Kickstarter has become a reliable launchpad for music hardware over the past decade. This week, two more projects are racking up the pledges on the crowdfunding platform.
Litejam Neo is billed as “the world’s first RGB electric acoustic guitar”, designed as an educational aid for people who are learning to play, courtesy of its light-up fretboard.
AP30 Music Boy is more of a fun gadget: a wearable hi-res music player “inspired” (heavily) by Nintendo’s iconic Game Boy handheld complete with a playable ‘Retro Block Puzzle Game’ (yes, the one you think, but not officially so).
Both projects set deliberately-low targets of $10k for their Kickstarter fundraising, and both have already raised much more than that from pledgers: more than $128k of pre-orders for the Litejam Neo and more than $257k for the AP30 Music Boy.
This isn’t traditional crowdfunding: it’s canny marketing, with the low targets (and often well-planned pre-launch campaigns) designed to make projects trend on Kickstarter, and thus pull in more buyers.
While the AP30 Music Boy may seem like more of a novelty, it does tap into a trend we’ve clocked recently: ‘dumb device nostalgia’. People looking back fondly at the pre-streaming times: iPod but even mini-disc players and old-school Walkman devices.
Streaming on smartphones remains the dominant behaviour, of course, but there’s money to be made in hardware projects that ‘de-smartify’ the listening experience – including for some younger people who were in nappies when the devices they’re nostalgic for were in their prime.
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