Seattle may be known for Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing and a basket of other mega-corporations drawing lots of technical talent; but our passions are in the arts.
Polygraph.cool, a fairly creative title itself, pulled together the data from 100,000 Kickstarter projects and sifted through to find what kinds of projects were funded in 150 American cities. Take this as a compliment or a curse, but Seattle is listed as one of four cities that are “similar to New York.” Regardless of that distinction, our five top Kickstarter categories are:
- Music - 26 percent
- Film & Video - 16 percent
- Publishing - 9.9 percent
- Art - 7.5 percent
- Games - 9 percent
That’s about three-quarters of the projects Polygraph checked. And yes, music, film & video are the top 42 percent. We do love entertainment, and evidently, we aren’t just spectators. We make the stuff. Good party material.
Despite that concentration, Seattle is fairly diverse. When they color coded the cities, some show up predominantly in one color: Palo Alto is grey with design; Nashville is red with music, Atlanta is blue with games; and Los Angeles has hardly any tech.
As for our details:
- Music: 20 percent of it is Indie Rock, 14 percent is Rock that isn’t Indie, and another 11 percent is Country and Western.
- Film & Video is simple and straightforward: 35 percent is Documentary and 26 percent is Shorts.
- Publishing is 24 percent Fictional. (Make your own jokes about that one.)
- Art is an even mix of Public Art, 15 percent; Painting, 12 percent; Performance, 12 percent; Illustration, 11 percent; and Mixed Media, 11 percent.
- And, even though we have an impressive array of programmers in town, 62 percent of the Games are Tabletops. The Video Game category does account for 23 percent, however.
Smaller cities can emphasize niches; but Seattle’s interests are more spread out. Maybe that’s what they meant by “similar to New York“.
Rock on!
- The Entire History of Kickstarter Projects [Polygraph]