I'm not stopping anybody, ForaBrokenEar.

If people want to give money to people they like so they can do something they want them to do, why not let them?

Their logo looks like the pinterest logo.

Also if they become successful, a trusted escrow to hold money for people on the bubble about sending strangers money. I think its worth it to avoid the hassle of credit card merchant setups

That's true, but you can't expect to get something for nothing, they're providing you with a platform for your blog, a method of maintaining a database of paying customers, and a means of distributing content to all of those customers. Surely that's worth 8%. 92% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Or another more cynical way of looking at it is yet another way for some middleman to siphon money off of your transactions. i.e. Patreon and their credit card service take 8% of all the money that gets funnelled through it, much like how Kickstarter works. This is the real motivation for automatic monthly payments.

So... for a $20 payment, you are paying them $1.60 to "help" you give $18.40 to some artist you like. Great. You would normally get more money to them sending that $20 through Paypal, and at least Paypal is pretty up-front about being a middleman. Or you could just mail them a cheque! It'd probably get there before the end of the month.

The similarity to a brand of tequila probably doesn't hurt. I also think it may help avoid certain issues I had with donation fraud. It just needs to be more like providing a service and less like begging.

But isn't that how it normally is anyway? Well, substitute room for studio? The whole point of having a patron is to do what you like full-time while being sustained and not starving to death... Isn't it?
I'm actually only half-serious and I agree with you.

"If I had a patron
chuppy chippy-chippy chippy-chippy-chippy-chippy chum
Then all day long I'd biddy-biddy-bum
If I was on patreoooOOOON"

Reminds me of http://flattr.com/

This idea will be replaced with a better one, so it has my respect.

hmm i wouldnt see myself feeling comfortable doing this.
wouldnt see myself paying anyone through this either tbh.
i know in a world where people are getting increasingly reluctant to pay for music that there needs to be ways for people to get money but.........
i dunno it seems a redundant service to me.
make a decent ep / video / book and people will pay to support it.
im aware alot of us low level artists are almost expected to give a pay what you want release thesedays, but i still pay for shit frequently if i like it.
I'll admit there have been albums i passed up because they weren't free - but there have also been albums i would never ever have passed up just because they were 10 quid. i figure the albums i will only get for free are simply stuff i deem obviously to be good, but not so good that i cant live without them.
im making a point somewhere soon i hope. er maybe my points is 'make stuff good enough that people dont mind paying for your releases'.
i give my shit away for free unless it physical. this basically tells me deep down that i know havent made something truely wicked yet / established a big enough following that id be confident of getting 500 downloads when its got a price.
i see kickstarter in a similar way.
i would like to add this is my personal view from a musicians side. i say good luck to anyone that uses this and kickstarter and makes the money they need to do what they have planned. i saw anamanaguchi's one yesterday and i say massive props to them.  im certainly not saying i disagree with these things in general. they now have almost 100k to go on tour, make cool shit and thats pretty fucking rad and fair play to them.
and there was my contradiction too
shouldn't type after first spliff post work. makes me ramble
also this is a distinct possibility

Well, that's how I see most small scale artists using this, although it could be helpful if you need proper studio time or whatever but then would small scale artists be able to get that kind of funding from strangers?

On the other hand, I wouldn't give fucking Radiohead any money to self release a new album either.

hello please can you send me money so i can sit in my room and smoke weed and make tunes rather than having to get a job thank you xoxo

Sounds like a really interesting idea. Will definately be trying it out once they add international payments and/or paypal. The only thing I'm wondering about is: Will there be any significant amount of patrons who actually support small-scale artists like the most of us? Having to become a registered patron isn't exactly as much of a low-level approach as one-click donating a few bucks on bandcamp.

@rainwarrior as far as I understand, you still get to evaluate content before paying, since payments are done once a month, and you can always retract your pledge if you don't like the content.

Isn't that how patronage was back in the olden days, though? They'd put the artist up, and pay them to be artistic?

I don't understand why someone would want to automatically give money to someone just because they uploaded something, sight unseen. I understand giving them the money after checking out what it was they uploaded, but that's already easily facilitated by twitters and mailing lists and paypal donate buttons and bandcamp etc. This seems like it would encourage people to upload half-baked stuff just to earn their auto-tips. Content should be evaluated before it is paid for.