Björk's Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the development of a new version of her Biophilia album-app for Android and Windows 8 has been cancelled, just 10 days after it launched.
The campaign was aiming to raise £375k in 30 days for the port of the critically-acclaimed iOS app, but a third of the way through, it had only attracted 263 backers and £15.4k of pledges – just 4.1% of the funding goal.
Visitors to the project's Kickstarter page this morning see this message: "Funding canceled. Funding for this project was canceled by the project creator about 19 hours ago."
It's one of the most high-profile failures on Kickstarter, in stark contrast to the campaign last year by US artist Amanda Palmer, who tried to raise $100k for a new album, book and tour, and ended up with $1.2m from nearly 25k backers.
Björk's campaign had an educational focus: she wanted to port Biophilia to Android and Windows 8 in order to get it onto the devices of more students, particularly those in the developing world, as part of a wider BioPhilia Educational Program to teach children about science and music.
The original app offered interactive modules for each song on Björk's Biophilia album: games, animation and remixing technology arranged within a single mother-app.
"The most interest has come from students from low-income households and schools with underfunded art budgets , and the only way to bring the project to those people is to have biophilia reprogrammed for Android and Windows 8," explained the Kickstarter project's original pitch.
In recent days, new rewards had been added to the project to persuade people to pledge, including album artwork and app-still prints, as well as limited-edition gold and platinum discs.
Björk also published a handwritten note to potential backers. "This is an odd one for me to ask of you but it proved unbelievably complicated to reprogram Biophilia for Android & more," she wrote.
"It will take 8 programmers 5 months!!! But I feel I cannot leave this project before this has been done since it seems to be the area where it can bloom most. We are already getting a regular school curriculum written out and so incredibly many have reached out to us so eager to adapt Biophilia's musicology angle to their schools."
The phrase "odd one for me to ask of you" may hint at one reason for the project's failure: people may have wondered why Björk wasn't funding the new app herself or with partners as she did the iOS version.
They may also have balked at the project's £375k funding goal – not necessarily seeing it as too much, but more to do with confidence that the project would get funded.
However unfair – it was clear in this instance that Björk wasn't trying to line her own pockets – there has been a backlash of sorts on Kickstarter against projects launched by people perceived to have their own funding reserves.
Veteran developer Peter Molyneux experienced these kinds of grumbles within the games industry, for example, with his Project Godus campaign, although that was successful in surpassing its £450k goal.
Some of the most successful Kickstarter projects, including Amanda Palmer, the Ouya games console and Pebble smart-watch have deliberately aimed low (low being $100k, mind) in order to show more momentum early on, and avoid people being put off by the fear that they're backing a doomed project.
So what now? Björk hasn't commented publicly yet on the cancelled Kickstarter, but it would be a shame if the Biophilia port itself was cancelled.
Its educational focus may well make it eligible for funding from alternative sources: European funds, perhaps, or non-governmental organisations. An alternative might be to approach Google or Microsoft to see if they'd be interested in funding an HTML5 version of the Biophilia app.
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