Hope I don't come off as combative but you don't know what you're talking about. Kickstarter/Patreon do not allow LLCs (acronym may vary based on country but the concept is the same--an entity to limit liability) on their platform. This is for very good reasons. You're trying to compare separate legal entities in ways that aren't comparable. Kickstarter/Patreon witholding money from a "sole proprietor" vs Idol witholding money from a contractor are completely different. Also the size of the companies and their ability to deal with reversing payments is different.
Just as an example, let's create a simplified """donothon""":
- 5 donors
- 5 tiers of Dono promises
- The promises are from $1/$10/$100/$1,000/$10,000
- The actual promises don't matter, you can make them up
- One person donates $1, second donates $10, third $100, fourth $1,000, last $10,0000
- Total donated is $11,111
- 3/5 promises get delivered and the talent leaves/dies/terminated/whatever
How do you refund the money?
40% back to each donor? What if it was the promises that the $10k/$1k/$100 guys donated to that were delivered? How do you handle that?
Is it 40% to each donor, or 40% back each indiviudal donor?
This is why if you have a brain you don't do donothons. The way 99% of financial transactions in the professional world work are that some work is done and then afterwards you bill for that work. At best you have something like a retainer payment. Outside of that you would have extremely large highly legalized contracts for things such as multi-billion dollar investments for things such as factories or other capex heavy investments.
I think I'm going into too much autism by this point but maybe someone finds it useful.