The age of the crunch funders

In fact, now you can be both, while also running a trendy bar and dabbling in a bit of philanthropy.

You can do all that - while simultaneously keeping up your day job - just by dropping a few lone pounds into crunch funds.

Crunch Funds are like the business versions of cyber-begging - those fashionable fundraisers of the early Noughties in which cash-strapped individuals made pleas from their homepages for help with paying for weddings, bills, new sofas or even breast implants.

But these are not just one person's desperate crusade for donations - this time it's a band trying to make an album or a team of entrepreneurs trying to open a bar.

Most don't just want your cash, they want your input, too. And often - whether monetary, altruistic or just a free gig ticket - there is some kind of return on investment.

"The gigs in London aren't very well paid, and going outside London costs money anyway. It's a tough market for an unsigned band," says Gabby Young, lead singer of Gabby Young and Other Animals.

She recently set up a three-tiered subscription scheme on her band website giving fans the chance to pay £12.50, £25 or £65 to "become an animal" and get various levels of access to material, merchandise and time with the band. "Joining a big label means you risk getting dropped or changed so we need our own way of raising funds."

The subscriptions, she explains, give the fans a chance to feel involved (they can even suggest song topics), while allowing the band to make a living from music. It seems apt that her forthcoming debut album is titled We're All in This Together.

For 18-year-old Adrian Bliss, one third of a teenage production team trying to fund a feature film by asking people to buy a £1 "producer" end-credit from their website buyacredit.com, it's a similar story.

"Right now production companies are even struggling to give money to established film-makers. We have no connections in the film industry and, even worse, we're teenagers. Who is going to give money to us?" he says.

"For people who are young and unestablished, this is the best way to get started."

Soon Bliss and his partners Ben Robbins and Toby Stubbs had stars such as Stephen Fry, Sir Ian McKellen, Joanna Lumley and Frank Skinner donating (Fry, Lumley and Skinner have now also been cast in cameo roles in the feature film).

It was only after the website was up and running that the boys heard the terms crowdfunding - the method that Franny Armstrong used to make her environmental film The Age of Stupid, and fan finance - the fan-to-band investment like Young's, but through platforms for multiple artists who want help funding albums such as sellaband.com, artistshare.com and slicethepie.com.

A new London bar project, MYO London, is using a similar format to get started.

The founders are looking for 2,000 "members" each to stump up £175 to open a bar, deciding collectively on the location, theme, name and design of the bar and making a return on any profits when it opens (or money back if it never does).

One of the first investors, 28-year-old actress Helen Foster, sees it as the ideal low-risk venture in the recession.

"I've always wanted to open a bar but I'd always been put off by the financial risk involved. £175 isn't very much to spend and seemed to me like a perfect way of having all the fun of running a bar without the risk," she says.

But crunch funds are not just for the benefit of trendy Soho-ites and media types.

A website called Kiva.com won runner-up for "most likely to make the world a better place" at the web and technology innovation awards, The Crunchies, earlier this year.

It's a crunch-funding site on which entrepreneurs in the developing world request loans for their businesses - whether that be a butcher in Mongolia or a restaurant in Palestine.

They can raise the money from any number of lenders, who are paid back in monthly instalments. And while there is no monetary profit for lenders, they benefit in other ways.

"Conventional investment wisdom is to have a diversified portfolio of investments," says one Kiva lender.

"This was the first time I considered emotional rewards as something I could expect besides the occasional dividend." And in a shrinking economy, at least that's one kind of return on investment we can rely on.