Amanda Palmer, Crowd Sourcing, and the Deeper Question of The Artist

About a week ago the blog-o-sphere exploded with serious venom toward Amanda Palmer.  Amanda “raised 1.2 Million dollars from a projected 100,00 dollar kickstarter campaign,” Palmer couldn’t afford to pay a string quartet and two to three brass and sax players a total of about $35,000 on her upcoming national tour.  The national tour which was the whole point of the Kickstarter.  Her solution was then to post a “Who wants to play with me on my national tour, in your city, for free beer!”

Many including producer/recording engineer Steve Albini (Nirvana, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Jesus Lizard) have made some bold yet well thought out arguments against the Boston-born Punk-Cabaret singer-songwriter.  Albini said on his personal website:  

I have no fundamental problem with either asking your fans to pay you to make your record or go on tour or play for free in your band or gather at a mud pit downstate and sell meth and blowjobs to each other. I wouldn’t stoop to doing any of them myself, but horses for courses. The reason I don’t appeal to other people in this manner is that all those things can easily pay for themselves, and I value self-sufficiency and independence, even (or especially) from an audience.

If your position is that you aren’t able to figure out how to do that, that you are forced by your ignorance into pleading for donations and charity work, you are then publicly admitting you are an idiot, and demonstrably not as good at your profession as Jandek, Moondog, GG Allin, every band ever to go on tour without a slush fund or the kids who play on buckets downtown.

Pretty much everybody on earth has a threshold for how much to indulge an idiot who doesn’t know how to conduct herself, and I think Ms Palmer has found her audience’s threshold.

Palmer did later clarify that she does have a core band which she will be traveling with and paying however this is more of a chance for fans of hers who are musically inclined to be able to join her on stage in their town.  Artists, like Erica “Unwoman,” Mulkey are also stepping fourth and talking about why they are willing to accept beer and high fives over cold hard cash.  In an article to the San Francisco Weekly Online Mulky stated:

On any given night, would I rather be playing with one of my top-10 favorite current musicians, or hanging out at home? Or buying a ticket, merely watching the show, wishing I were on stage? The answer is obvious for me. A musician who only wants to play paid gigs? That’s valid too; neither of us is more serious or righteous than the other.

The thing that bothers me the most about this debate is the people who guilt those who do work for free, as if we’re devaluing the work by doing so, as if we’re scabs. I am very firmly for labor unions, but playing a super-fun rock show is not at ALL the same as manual labor, or teaching. Or playing a corporate gig no one really wants to play. As soon as actual musical love and sparkly fame come into the picture, you’re looking at currency that’s not dollars. That currency is, in Amanda’s case, invisible to anyone who doesn’t love her music or want to play for her fans. But it’s real to us.

Palmer left major labels years ago and “Theatre is Evil,” is her first forray as a completely independant artist (Much like Metallica and Nine Inch Nails), and the truth of the matter is we don’t know what kind of bills Palmer has to pay for to create the album, to go on tour, and to exist as an artist.  In fact she quite plainly stated in a blog post where all the money was going to go.  She also mentioned running naked through the streets if she reached a million but she’s under enough scrutiny, so let’s not split hairs.

Maybe the problem is simply semantics.  If this was looked on as “I want my fans to play with me as well as my band because you’re awesome and I love you,” the issue would be a moot point, but because we know she cant afford to pay extra members of her band (As she stated) instead of crowd sourcing for the art of it, the question everyone is asking is “Where did all that extra money go?”  In my opinion however the bigger question is what would have been done if she had only raised the 100,000 that was her goal?  If 35,000 is too much what would they have done with only $100,000?