Popcorn Noises

This Amanda Palmer Thing

I couldn’t care less about Amanda Palmer’s music. I heard maybe one or two Dresden Dolls songs however many years ago and found them thoroughly awful. But there’s the whole Kickstarter thing where she somehow raised a bajillion dollars to record an album (music industry super secret: most albums do not cost a bajillion dollars to record—half a bajillion, maybe, but it’s pretty safe to assume the other half went in her pocket), all of which was donated by fans, and now she’s asking those fans to be in her band for free when she comes to their town. They’ll do it, too, because people eager for attention will do anything to get on a stage and associate their personal brand with a more famous one.

That’s what this is about. It’s not about taking the old-world capitalism out of the arts and it’s not about technology breaking down barriers between artists and fans. Do you know why it’s not about those things? Because those barriers still very much exist, they’ve just been shifted a little bit to one side. You paid Amanda Palmer to make her album, then you paid for a ticket to see her play, and then you (or let’s say your friend since I hope the schmucks on stage with her are at least admitted to the venue free of charge) get up and play in her band for—I’m quoting here—“hugs/high fives” and “beer.” And you’re ecstatic about it because you don’t realize that Amanda Palmer has just done to you what people like Amanda Palmer have been complaining the record industry does to them for decades: she’s appropriated your time, talent, and (sometimes) money, flashed the allure of stardom in your face to keep you from asking questions, and then she’s kept all the cash for herself. Pay her to make music and play shows all you want, but the moment you render artistic services on her behalf, uncompensated, you’re being played.

Touring is an expensive ordeal, I know, and artists are rarely well-funded enough to pay the people who play with them even close to what they want or deserve. Unless, of course, their fans just gave them a bajillion dollars (a bajillion dollars is enough money to go on tour too, FYI). Besides, the real difference that counts here, between taking a friend/fellow musician on the road with you and giving them what you can, and asking your fans to fill in for free, is that the fans are doing the work of the band while still being kept on the other side of the curtain. It makes all the difference in the world. If you weren’t charging admission to your shows, then having the fans play along would be fine—great, even! barrel o’ laughs!—or if you put out an all-call and had a group of fans audition to be in the band as paid members for the whole tour, that’d be cool too. But Amanda Palmer is not doing these things. It seems to me that what Amanda Palmer is doing is purporting to ‘break down barriers’ and ‘get real with fans’ with one hand while upholding the profitable old-school structures of artist-audience separation (which, for the record, there is nothing wrong with so long as both parties know that’s how it works) with the other. I bet the people who played strings and horns on the album she crowd-funded got paid for their work.