He said nothing and buttered his scone.
I glared at him.
Don’t get pissed at me. I’m just SAYING, I said. I just need to do a thing.
He leaned back in his chair, and raised his eyebrows.
Do whatever you gotta do, doll.
I refreshed the Kickstarter page. It was still eight hundred dollars away.
Well…it’ll take a second. No biggie. So. Anyway. How are you?
He didn’t say anything for a second, as if he didn’t trust me to pay attention to the answer, then he settled in and shrugged his shoulders.
I hate the steroids. I’ve got a crushing headache. And I hate this stick, he said, gesturing at the cane. I fucking bumped right into a lady with a stroller on the way in here. She came up along my right side, which is the side I’m not seeing well out of, and she—
My phone buzzed. I glanced down at it. It was my manager Eric, sending a group text to me and the rest of the team, saying, ABOUT TO HIT 1 MILLION, READY FOR THIS FUCKING MADNESS?
Anthony cocked his eyebrows at me.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. I got a text. It’s the Kickstarter thing. Sorry. Keep going.
My phone vibrated again. I glanced down. It was Hayley responding to the text saying we were almost there.
Listen, said Anthony, leaning back. Do your thing. This was code for: Don’t half pay attention to me, you clown. He wasn’t angry. He was just slightly annoyed and amused.
Then the text came from Eric: WE DID IT. HUZZZZAHHH. $1 MILLION. YAY TEAM!
I texted back gleeful congratulations, posted Lee’s painted-tummy photo to my Twitter feed, and said,
Okay, okay. It’s over. It’s done. My Kickstarter just hit a million dollars. I uploaded a naked photo. I’m all yours.
I settled into my chair and took a sip of my coffee, feeling like the queen of the universe. Now, finally, I could focus on my sick friend.
Anthony just looked at me.
Then he picked up his phone and started to fiddle with it, ignoring me.
I sat waiting for him to finish whatever he was doing, wondering if he was going to torture me for this entire day because I’d been such a distracted asshole.
My phone buzzed with a text.
It was from Anthony. I looked at him. He ignored me.
I read the text. It said:
If you love people enough, they’ll give you everything.
IN MY MIND
In my mind
In a future five years from now
I’m a hundred and twenty pounds
And I never get hungover
Because I will be the picture of discipline
Never minding what state I’m in
And I will be someone I admire
And it’s funny how I imagined
That I would be that person now
But it does not seem to have happened
Maybe I’ve just forgotten how to see
That I am not exactly the person that I thought I’d be
And in my mind
In the faraway here and now
I’ve become in control somehow
And I never lose my wallet
Because I will be the picture of discipline
Never fucking up anything
And I’ll be a good defensive driver
And it’s funny how I imagined
That I would be that person now
But it does not seem to have happened
Maybe I’ve just forgotten how to see
That I’ll never be the person that I thought I’d be
And in my mind
When I’m old I am beautiful
Planting tulips and vegetables
Which I will mindfully watch over
Not like me now
I’m so busy with everything
That I don’t look at anything
But I’m sure I’ll look when I am older
And it’s funny how I imagined
That I could be that person now
But that’s not what I want
But that’s what I wanted
And I’d be giving up somehow
How strange to see
That I don’t wanna be the person that I want to be
And in my mind
I imagine so many things
Things that aren’t really happening
And when they put me in the ground
I’ll start pounding the lid
Saying I haven’t finished yet
I still have a tattoo to get
That says I’m living in the moment
And it’s funny how I imagined
That I could win this winless fight
But maybe it isn’t all that funny
That I’ve been fighting all my life
But maybe I have to think it’s funny
If I wanna live before I die
And maybe it’s funniest of all
To think I’ll die before I actually see
That I am exactly the person that I want to be
Fuck yes
I am exactly the person that I want to be
—from Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, 2011
One of my favorite yoga teachers once told a story during class.
Since ever, in China, bamboo farmers have planted baby bamboo shoots deep into the ground. And then, for three years, nothing happens. But the farmers will work, diligently watering the shoot, spreading hay and manure, waiting patiently, even though nothing is sprouting up. They simply have faith. And then, one day, the bamboo will shoot up and grow up to thirty feet in a month. It just blasts into the sky.
Any small, sustainable artist-fan community works like this. Crowdfunding works like this.
There’s years and years of authentic work, tons of nonmonetary exchanges, massive net-tightening, an endless collection of important moments. Good art is made, good art is shared, help is offered, ears are bent, emotions are exchanged, the compost of real, deep connection is sprayed all over the fields.
Then, one day, the artist steps up and asks for something.
And if the ground has been fertilized enough, the audience says, without hesitation:
Of course.
But it isn’t magic. That first part can take years. Decades.
A lot of misunderstanding about crowdfunding stems from missing this point: if somebody hasn’t been watching you farm, suddenly sees the fruits of the labor, and thinks that maybe it all happened by magic, it can be painful. I got a lot of that after my Kickstarter launched:
But I’ve never heard of her…how can people want to give her that much money? What a lucky bitch.
This is why some lesser-known people have had such real success with crowdfunding—they’ve fertilized over time, and diligently—and some better-known people who appear to have massive reach haven’t done well at all. Fame doesn’t buy trust. Only connection does that.
National Public Radio has been following the connect-connect-connect-then-ask model forever: it’s called the annual on-air fundraiser. They create and transmit nonstop, they give away their reporting, storytelling, and content for free all year.
And then when the time comes: they ask.
And, fundamentally, all asking works like this. You must prepare the ground. If you’re going to be asking one day, you need someone to ask who is going to answer the call. So you tend to your relationships on a nonstop basis, you abide by the slow, ongoing task, going out there like a faithful farmer, landing on the unseeable bamboo shoot.
And then, when it is time—whether you’re asking a bunch of people to preorder your album, or asking one person to hold back your hair while you’re puking—someone will be there for you.
There’s a difference between asking a stranger for a handout, a friend for a favor, or a customer for a down payment on a piece of merchandise. Crowdfunding artists are generally working in the third category, in the spirit of the second.
My Kickstarter had been carefully constructed to allow everyone who
wanted to get involved to contribute, no matter how little the amount. The lowest price point was a single dollar, which bought you a simple digital download of the album (which we promised would be out within five months). The CD package cost $25, and the more expensive packages included an art book, a painted portable record player (I spent a whole weekend that summer painting them, with Casey and two artist friends of hers, on my parents’ back porch), fancy double-disc vinyl records ($50), limited-attendance art parties in five cities ($250 a ticket), and house parties ($5,000 each).
By the time we closed, after a monthlong campaign that gathered over a million in backing, the most astonishing thing to me wasn’t the number of dollars. It was the number of people: There were just under twenty-five thousand backers. Almost the exact number of sales that had constituted a failure in the eyes of the label. I had fallen into my crowd, and they’d caught me. The backers were ecstatic about the success of the Kickstarter, and everybody who had helped me to build it was over the moon.
But a backlash started in the press and on the music blogs. Some journalists were suspicious about artists doing business via crowdfunding, calling Kickstarter a form of “online begging.” I blogged my position and made my business expenses transparent so that people could understand the nature of this system: crowdfunding wasn’t charity, as some people seemed to think; my backers were buying things. It was a means for implementing a business model based on the currency of asking and trusting. I was doing exactly what I had been doing for years, going directly to the fanbase, asking them to buy everything in advance: the records, the tickets, the high-level record players and the intimate house parties. Some journalists didn’t understand how crowdfunding worked, and many thought that all the money was donations, rather than advance purchases of actual things that I had to create and deliver.
It shocked me that even some of my smart business friends asked me what I was going to do with a million dollars. I explained that, er, the million dollars was going to be used to pay back my recording debts, and to manufacture thousands of records with high-quality packaging, and to print thousands of art books, and to pay thirty-five fine artists for their work in that book, and to pay for the shipping, and to fly me around to deliver what I’d promised. And after that, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left.
Even weirder, a few folks who supported the concept of crowdfunding singled me out. They grumbled that I didn’t have the right to ask my fans to preorder the album using Kickstarter because I wasn’t a “true independent”—I was a refugee from the major-label system who was already known. Therefore, I shouldn’t be allowed to use Kickstarter, which was, in their minds, supposed to be reserved for the unknown.
These sorts of critics would write screeds online about how I was equipped to “find some other way” to put an album out. This is what struck me as particularly ironic. I had found “some other way” to release music: crowdfunding.
This made me wonder: Who wasn’t allowed to use crowdfunding? Who wasn’t allowed to ask for help directly from their fans? Lady Gaga? Madonna? Justin Bieber? The answer is: anyone can. Crowdfunding has to be a democratic tool, and mega pop stars have as much right to use the tool as anyone else—as much right as any unknown garage band with no fanbase or head start.
For a couple of weeks, I had a hard time looking at Twitter because for every thousand congratulations, there were another hundred insults being hurled in my direction. They were hard to read.
I REALLY USED TO LIKE AMANDA PALMER UNTIL SHE STARTED BEGGING HER FANS FOR MONEY.
People were calling me “shameless,” but I decided to take that as an unintended compliment. Wasn’t shame…bad? Like fear? I mean, nobody uses “fearless” as an insult.
I laughed most of it off, but it was hard in truth not to feel a glimmer of doubt. I knew I’d worked hard for all this, and I had an almost unquestionable faith in my songs, my band, and my ability to create something magnificent to send to my backers. But my ego also withered with the amount of people telling me I was a useless, entitled narcissist, conning my fans out of their money.
There was a distinctly familiar GET A JOB quality to all of the yelling aimed in my direction.
I recognized the voice.
You’re not allowed to ask for that. You don’t deserve it. You’re not real enough.
It was my own.
After the Kickstarter campaign succeeded and closed, my life turned into a hurricane of preparation for the upcoming tour, which was scheduled to last almost a year and hit dozens of countries. I wanted the stage show to be an unforgettable, rolling, worldwide celebration of the record that the fans themselves had helped me to make, and, to that end, I wanted it to feature as much crowdsourcing, crowdsurfing, and crowd-connecting as humanly possible. I worked together with Michael (McQuilken, the Grand Theft drummer who was also a theater director) on a pile of ideas to take onto the road: we designed a dress with a train the size of a ballroom floor that I wore while crowdsurfing, covering the audience under a giant sheet of translucent blue as they held it aloft and sailed me over their heads; the band dressed from scratch using clothing items the fans brought and tossed up onto the stage; we asked people to upload photos of images that connected to specific song themes—childhood bedrooms, treasured objects, lost loved ones—and we projected them onto a giant scrim above the stage. We communed.
I also thought it would be fun to ask members of the fanbase to join the band onstage to play some of the string-and-horns arrangements we’d recorded on the album, instead of filling in those melodic parts on guitar or piano. I’d done similar things with musicians, dancers, and other random stage-performer volunteers over the years; the community always loved it. Hundreds of eager players volunteered via email, and we picked four or five volunteer musicians for each city. The payment for volunteering onstage was the usual crowdsource currency: free tickets and guest list for friends; merchandise, backstage beer, hugs, high-fives, love. The fans knew the drill. The first few shows worked out perfectly.
Then a French horn player wrote me an open letter on her blog, saying that while she was tempted to join the tour, she felt that the lack of payment was unethical. The blog post went viral, the New York Times ran a story, and within days a controversy had blown up.
And gotten distorted, to boot. A lot of critics on the Internet were starting to claim that I’d made a million dollars and I wouldn’t pay my band.
Actually, I did pay my band; they were all on salary, which meant they got paid even on their days off. As for the volunteers, they had volunteered. No one had anticipated that their performances were going to be seen as political statements. They’d understood the deal when they volunteered, and just wanted to play music.
The initial Kickstarter controversy regarding digital panhandling, which was just dying down, began anew, and now things were darker. Now I was not only begging my fans for money, I was also exploiting musicians in a tawdry search for free labor. It got mean. Gawker, the celebrity news and gossip blog site, referred to my use of crowdsourcing as “the smoke-and-mirrors tactic of a grifter.” A blogger from the New Yorker wrote, “Amanda Palmer’s hustle becomes a half-real and half-symbolic version of the competition to scrape a last dollar from the hides of the desperate.”
The noise was mostly from people who had never heard of me before and knew nothing about me—or the fanbase. My Twitter feed and blog comments, usually sources of comfort and community, were now also filled with people who were only visiting to voice their outrage. A classical musicians’ union started a petition against my unethical crowdsourcing. The day after the Times article ran, I received an email from a professional violinist who’d worked for years with my hometown’s symphony orchestra that opened: “Amanda, you ignorant slut…” and went on to tell me what a terrible person I was, on top of being an untrained, unprofessional, shitty musician.
That hurt. It all hurt.
After a week of this, I threw up my hands and decided to pay the volunteers. It s
eemed like a harmless solution: They’d be happy to get an unexpected $100 for their time (though some of them gave their surprise paychecks to charity, twittering and blogging that they’d volunteered and wanted to keep it that way). My stressed-out band and I could stop fielding hate bombs in our Twitter feeds. And we could all get back to work.
In the aftermath, a familiar feeling lingered, a leftover from my statue days. The whole controversy was pretty…GET A JOB. But we were all, in our own ways, doing our jobs.
Everybody on the sidewalk who interacted with The Bride was in the arena with me, engaged in the strange exchange. And everyone at my shows—whether onstage, or volunteering, or in the audience—was happily exchanging: favors, flowers, dollars, music, hugs, beer, love, whatever. But the critics were neither with us on the sidewalk, nor with us at the shows. They were yelling from their car windows, or from behind their laptops. They couldn’t see the exchange for what it was: a process that was normal for us, but alien to them.
A short time later, as the outrage was dying down, a paradox struck me that seemed to get at the heart of the matter: What if I’d simply SOLD the chance to come play with the band onstage by making it a package of the Kickstarter—an item for purchase, like a $25 CD or a $10,000 art-sitting? What if I’d charged $100 for the opportunity to come and play trombone live onstage with my band?
I didn’t need to do an experiment to find the answer; The Polyphonic Spree, an orchestral indie band, had already done it for me. They launched a Kickstarter that same month and offered a $1,500 option to come onstage with any instrument and join the band for a few numbers. They limited the number of packages to ten, and sold every one of them.
There was no controversy.
Why not? The conclusion I came to was that people are comfortable as long as there is money flowing in ANY direction, whether from the artist to the volunteer, or from the volunteer to the artist. People can understand a price tag, no matter what it’s stuck on. But some can’t understand a messier exchange of asking and giving—the gift that stays in motion.
The Art of Asking Page 23