The Art of Asking

by Amanda Palmer

  I thought back to my statue days and the GET A JOB critics, who didn’t feel very far off from the people calling me a beggar when I decided to take help directly from my fans.

  It said, something, I think, about the fundamental discomfort people have around the artist—or the person—who asks for direct exchange.

  A big part of the reason artists feel so squeamish about standing behind their own cash registers is a direct response to the fact that many customers feel squeamish about seeing them there. Nobody would have yelled GET A JOB at the ticket-taker outside a gallery door if The Bride had been on view for a dollar a pop. It seems that, over time, artists and audiences alike have become accustomed to a legitimizing agent, a transactional middleman to throw professional fairy dust over the exchange. The times are changing.

  It’s a 180-degree turn from the eighties and nineties, when most exchanges with big musicians were entirely indirect, and involved—at least in my case—getting on your dirt bike, cycling to the mall, walking into the record store, and exchanging your $9.99 for a physical album, which was rung up for you by an indifferent clerk who had absolutely nothing to do with the artist who created the music.

  All buskers—and artists, and people—have different degrees of comfort with asking. Some buskers have perfect three-minute pitches in which they yell at a crowd to please give as much as possible (and watching a master at work is a treat—it’s a part of their craft). But my friend Jason Webley, who busked for years with an accordion, refused to put his case out for money…he didn’t like the idea of being coin-operated. So he would play for half an hour, build a crowd, and then he’d sell CDs for $5 at the end of his show, not accepting any donations. If somebody generously tried to give him a twenty instead of a five, he’d simply thrust four CDs at that person.

  Everybody finds their own path for letting other people help.

  Who’s allowed to ask? Well, technically, anyone. And the Internet makes it possible for anyone to ask for anything with a signal that can potentially reach anyone else online. The flipside, however, is that you also can’t limit who hears your plea or control who sees your crowdfunding page.

  A freelance fine artist once reached out to me over Twitter with the link to his crowdfunding page, asking if I’d help spread the word that he was asking online for help with his medical bills. He’d had a stomach operation, and there were complications keeping him from working. His was a typical tale from the failing American health system—a family, kids, a house, a sudden illness, not enough insurance coverage, mounting medical bills, and potential bankruptcy and impending foreclosure.

  I hesitated to help.

  I’d recently seen some articles blasting a Canadian couple who were trying to crowdfund their dream of moving to Scotland. Some of the press was nasty, calling them “bizarre” and printing headlines like, “We’d love to live in Scotland. Canuck pay our air fares? Canadian couple launch online bid to fund dream,” while the online comments (as often happens) were even worse:

  Are you kidding me? These scroungers want people to pay for their luxuries while we have so many people with a real need that could be helped. SHAME ON THEM!

  I can’t believe they have the brass neck to ask for others to finance their dream. Everyone has dreams, you just have to work towards them and not expect others to foot the bill.

  Someone actually commented (I’m not kidding):

  GET A JOB

  They raised only a few hundred dollars, and from the interviews it sounded like they actually had expected total strangers to get excited about their dream. If they’d raised thousands of dollars from friends and family who were happy to have a formal mechanism through which to help them, it wouldn’t have been a sad story at all. It would have been a cause for celebration. But the story was kind of sad because they didn’t realize how futile their asking was.

  So when I saw the email from the artist needing stomach surgery, there was a part of me that cringed, fearing that he might be asking an invisible crowd, crowdsurfing into an empty room. I sighed and shared the link, ready to be disappointed.

  Within twenty-four hours, he’d made his goal of $10,000 from what looked like a tight-knit community of forty or fifty friends and family.

  And as I looked at his success, I realized that I had been thinking like the trolls, standing on the periphery, judging.

  Who can know? He risked, his crowd helped. He asked, he got. There was no reason for me to be skeptical. The only people who can really judge if a request is fair are the ones being asked—the ones who have the relationships are the ones who understand the complexity of the situation.

  Unfortunately, some people try to use crowdfunding not understanding this concept, hoping that somehow there’s magical “free money” out there. There isn’t.

  Effective crowdfunding is not about relying on the kindness of strangers, it’s about relying on the kindness of your crowd.

  There’s a difference.

  When I came across the work of Walt Ribeiro, a composer/arranger on YouTube, it delighted me: he takes current pop songs and arranges them orchestrally using computerized instruments. He’d uploaded his arrangements of Adele, Radiohead, and MGMT and they’d gotten hundreds of thousands of views, but as often happens with popular digital content creators, the hit tally wasn’t translating into real money. Walt wanted to make a record with a real orchestra but couldn’t figure out how to make it happen.

  I had another fancy show coming up with the Boston Pops Orchestra, and I reached out to Walt over Twitter, got his email, and asked if he would be game to do an arrangement of “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga for the concert at Symphony Hall. He was beyond game. We chatted about crowdfunding; we became friends. His arrangement rocked.

  When Walt emailed me a few months later excitedly telling me about his new Kickstarter campaign, I happily plugged it and thought that he would easily achieve his goal of $7,000. I twittered about it, I blogged about it, I told the story of this nice arranger/orchestra dude who was embracing the future of music and trying to Kickstart his orchestra album.

  His Kickstarter didn’t get funded. It more than didn’t get funded: it only raised $132 of a $7,000 goal, from three backers. I was one of them.

  Hundreds of thousands of people had enjoyed Walt’s work on YouTube, but he hadn’t cultivated a long-term relationship with them, he hadn’t yet built a bridge of exchange between himself and his potential supporters.

  There isn’t always a crowd from which you can fund. Sometimes you just don’t know until you jump.

  It also appeared that my enthusiasm for somebody else’s project held little or no sway with my own fans. Some clicked the link, they looked, they decided it wasn’t for them, they moved on. I could boost the signal, but I couldn’t build the bridge.

  Which, as I thought about it, wasn’t a bad thing. It made me consider one of the reasons I loved my fanbase so much: they are wholly independent and have their own unassailable, discerning tastes. They weren’t looking to me as a leader to follow blindly, there to dictate their choices. They were looking to me as a connector, a coordinator, which was the role I wanted.

  Standing above everybody is lonely—I knew that from experience. I liked the idea of being with everybody.

  (Two years on, Walt is still working on his arrangements and just launched a Patreon.com page. He has eighteen backers. I’m one of them.)

  My friend Sxip Shirey is a crazed multi-instrumentalist composer with a huge white Albanian Afro who used to tour with small punk circuses as their live one-man band. His music is absolutely entrancing, but it’s miles from mainstream. Sxip’s been touring for almost twenty years as an MC and impresario: he’s a connector, a carny, a lover of food, whiskey, randomness, people, and laughter.

  He never landed a record deal with a label, but he wanted to make a high-class official recording of his music, so he decided to crowdfund. He surpassed his goal of $20,000 with the help of 531 backers. Most of these people were Sxip’s fri
ends and fans from New York, and a few hundred people from other states or countries who had seen him on tour over the years. I’d estimate that Sxip had, at one time, probably shared a drink with at least 37 percent of his backers. They just wanted to help him make his record and…Be Sxip.

  Sxip’s Kickstarter proved a theory I’d had, but never tested.

  Beyond the basic CD option for $20, he didn’t give many details of what he was going to give the crowd. He just asked them to trust him.

  These were the descriptions of his Kickstarter backer levels:

  Pledge $1 or more: All backers will get SOMETHING!

  Pledge $20 or more: You will receive my new CD with beautiful art. I will sign it and you will be SO PLEASED at the surprise gift that is ALSO sent with it. It will be worth it!

  Pledge $50 or more: You will get my new CD and OH MY!! There are TWO extra surprise gifts in the same parcel! You have a lot to listen to now! Call your mom or other family member. This is a day to remember!

  Pledge $1,000 or more: Damn, oh shit…just you wait…be calm beating heart…oh…oh yes…oh YES…JUST YOU WAIT, seriously. My hands are sweating just thinking about. Seriously.

  Pledge $2,000 or more: Call me, it’s important. we need to plan this out. It won’t be simple but it will be worth it!

  Pledge $3,000 or more: Oh My God, for YOU, I’m gonna…BRING…DOWN…THE…THUNDER!!!!!

  He reached a total over $21,000. Most (350 people) bought the $20 package and another seventy-six bought the $50 package, while fifty-nine bought the $100 package. Two people bought the $1,000 package.8

  My theory: one of the biggest reasons people usually want to help an artist is because they really want…to help an artist. Not get a fancy beer cozy. If they make the decision to help, they will help at the level at which they are able, no matter what token, flower, or simple thank-you awaits them at the other end.

  I emailed a pal at Kickstarter to see if they had any hard evidence to support this, and indeed, they had the numbers: Since Kickstarter began, 887,256 backers have asked for the artists to refrain from sending them any kind of reward—which represents a little over 14 percent of their user base.

  Sometimes people just want to help. You never know until you ask.

  The night my Kickstarter campaign closed, at the stroke of midnight on May 31, 2012, I threw a free celebration party in Brooklyn. I announced it ninja-style on Twitter and on the blog the day before. A few hundred people gathered in a parking lot with a rented sound system, pizza, booze, and spontaneous circus performances, and we counted down the final hours in style.

  A friend loaned us a gigantic plastic tank—to create a human-sized aquarium—and I paid a handful of artists to source dozens of phone books. They spent three days gathering them and handwriting, each on a separate yellow page, the names of the over twenty-four thousand backers. My band and I donned old-fashioned swimsuits, sat in the life-sized fish tank on the back of a truck, and began ripping every page out of every phone book and thanking every backer individually by holding each page up against the front wall of the tank, where a camera was recording a live webcast.

  After we held up each page, we’d crumple it up and drop it to the floor of the tank. By midnight, we were sitting chest deep in an ocean of crumpled yellow-page names; it was glorious, and a few of us even went for a yellow-page swim.

  When we mailed out the physical album to thousands of backers a few months later, we included a single random yellow-page surprise with each order. Someone started a “find your yellow-page person!” database online.

  Two years later, people are still finding each other.

  When they do, they tell me. And I tell everybody else. The net keeps tightening.

  Here are three Kickstarter stories.

  An indie musician named Deakin from the band Animal Collective presold a limited-edition CD and other rewards through Kickstarter in connection with his trip to a festival in Mali, Africa, and to support an anti-slavery charity there. He raised about $25,000 from a few hundred people. Then he dropped off the face of the earth: no communication, no record, no nothing. He never posted anything to the backer update page, and his backers started to grumble after a while.

  In the backer-only comments, which are visible to the public, you can see the story slowly unfold. They start out excited, then patient, then everybody starts wondering what the hell is going on. A year in, people begin asking if they can please get their money back. But there is nobody to ask: the ship had been abandoned by its captain. Then comes the anger. They were miffed, but mostly because they’d been abandoned as collaborators.

  The backers started to complain that they been “duped”; they begged for information, they resented the fact that he was off making a new album with his band. One backer posted: I gave this to my boyfriend as a fucking gift…which was never delivered. Ungrateful fuck.

  A couple of years later, he gave an interview in which he explained that he’d been struggling with making the album, confirmed that all the money had made its way to the charity, and promised to deliver when he could. But there were still a lot of unhappy backers.

  If Deakin had sent out a message to his backers saying:

  Hey guys! So sorry but the recording fell through, here’s why, and here’s some pictures from my trip, and here’s a deep, personal story of what I saw while I was there…how do you feel if I just send you some signed photos instead?

  …I think his crowd might have been less upset.

  John Campbell is the creator of a webcomic called “Pictures for Sad Children,” who ran a Kickstarter to produce a hardcover collection of his work and raised $51,615 from 1,073 backers. After reaching his goal, making the book, and fulfilling many of the orders over the next year and a half, he posted a long, rambling blog piece about affluence, capitalism, and consumerism, and included this announcement:

  I shipped about 75% of kickstarter rewards to backers. I will not be shipping any more. I will not be issuing any refunds. For every message I receive about this book through email, social media, or any other means, I will burn another book.

  He also posted a video of himself burning a copy of the book. It looked like he was having a meltdown, and was out of resources (both in the money and energy departments) to complete fulfillment of his backers’ book orders. But here’s the interesting thing: If you look at the backer comments, his supporters weren’t actually all that angry. Most seemed worried about his well-being more than anything else.

  His backers rallied. Most showed a high level of concern for the artist—you could tell that this was a community, not a soulless storefront. One backer offered to make a digital version of the book to send to those who hadn’t received their packages. Another set up a “Sad Children Book Club,” posted his own email address, and offered to serve as the intermediary post office for anyone who wanted to donate their book to someone who’d missed out.

  Three months later, another artist named Max Temkin stepped in, drove to John’s house to collect the unfulfilled books, and paid the shipping fees out of his own pocket to get the remaining books to their backers.

  There are patrons everywhere. The point, though, is that even though John fucked up royally and did the unthinkable—Insulted his fanbase! Burned his own book!—at least he communicated. And that act—no matter how dark the story had become—kept him connected with the crowd.

  Josh Ente is an artist living in a part of New Orleans that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. On his block, there was a collapsing, abandoned house, and he launched a Kickstarter to fill it with thousands of colored bouncy balls. He raised about $3,000 in backing from about two hundred people, but after everybody’s accounts had been charged, the city got an anonymous complaint and threatened to arrest him if he went forward—even though he had approval from the homeowner and the city permits department. There’s no reverse switch on Kickstarter—you can’t automatically refund people once their credit cards have been charged—but Josh couldn’t stand
the idea of leaving people hanging.

  So he got in touch with every person who funded the ball pit and offered them a choice: he would pay them back individually, by check, or put their money towards the charity of their choice. He even ran into an old friend at a party a few months later and gave him cash straight out of his wallet. Here’s how it broke down: about 40 percent asked for their money back, 40 percent sent it on to charity, and 20 percent said, Just put this towards your next art project. Josh had already spent the starting capital to build the project; he’d already bought the bouncy balls. Which means he paid all of those people back—and donated to all those charities—out of his own pocket, at a loss.

  I wondered what he did with all the balls, so I asked him. His response: I was able to intercept them before they were delivered; as far as I know they’re still in a warehouse in Dallas waiting for me to pick them up. I also had two hundred pool noodles that were supposed to be used for safety padding on my porch for almost two years before I gave some to a Mardi Gras float and some to a Viking funeral.

  My relationship with my fans is like a friendship. I have faced a slew of screwups over the years: accidentally double-booked shows, mail-order albums that shipped five or six months late. But most of the time, if I explain the backstory and the behind-the-scenes logistics of the situation, the audience stands with me. I’ve apologized tons of times. The only thing I must not do is break the code of honesty and steady, forthright contact. You can fix almost anything by authentically communicating.

  The most expensive bundle package of the Kickstarter was the ten-thousand-dollar “art-sitting and dinner,” for which I promised to draw your portrait or vice versa…or whatever (clothing optional). Two people bought it. I delivered the first one in Washington, DC, and brought Neil along.