AFP, Neil Gaiman, and $95K (and counting)
If you haven’t heard already on a music blog or in your tweet stream, allow me to break the days-old news: Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman have raised over $95K (and counting) on Kickstarter for a five-city West Coast “tour”, the contents of which have yet to be determined. Except that it will involve the happy couple Amanda and Neil doing…whatever it is they do together onstage.
Here’s the explanatory video, in which AFP confesses she doesn’t know what the fuck they’ll be doing in the show, but that, even if they’re not coming to your city, you should still give them your money.
Within hours of the start of this campaign, the highest donation option of $500 had been capped. This means that the max amount of fans possible paid $500 for a ticket to the show (whatever it turns out to be), a grab bag of merch, and an “intimate” meet-and-greet with Amanda and Neil. The ironic thing is that you can usually meet Amanda after any of her shows. For free. One can only assume that meeting Neil Gaiman is more expensive. But $500? Really?
Here’s the kicker: the project is already 475% funded; it has 22 days to go; and people are STILL DONATING. It’s like this cult of followers can’t stop themselves from giving, even when the “tour” has been funded four times over.
What peeves me the most is that Amanda’s songwriting has been less than her best since about 2006. Yes, Virginia was the last strong album she wrote. No, Virginia was essentially a bunch of B-sides. WKAP was an incoherent collection mostly of self-indulgent ballads with an online fantasy game accompanying it and a commemorative coffee table book made collaboratively with none other than Neil Himself. (So it came as no surprise when AFP and Neil announced they were dating around 2009.) Now they’re married, and apparently they believe that their simultaneous presence onstage is worth anywhere from $30-$500. My question is, where is the music to back up this ticket price? Is Radiohead on ukulele worth that? Is a live album in Australia worth that–or is it just a way to avoid going into the studio?
It seems like Amanda has realized that she can sell anything on the Internet and that people will buy it–four or five times over; so quality no longer matters. She can announce a show on the beach while her husband eats a banana, and people will give her $95,000. She doesn’t have to write good songs anymore. (Maybe Neil won’t have to write books anymore.) They make more money standing on the beach than most people make in two years. This is not art. This is a musician-turned-megalomaniac e-personality run amok. It’s crowdsourcing at its worst, flippantly inviting people to pay for concerts that probably won’t come to their city or for an opportunity backstage that thousands of people have previously gotten for free.
I was a huge fan of The Dresden Dolls. They worked hard, toured incessantly, and made great music. And I never had to pay more than $40 to hear it. Granted, I may have Roadrunner Records to thank for that. According to AFP, being indie is more profitable for her than was having a record deal. When it’s profitable to the tune of $95K for a uke, a half-formed idea, and a banana, I guess she’s right. The fans have spoken: do little, and we’ll pay you a lot.
x
you have no idea. it’s certainly worth it. you describe a woman with a beautiful mind who is living music as a money-grubbing passionless musician which is so fucking unright. i cannot find that much passion in any other’s music or art. you didn’t get the point. amanda palmer makes millions of people happy. listen to her album again and understand it. it’ll be worth it
and probably you’re just thinking now that she has manipulated as well but that’s not true. i just recognise her i even find myself in her.
Thanks for the comment. As I mentioned in the post, I’m a big fan of The Dresden Dolls. What bothers me about the trajectory of Amanda Palmer’s solo career is that she seems to spend more time on the Internet creating a rather narcissistically uncensored e-persona for herself than the time she spends making art. After about 2009, I just tuned out. Her solo music and the Evelyn Evelyn projects aren’t as strong as the DD material, in my opinion, which frustrates me as a listener and as a fan. (Incidentally, I think Jason Webley is a genius solo artist.) And I stand by my opinion that, if you’re going to pitch a project to me via Kickstarter and you’re going to ask for my money, it’s unprofessional and disrespectful not to have a more specific plan of what you intend to do with my money when you ask me for it. Artists who apply for grants have to write detailed proposals of how they intend to use the grant money. If she and Neil sent that video to the NEA, I doubt it would get them very far. It’s conceited and presumptuous to think that your back catalog of work entitles you to fans’ money for future projects when you can’t give a clear idea of what exactly that project is going to be other than, generally, “a tour”, and it’s also inappropriate, I feel, to ask people to fund concerts they will never see, since the tour was planned for only a few cities.
I have no problem with people being fans of AFP. I only ask people to put the fandom aside for a moment and ask themselves to consider objectively whether they’ve been taken in just a little bit.
On a side note–I have to admit that, once AFP figured out how to milk social media to mine her fanbase, she quickly became a genius at it. I’ve learned things from her that I’ve applied to the social media work that I do to make a living. As an independent businesswoman, online community creator, and marketer, she’s quite brilliant. And there’s really no financial reason for her to change her strategy because it’s certainly working. Anyone who donated to her and Neil’s Kickstarter campaign has already proven this point!