Amanda Palmer
The twenty-four case studies in Made with CC were chosen from hundreds of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons staff, and the global Creative Commons community.
We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by those we interviewed.
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Amanda Palmer is a musician, artist, and writer. Based in the U.S.
amandapalmer.net
Revenue model: crowdfunding (subscription-based), pay-what-you-want, charging for physical copies (book and album sales), charg-ing for in-person version (performances), selling merchandise
Interview date: December 15, 2015
Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson
Since the beginning of her career, Amanda Palmer has been on what she calls a “journey with no roadmap,” continually experimenting to find new ways to sustain her creative work. 1
In her best-selling book, The Art of Asking, Amanda articulates exactly what she has been and continues to strive for — “the ideal sweet spot . . . in which the artist can share freely and directly feel the reverberations of their artistic gifts to the community, and make a living doing that.”
While she seems to have successfully found that sweet spot for herself, Amanda is the first to acknowledge there is no silver bullet. She thinks the digital age is both an exciting and frustrating time for creators. “On the one hand, we have this beautiful shareability,” Amanda said. “On the other, you’ve got a bunch of confused artists wondering how to make money to buy food so we can make more art.”
Amanda began her artistic career as a street performer. She would dress up in an antique wedding gown, paint her face white, stand on a stack of milk crates, and hand out flowers to strangers as part of a silent dramatic performance. She collected money in a hat. Most people walked by her without stopping, but an essential few stopped to watch and drop some money into her hat to show their appreciation. Rather than dwelling on the majority of people who ignored her, she felt thankful for those who stopped. “All I needed was . . . some people,” she wrote in her book. “Enough people. Enough to make it worth coming back the next day, enough people to help me make rent and put food on the table. Enough so I could keep making art.”
Amanda has come a long way from her street-performing days, but her career remains dominated by that same sentiment — finding ways to reach “her crowd” and feeling gratitude when she does. With her band the Dresden Dolls, Amanda tried the traditional path of signing with a record label. It didn’t take for a variety of reasons, but one of them was that the label had absolutely no interest in Amanda’s view of success. They wanted hits, but making music for the masses was never what Amanda and the Dresden Dolls set out to do.
After leaving the record label in 2008, she began experimenting with different ways to make a living. She released music directly to the public without involving a middle man, releasing digital files on a “pay what you want” basis and selling CDs and vinyl. She also made money from live performances and merchandise sales. Eventually, in 2012 she decided to try her hand at the sort of crowdfunding we know so well today. Her Kickstarter project started with a goal of $100,000, and she made $1.2 million. It remains one of the most successful Kickstarter projects of all time.
Today, Amanda has switched gears away from crowdfunding for specific projects to instead getting consistent financial support from her fan base on Patreon, a crowdfunding site that allows artists to get recurring donations from fans. More than eight thousand people have signed up to support her so she can create music, art, and any other creative “thing” that she is inspired to make. The recurring pledges are made on a “per thing” basis. All of the content she makes is made freely available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA).
Making her music and art available under Creative Commons licensing undoubtedly limits her options for how she makes a living. But sharing her work has been part of her model since the beginning of her career, even before she discovered Creative Commons. Amanda says the Dresden Dolls used to get ten emails per week from fans asking if they could use their music for different projects. They said yes to all of the requests, as long as it wasn’t for a completely for-profit venture. At the time, they used a short-form agreement written by Amanda herself. “I made everyone sign that contract so at least I wouldn’t be leaving the band vulnerable to someone later going on and putting our music in a Camel cigarette ad,” Amanda said. Once she discovered Creative Commons, adopting the licenses was an easy decision because it gave them a more formal, standardized way of doing what they had been doing all along. The NonCommercial licenses were a natural fit.
Amanda embraces the way her fans share and build upon her music. In The Art of Asking, she wrote that some of her fans’ unofficial videos using her music surpass the official videos in number of views on YouTube. Rather than seeing this sort of thing as competition, Amanda celebrates it. “We got into this because we wanted to share the joy of music,” she said.
This is symbolic of how nearly everything she does in her career is motivated by a desire to connect with her fans. At the start of her career, she and the band would throw concerts at house parties. As the gatherings grew, the line between fans and friends was completely blurred. “Not only did most our early fans know where I lived and where we practiced, but most of them had also been in my kitchen,” Amanda wrote in The Art of Asking.
Even though her fan base is now huge and global, she continues to seek this sort of human connection with her fans. She seeks out face-to-face contact with her fans every chance she can get. Her hugely successful Kickstarter featured fifty concerts at house parties for backers. She spends hours in the signing line after shows. It helps that Amanda has the kind of dynamic, engaging personality that instantly draws people to her, but a big component of her ability to connect with people is her willingness to listen. “Listening fast and caring immediately is a skill unto itself,” Amanda wrote.
Another part of the connection fans feel with Amanda is how much they know about her life. Rather than trying to craft a public persona or image, she essentially lives her life as an open book. She has written openly about incredibly personal events in her life, and she isn’t afraid to be vulnerable. Having that kind of trust in her fans — the trust it takes to be truly honest — begets trust from her fans in return. When she meets fans for the first time after a show, they can legitimately feel like they know her.
“With social media, we’re so concerned with the picture looking palatable and consumable that we forget that being human and showing the flaws and exposing the vulnerability actually create a deeper connection than just looking fantastic,” Amanda said. “Everything in our culture is telling us otherwise. But my experience has shown me that the risk of making yourself vulnerable is almost always worth it.”
Not only does she disclose intimate details of her life to them, she sleeps on their couches, listens to their stories, cries with them. In short, she treats her fans like friends in nearly every possible way, even when they are complete strangers. This mentality — that fans are friends — is completely intertwined with Amanda’s success as an artist. It is also intertwined with her use of Creative Commons licenses. Because that is what you do with your friends — you share.
After years of investing time and energy into building trust with her fans, she has a strong enough relationship with them to ask for support — through pay-what-you-want donations, Kickstarter, Patreon, or even asking them to lend a hand at a concert. As Amanda explains it, crowdfunding (which is really what all of these different things are) is about asking for support from people who know and trust you. People who feel personally invested in your success.
“When you openly, radically trust people, they not only take care of you, they become your allies, your family,” she wrote. There really is a feeling of solidarity within her core fan base. From the beginning, Amanda and her band encouraged people to dress up for their shows. They consciously cultivated a feeling of belonging to their “weird little family.”
This sort of intimacy with fans is not possible or even desirable for every creator. “I don’t take for granted that I happen to be the type of person who loves cavorting with strangers,” Amanda said. “I recognize that it’s not necessarily everyone’s idea of a good time. Everyone does it differently. Replicating what I have done won’t work for others if it isn’t joyful to them. It’s about finding a way to channel energy in a way that is joyful to you.”
Yet while Amanda joyfully interacts with her fans and involves them in her work as much as possible, she does keep one job primarily to herself — writing the music. She loves the creativity with which her fans use and adapt her work, but she intentionally does not involve them at the first stage of creating her artistic work. And, of course, the songs and music are what initially draw people to Amanda Palmer. It is only once she has connected to people through her music that she can then begin to build ties with them on a more personal level, both in person and online. In her book, Amanda describes it as casting a net. It starts with the art and then the bond strengthens with human connection.
For Amanda, the entire point of being an artist is to establish and maintain this connection.
It sounds so corny, but my experience in forty years on this planet has pointed me to an obvious truth — that connection with human beings feels so much better and more fulfilling than approaching art through a capitalist lens. There is no more satisfying end goal than having someone tell you that what you do is genuinely of value to them.
As she explains it, when a fan gives her a ten-dollar bill, usually what they are saying is that the money symbolizes some deeper value the music provided them. For Amanda, art is not just a product; it’s a relationship. Viewed from this lens, what Amanda does today is not that different from what she did as a young street performer. She shares her music and other artistic gifts. She shares herself. And then rather than forcing people to help her, she lets them.
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