Amanda Palmer

As SingularDTV prepares to launch, we want to take a moment to talk about artists who have been brave enough to break the mold of the traditional music distribution system and put their music out in the world for free, letting their audiences pay what they think it’s worth.

Ground Zero for bypassing the traditional music distribution channels is Amanda Palmer, or Amanda Fucking Palmer, as she’s sometimes known. The punk cabaret singer and performance artist famously raised $1.2 million for her album Theatre is Evil in 2012 (and then found herself in the center of a minor culture war when she went on tour with the album and asked some musicians to play for free.)

Palmer wasn’t always the poster child for label rebellion. She’d been signed to Warner’s Roadrunner Records, but the two parted ways in 2008, in part because the agent provocateur bared her belly in a video and the label thought her stomach needed a photoshop diet. She refused and was eventually dropped from Roadrunner — a welcome release, she says.

Over the next few years she experimented with various ways to release her records without a label backing her. In 2010, she dropped an album of Radiohead cover songs onto her own website and asked fans to pre-order. She raised $100,000 but found the enterprise taxing. “Being a record label and record manufacturer and distribution center for 1,000s of fans who have ordered merchandise is a pain in the ass. A lot of artists don’t want to do it,” she told Forbes magazine.

For her next album, Theatre is Evil, she turned to Kickstarter for help. A total of 25,000 fans donated a staggering $1.2 million to fund the project. It was the most successful Kickstarter campaign for a musician at the time.

We should note that Palmer has always been tight with her fan base, both electronically via her blog and her Twitter feed, and physically — she crowd surfs at her shows, literally falling into the arms of her fans, and couch surfs during tours, literally sleeping at their homes. When she blogged about the “belly” comment from the Roadrunner execs, her fans started a website with pictures of their own unmodel-esque bellies to show their support.

When she went on tour with Theatre is Evil, she offered to let musician fans join her on stage for the horns and strings, and some critics called her out for making all that cash and then not paying her performers. Palmer reacted as she always has — with transparency. She blogged about the dust up and was interviewed everywhere from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal. Eventually she changed her mind and decided to pay the volunteers. She also wrote a manifesto of sorts about the economics of art, called “The Art of Asking,” and gave a TED talk of the same name, in which she discusses her views on art and commerce.

Ever the entrepreneur, she’s off Kickstarter and onto a new model — a subscriber crowdfunding platform called Patreon in which 8,000 fans fund ongoing content creation with a subscription in an amount of their choice.

“i’ve gotten to know myself,” she writes on her Patreon page. “As a creator, as a songwriter, and as a recording artist, I thrive on instant gratification and a direct mainline to my audience without having to go through labels, distributors, the machine, the mass media. I love making things and instantly sharing. And I know my fan base: you’re smart, kind, supportive, future-platform embracing people,” she writes.

www.singulardtv.com

SingularDTV