THE ART OF ASKING
The Dresden Dolls became the first Kickstarter to reach $1 million but it began on the streets for Amanda Palmer.
CAMBRIDGE, MA
Standing in Harvard Square, you see a glowing white figure. A 8 foot tall statue in a white bridal dress with painted white arms, and dark black hair outlining her painted white. face. As you drop money in her hat, her towering figure bends over, looks you in the eye and gives you a flower. It was a steady income for the “8 Foot Bride”: $60 on a weekday, $90 a day on a the weekend.
But for Amanda Palmer her first experiences as a paid performance artist also came with shame.
“I would get harassed sometimes. People would yell at me from their passing cars, “Get a job.” And I was like “This is my job.” But it hurt because it made me fear that I was somehow doing something unjob-like and unfair and shameful. I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box.”
“They couldn’t see the exchange that was happening between me and the crowd. An exchange that was very fair to us. And weird and alien to them.”
Amanda is mostly known today as a pianist and singer working with drummer Brian Viglione in The Dresden Dolls, an emotional combination of punk and cabaret music. Amanda has always been a open book about the couch surfing, hard-scrabble and handout economy of being a punk musician. One story stands out to her in particular:
“We found out that our couch surfing host was an 18 year old girl and her whole family we undocumented immigrants from Honduras. That night her whole family took the couches so that we could have their bed. And I thought, “These people have so little. Is this fair?”
And in the morning her mother said, “Your music has helped my daughter so much. Thank you for staying here. We’re all so grateful.’ And I thought, ‘This is fair.”
In the early 2000s, The Dresden Dolls were picked up by Roadrunner Records, a heavier subsidiary of Warner Bros. After a few years it came time to market Amanda’s solo album, but Roadrunner wanted to edit out the more personal and human aspects of Amanda. For example, the label wanted to edit out her bare stomach shots in a music video because they were “too fat”.
“They decided to do the absolute minimum to promote it. I think they looked at it as an investment just in case something amazing happened by accident. But what has remained true in my career for the last 10 years is that fucking nothing happens by accident. You tour and you work hard and you take care of your fans and very real things lead to other real things. There's never been some fantastic fluke or break in my career, it has all been very slow and steady.”
The album sold 25,000, a number that Amanda saw that number as 25,000 personal connections to her fans, but Roadrunner saw as a failure to go mainstream enough. In the feud with her label, Amanda came to believe that she could count on the passion of her fans more than the structure and capital of her label. She publicly and successfully petitioned for Roadrunner to drop her and then started a Kickstarter for her next album.
“I asked for $100,000 and my fans gave me nearly #1.2 million, making it the biggest kickstarter to date.”
Ironically the $1.2 million from Kickstarter was funded from 25,000 people, the same number that her record company had considered a failure.
For Amanda the act of asking her fans for help can be as creative as her music. When you’re truly vulnerable with people, they want to help you. To be an artist is to be vulnerable, and so many artists just aren’t willing to be truly vulnerable and truly relatable.
“Artists are connectors and openers, not untouchable stars. Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance. But the internet and the content that we’re freely able to share on it are taking us back. It’s about a few people seeing you up close and those people being enough.”
BOOK TRAILER
TED TALK
KICKSTARTER VID
DISCUSSION
Amanda says, ”The things people had a hard time asking for, are the things they thought they just didn’t deserve, or deserve to ask for because they thought it was selfish and greedy… There are all these moments in our lives that we can’t get from one place to another without help. And to ask for it we have to believe that we deserve it.”
Q: Do you believe you deserve what you’re asking for? Why or why not?
Amanda is as creative with her asking as her music, always finding ways that fans want to get involved with money or in-kind support. “We’ve been obsessed with the wrong question, ‘Which is how do we make people pay for music. What if we started asking how do we let people pay for music?” In short, a good ask doesn’t feel forced, it’s an opportunity.
Q: How do you let your audience help you?