[Music]
[Applause]
uh
so i didn't always make my living for
music
for about the five years after
graduating from an upstanding
liberal arts university this
was my day job i was
a self-employed living statue called the
eight-foot bride
and i love telling people i did this for
a job because everybody always wants to
know
who are these freaks in real life
hello i painted myself weight one day
stood on a box put a hat or a can at my
feet
and when someone came by and dropped in
money i handed them
a flower and some
intense eye contact
and if they didn't take the flower i
threw in a gesture
of sadness and longing as they walked
away
so i had the most profound encounters
with people especially lonely people who
looked like they hadn't talked to anyone
in weeks and we would get this beautiful
moment of prolonged eye contact being
allowed
in a city street and we would sort of
fall in love a little bit
and my eyes would say thank you
i see you and their eyes would say
nobody ever sees me thank you
and i would get harassed sometimes
people would yell at me from their
passing cards get a job
and i'd be like this is my job
um but it hurt because it made me
fear that i was somehow doing something
unjob-like
and unfair shameful
i had no idea how perfect
a real education i was getting for the
music business on this box
and for the economists out there you may
be interested to know i actually made a
pretty predictable income
which was shocking to me given i had no
regular customers but pretty much
60 bucks on a tuesday 90 bucks on a
friday it was consistent
and meanwhile i was touring locally and
playing in nightclubs with my band the
dresden dolls this was me on piano a
genius drummer
i wrote the songs and eventually we
started making enough money that i could
quit
being a statue and as we started touring
i really didn't want to lose this sense
of direct
connection with people because i loved
it so after
all of our shows we would sign
autographs and hug
fans and hang out and talk to people and
we made an art out of asking people to
help us
and join us and i would track down local
musicians
and artists and they would set up
outside of our shows and they would pass
the hat and then they would come in and
join us on stage so we had this
rotating smorgasbord of weird random
circus guests
and then twitter came along and made
things even more magic because i could
ask
instantly for anything anywhere so i
would need a piano to practice on and an
hour later i would be at a fan's house
this is in london
people would bring home-cooked food to
us all over the world backstage and feed
us and eat with us this is in seattle
fans who worked in museums and stores
and and any kind of public space would
wave their hands
if i would decide to do a last minute
spontaneous free gig
this is a library in auckland
on saturday i tweeted for this crate and
hat because i did not want to schlep
them from the east coast and they showed
up care of this dude chris from newport
beach
who says hello i once tweeted where in
melbourne can i buy
a neti pot and a nurse from a hospital
drove one
right at that moment to the cafe i was
in and i bought her a smoothie and we
sat there talking about nursing and
death and i love this kind of random
closeness which is lucky because i do a
lot of couchsurfing
in mansions where everyone in my crew
gets their own room but there's no
wireless
and in punk squats everyone on the floor
in one room with no toilets
but with wireless clearly making it the
better option
my crew once pulled our van up to a
really
poor miami neighborhood and we found out
that our couchsurfing host for the night
was an 18 year old girl still living at
home and her family were all
undocumented immigrants from honduras
and that night her whole family
took the couches and she slept together
with her mom
so that we could take their beds and i
lay there thinking
these people have so little is this fair
and in the morning her mom taught us how
to try to make tortillas and wanted to
give me a bible
and she took me aside and she said to me
in her broken english
your music has helped my daughter
so much thank you for staying here
we're all so grateful and i thought
this is fair this is
this a couple months later
i was in manhattan and i tweeted for a
crash pad
and at midnight i'm ringing a doorbell
on the lower east side and it occurs to
me i've never actually done this alone
i've always been with my band or my crew
is what stupid people do
is this how stupid people die and before
i can change my mind the door bus open
she's an artist he's a financial blogger
for reuters
and they're pouring me a glass of red
wine and offering me a bath and i have
had
thousands of nights like that and like
that
so i couch surf a lot i also crowd surf
a lot i maintain couchsurfing and crowd
surfing are basically
the same thing you're falling into the
audience
and you're trusting each other i once
asked
an opening band of mine if they wanted
to go out into the crowd and pass the
hat to get themselves some extra
money something that i did a lot and as
usual the band was psyched but there was
this one guy in the band
who told me he just couldn't bring
himself to go out there
it felt too much like begging to stand
there
with the hat and i recognized his
fear of is this fair
and get a job and
meanwhile my band is becoming bigger and
bigger we sign with a major label
and our music is a cross between punk
and cabaret it's not for everybody
but well maybe it's for you
we sign and our there's all this hype
leading up to our next record
and it comes out and it sells about 25
000 copies
in the first few weeks and the label
considers this
a failure and i was like 25 000 isn't
that a lot they're like no
the sales are going down it's a failure
and they walk off
right at the same time i'm signing and
hugging after a gig
and a guy comes up to me and hands me a
10 bill
and he says i'm sorry i burned your cd
from a friend
i but i i read your blog i know you hate
your label i just want you to have this
money
and this starts happening all the time
i become the hat after my own gigs but i
have to physically stand there and take
the help from people
and unlike the guy in the opening band
i've actually had a lot of practice
standing there thank you
and this is the moment i decide i'm just
going to give away my music
for free online whenever possible so
it's like metallica over here
napster bad amanda palmer over here and
i'm going to encourage
torrenting downloading sharing but i'm
going to ask
for help because i saw it work on the
street
so i fought my way off my label and for
my next project with my new band the
grand theft orchestra
i turned to crowdfunding and i
fell into those thousands of connections
that i'd made
and i asked my crowd to catch me
and the goal was a hundred thousand
dollars my fans backed me at nearly 1.2
million which was the biggest music
crowdfunding project to date
and you can see how many people it is
it's about 25 000 people
and the media asked amanda the music
business is tanking and you encourage
piracy how do you make all these people
pay for music
and the real answer is i didn't make
them
i asked them and through the very act
of asking people i'd connected with them
and when you connect with them people
want
to help you it's kind of
counterintuitive for a lot of artists
they don't want to ask for things
but it's not it's not easy
it's not easy to ask and a lot of
artists have a problem with this
asking makes you vulnerable and
i got a lot of criticism online
after my kickstarter went big for
continuing my crazy crowdsourcing
practices
specifically for asking musicians who
were fans if they wanted to join us on
stage for a few songs in exchange for
love and tickets and beer and
this was a doctored image that went up
of me
on a website and this hurt in a really
familiar way and people saying
you're not allowed anymore to ask for
that kind of help
really reminded me of the people in
their cars yelling get a job
because they weren't with us on the
sidewalk
and they couldn't see the exchange that
was happening between me
and my crowd an exchange that was very
fair to us
but alien to them
[Music]
this is slightly not safer work this is
my kickstarter backer party in berlin at
the end of the night i stripped and let
everyone draw on me
now let me tell you if you want to
experience the visceral feeling of
trusting strangers
i recommend this especially if those
strangers are drunk german people
this was a ninja master level fan
connection because what i was really
saying here was
i trust you this much should i
show me for most of human history
musicians artists they've been part of
the community
connectors and 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 loving you up
close and about those people
being enough so a lot of people are
confused by the idea of no hard sticker
price they see it as an unpredictable
risk but the things
i've done the kickstarter the street the
doorbell
i don't see these things as risk i see
them as trust
now the online tools to make the
exchange
as easy and as instinctive as the street
they're getting there but the perfect
tools aren't going to help us
if we can't face each other and give
and receive fearlessly but more
important
to ask without shame
my music career has been spent trying to
encounter people
on the internet the way i could on the
box
so blogging and tweeting not just about
my
tour dates and my new video but about
our work and our art
and our fears our hangovers
our mistakes and we see each other
and i think when we really see each
other
we want to help each other
i think people have 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
thank you
you