By Charlotta Hedman
Amanda Palmer isn’t afraid of doing things differently. She started out performing as a living statue in her 20s and formed the Dresden Dolls in 2000. But her big breakthrough came in 2008 when she released her solo record Who Killed Amanda Palmer. Since then she’s become a bit like the Lady Gaga for smart internet kids (and grown-ups).
Why does all of this matter then? There are plenty of artists out there doing the same thing, catering to an audience of very devoted fans. But not all of them can sell $15 000 worth of music and merch in three minutes. How did Palmer do it? She teamed up with a start-up.
Palmer released her new album “Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele” through Bandcamp and sold out in a matter of minutes. Combined with the release was a clever whirlwind of internet activity and Palmer threw a launch party live on Ustream.
The next day the thousand limited-edition vinyl LPs had sold out, 450 vinyl LP/t-shirt/button bundles were gone, as were 100 packages that included a T-shirt and a hand-painted ukulele, writes billboard.biz.
Fans who wanted to buy a digital version of the album paid a minimum of 84 cents for the download, but were free to pay more if they wanted to. The 84 cents represent they royalty fees that will go to Radiohead (who’ve already adopted the same business model).
And Palmer did it all herself, with the help of a small team. No record label, no producers, no managers, according to Sean Francis who helps Palmer with her internet presence. Francis was interviewed by Bandcamp after the launch. According to him it’s all about listening to what the fans say and then meeting their demands.
“Each one of us – no matter what our individual role – cares a lot about what and how the fans consume…what they like, what they don’t buy, what they want to purchase, and how they want to purchase it… That’s one of the reasons, for example, that we skipped CDs for this release. Time and time again, we heard fans say “I don’t even use CDs, but I bought this to support you.” So we listened to that, and started talking with the fans about it not being a dirty thing to pay for digital music. There’s no shame in putting money into an artist’s pocket and not getting some sort of physical good for it.”
Palmer and Francis also decided not to use iTunes and preferred having more control over the process.
“We have nothing against iTunes, it’ll end up there eventually I’m sure, but it was important for us to do this in as close to a DIY manner as possible. If we were just using iTunes, we couldn’t be doing tie-ins with physical product, monitoring our stats (live), and helping people in real-time when they have a question regarding the service. Being able to do all of those things and having such a transparent format in which to do it has been a dream come true. We all buy stuff on the iTunes store – or AmazonMP3 or whatever – but it’s not THE way artists should be connecting to fans, and it’s certainly not the way someone is going to capture the most revenue on a new release.”
More of the interview with Sean Francis can be found on Bandcamp’s website.
Palmer has managed to get close to her fans in ways not many big contemporary artists can. She’s approachable, active on twitter, writes a blog that actually seems real and not overly edited by a PR. She has among other things used twitter to organise stealthy last-minute gigs when she’s touring. And in this blog post she explains how she randomly on a Friday night managed to sell $11 000 worth of t-shirts with the help of twitter. Aspiring artists should take note.