amanda palmer's open poem to jonathan chait (and other crimes)

xpost obv the entertainment industry has long known access to heroes is a salable commodity (HANG OUT WITH METALLICA AND MTV, yadda ya) and you could even argue what she's doing is kinder to the kind of fan that sends in a hundred postcards to hang out backstage. but what kind of person can OFFER that kind of emotional availability simply for a price, other than your l-rons.

xpost It's $1000 per "thing"

there are a million william shatners who will take your money in exchange for a sprinkling of their fame-dust but on some level it'd be weirder if shatner was like NOW YOU ARE MY FRIEND FOR LIFE I SWEAR TO YOU

lemmy letting 50 rubes sit backstage with him vs lemmy having a monthly skype date with 50 rubes who've provided their cc numbers

Picturing Lemmy or Spock & Kirk telling strangers, "I love you. I just wanted to say that" is pretty fun.

noooo it's even weirder! amanda is saying that is a frequently asked question. her response is

"i love you too. here's a hug ((((((((((())))))))))))"

The vibe of the Spock/Kirk photo op was more like "do not touch them, do not engage them in conversation, this is a photo opportunity no more". Escorted in from the left. Pose. Photo taken. Escorted out to the right while next rube approaches from left. I think my friend would've preferred dinner.

well no shit. everyone would prefer their hero show them love, respect and attention, especially after they've coughed up considerable green. the question is what kind of person promises that subscription-style

It's not that weird flattering/hyping the love you get from your fanbase is a large part of managing that fanbase in the new digital panhandling future.

that's not a hug! those are parentheses!

It's not that weird flattering/hyping the love you get from your fanbase is a large part of managing that fanbase in the new digital panhandling future.

no it's still weird, or pomplamoose would be offering it too

"i love you too. here's a hug (((((((((((goatse.cx))))))))))))"

Wasn't there a music video in the late 90s that was some nondescript guy walking around with a sign that said "Free hugs" and it was just him hugging people and meant to be some enlightening twee performance art feel like she is running w those vibes.

the open-endedness of the $1000 pledge is off-putting, as it seems like this would be attractive to a person who wants her as a friend, and that that friendship can be purchased for $1000 and be a total GFE. But when does it stop? What if she doesn't call you one day? Is there a contract length to this comitment? Will she become your life-long buddy?

obv the willingness to offer a serious emotional connection to anyone willing to cough up the bucks is a good quality to have in our digital future but it's still a tier or eight above RTing compliments and photo ops

Jack Conte from Pomplamousse has three patrons that pay $100 per video. He makes a video every 20-30 days. That's about $1500/year. For that they get a phone call and a monthly skype for an hour. The business model is fine. The only weird thing is that someone wants to do it with Jack Conte/Pomplamousse/Amanda Palmer.

A friend of mine paid $250 just to have a photo taken with Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner. No call, no talk, no dinner. 90 seconds and a photo. That was on top of another $50 to get into the event where it happened. My friends brother paid $500 for a "backstage experience" with Motorhead - hanging out in a room with a bunch of other fans plus the band for half an hour. So paying a grand for that doesn't seem too bad really if you like the artist.

― everything, Wednesday, March 4, 2015 2:37 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these sort of things always make me feel bad for the band. who the fuck wants to spend 30 minutes with a bunch of rabid fans who paid too much to be there? sounds like purgatory.

same thing when hal hartley offers to have lunch with somebody if they spend $3,000 to support his new movie. what a horrible lunch that must be.

Wasn't there a music video in the late 90s that was some nondescript guy walking around with a sign that said "Free hugs" and it was just him hugging people and meant to be some enlightening twee performance art feel like she is running w those vibes.

By nondescript guy you mean Judah Friedlander?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXe8PFKsOIc

" For that they get a phone call and a monthly skype for an hour. "

WTF are you going to talk to some stranger about for an hour? From either end that is weird! I feel weird when I meet celebrities or musicians I like after about ten words.

i apologize for assuming jack from pompalamoose wasn't also down for this kind of subscription superfan cultivation, which was indeed short-sighted of me

does amanda palmer have a lot of stalkers? b/c her behavior -- predicated on a constantly-projected false intimacy with her fans -- would seem to lead to that sort of thing.

esp. given how many fans she has that buy into it.

i apologize for assuming jack from pompalamoose wasn't also down for this kind of subscription superfan cultivation, which was indeed short-sighted of me

― da croupier, Wednesday, March 4, 2015 1:05 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He owns the Patreon website.

Wasn't there a music video in the late 90s that was some nondescript guy walking around with a sign that said "Free hugs" and it was just him hugging people and meant to be some enlightening twee performance art feel like she is running w those vibes.

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, March 4, 2015 3:59 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lollllll it was the fucking dave matthews band

though ok jack at least makes a point to suggest his role is that as a technical advisor rather than a bff

Pledge $100.00 or more per video

3 patrons (All 3 sold out!)
Click to be notified when a spot opens

You get everything you see in the other packages PLUS an hour long Google Hangout with me, every time I release a new video. Just the two of us. We can talk about how to produce music, how to get started on YouTube, how to setup and play a Launchpad, anything you like! Plus, when you sign up, I will personally call you on the phone and thank you for becoming my patron.

ahhh dang too slow. forgot that it was judah friedlander

must be weird when a spot becomes available in jack's three amigos club. like, was it some amicable "ok now i know how to set up a launchpad, thanks jack! bye!" thing? did shit get too real? not real enough?

That is so crazy! LOL DMB.

Yeah everyone otm on how weird it would be to have to spend an hour on the phone/skype with a complete stranger who you know nothing about other than they gave you $1,000. You probably start feeling like a politician.

Or even start to feel like you're at work and that this is your job or something!

idea: you pay $1,000 to have a personal conversation with a musician you admire, who proceeds to interrogate you about why you like his terrible music and why you thought talking to him one on one would be rewarding. conversation ends in tears. you hang up, then get an email from paypal notifying you that the $1,000 has been withdrawn from your account.

i think you basically described an e-meter reading

I would imagine being on the phone with an amanda palmer fan would involve listening to really awful poetry, crying, listening them practice from drama club, and talking them out of cutting themselves. but maybe not.

someone should go undercover and see if after a year you get invited to the super-secret VIP fan club there isn't even a public crowdfunding page for

i apologize for assuming jack from pompalamoose wasn't also down for this kind of subscription superfan cultivation, which was indeed short-sighted of me

― da croupier, Wednesday, March 4, 2015 4:05 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Scanning the thread I saw this and in context I briefly thought it was about one of the pledge gifts being a "jack from pomplamoose"

i feel like when you get to the point where you're offering super-duper personal access to 3-4 people you should give them names like its the Inner Circle Of The Hellfire Club

"I'm afraid The Grey King's Credit Card has expired and he shan't be joining our skyping this month. Meet Frank, he is 17, a devoted fan of my streams, and the new Grey King."

"EXCELSIOR!"

My daughter's preschool had a silent auction where one of the bidding items was "A day with Queens Boro President Melinda Katz"

Scanning the thread I saw this and in context I briefly thought it was about one of the pledge gifts being a "jack from pomplamoose"

yikes! keep 'em away from the produce section, right?

would you help jack off a pomplamoose?

ok, so the source of my mild indignation here is that generally the sort of musicians who use kickstarter, patreon, indiegogo and the like are the ones who have fallen off (or never made it onto) the PR/hype cycle, for whatever reason. (a lot of times it's partly demographics-based -- it's not a coincidence that a lot of female singer-songwriters use it and historically have been among the first. games, same thing.) obviously palmer has a much bigger fanbase / revenue intake then a lot of those, but when things move from "lol amanda palmer" to "lol people who use patreon" it starts to feel a lot like punching down.

(also, I do sort of have a dog in this race, in that I used to subscribe to kristin hersh's equivalent. may or may not still subscribe, I honestly forget.)

for fuck's sake people, I realize amanda palmer is persona non grata but this is fundamentally no different from everyone else's patreon/cashmusic/other subscription service doesn't seem like a defense of "people who use patreon" but a defense of amanda palmer

and who punched down on music subscription services anyway

the joke of palmer being the poster child for all these services is that where most people using them want to give you a specific item of value in return - even jack pomplamoose makes his one-on-one convos sound like advice consultations - palmer's whole shtick is that the art should be free and it's HER you pay for. her problem with kickstarter was she'd have to keep selling her projects individually. This allows her to treat literally anything she does as being of equal value, as what you're really doing is saying "amanda keep making things" and getting her approval and appreciation in return. this is very different from some "six songs a year, 12 bucks and you get a tote bag" operation

It's patronage. That's why it's called Patreon. While it differs from the historical sense of patronage by virtue of being crowdsourced rather than from a single patron, the idea is the same. It's not inherently better or worse than receiving goods for services. And since it's increasingly difficult to get people to pay for goods, this model may work better for some artists than others. Many (imo) good artists have done better under this model than the project-specific funding model.

xpost Whatever the "things" are, they are likely better value mp3s which you can get for free anyway and are not real objects. She makes artwork, stencils, customised covers (and yes, chewed up postcards) and that kind of thing. Presumably the people who pay are expecting similar, since that's what she has done in the past. I truly don't understand why this is necessarily so appalling bearing in mind the business practices of the music industry over the last 50 years.

so where is her sistine chapel

xpost

again, if anyone is exploiting, fostering and selling cult-of-personality based affirmation on patreon or kickstarter to the degree amanda palmer is, PLEASE NAME THEM cuz i'd love to see more examples. we're talking about something VERY DIFFERENT from "if you give me 5 bucks a song I'll put your name at the end of one of my videos"

or if not very different, a far more extreme version that i think most artists would balk at

PLEASE NAME THEM

As far as I know she actually fulfills the terms of her fundraising, which is not true of many many kickstarters. Her terms are wack as fuck but her fans don't seem to feel ripped off by them?

Her sistine chapel is a piece of garbage she put in her mouth i think