Following the massive success of her Kickstarter experiment, we asked Amanda Palmer if she wanted to write a quick guest post about why she thought the offering was so successful. Here’s what came back, including a bonus bit from Sean Francis, who has helped Amanda for years on the tech/social side of things.

There’s a great story about how bamboo grows. A farmer plants a bamboo shoot underground, and waters and tends it for about three years. Nothing grows that’s visible, but the farmer trots out there, tending to this invisible thing with a certain amount of faith that things are going to work out. When the bamboo finally appears above ground, it can shoot up to thirty feet in a month. This is like my kickstarter campaign. The numbers aren’t shocking to me, not at all. I set the goal for the kickstarter at $100,000 hoping we’d make it quickly, and hoping we’d surpass it by a long-shot.

I’ve been tending this bamboo forest of fans for years and years, ever since leaving roadrunner records in 2009. Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that i curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on…all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY. Asking my poor fans to give a dollar, or if nothing else, to spread the link; asking my rich fans to loan me money at whatever level they can afford to miss it for a while.

And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.

I’ve seen people complaining that this is easy for me to do because I got my start on a major label. It’s totally true that the label helped me and my band get known. But after that, the future was up to me. It bought me nothing but a headstart, and I used it. I could have stopped working hard and connecting in 2009. If I’d done that, and then popped up out of nowhere in 2012 to kickstart a solo record in 2012, my album would probably get funded to the tune of $10k…if I was lucky. There are huge ex-major label artists (pointless to name names) who have tried the crowd-funding method and failed dramatically, mostly because they didn’t have the online relationship with their fans to rely on. And vice versa: plenty of young upstarts with a small but devoted fanbase have kicked ass using crowdfunding, because they’ve taken a hands-on approach online and at shows, and have been close and connected with their fans ALL THIS TIME, while nobody was caring or watching.

I tweet all day. I share my life. My REAL life. The ugly things, the hard things. I monitor my blog religiously. I read the comments. I ask for advice. I answer questions. I fix problems. I take fans at their word when they see me at a show and tell me their vinyl arrived broken in the mail. I don’t try to hide behind a veil of fame. I don’t want to be anything more than totally human. I make mistakes, get called out, and apologize. I share my process. I ask for help SHAMELESSLY. I sleep at my fans houses. I eat with them. I read the books they write. I see their plays and dance performances, online and in real life. I back their own crowdfunding projects. I get rides home with them. I’m the kind of person they WANT to help, because they know me well enough, after years of connecting, to know WHO I ACTUALLY AM. They don’t just get a photoshopped snapshot of my every time I have an album to promote. They see the three-dimensional person, in motion, in real-time. Living and working.

There is no marketing trick. There is human connection, and you can’t fake it. It takes time and effort and, most importantly: you have to actually LIKE it, otherwise you’ll be miserable.

We’re entering the era of the social artist. It’s getting increasingly harder to hide in a garret and lower your songs down in a bucket to the crowd waiting below, wrapped in a cloak of sexy mystery above. That was the 90s. Where an artist could be as anti-social as they wanted, and rack up cred left and right for shoe-gazing and detaching. It’s over. The ivory tower of the mysterious artist has crumbled. If you’re painfully shy and antisocial and hate tweeting and blogging and connecting and touring…and you really just want to write and sing music and be left alone, you can still succeed…if your music is BRILLIANT. But you better have a damn clever boyfriend, girlfriend or friend-manager to fight your battle for you and lift the megaphone in your name, because no longer will a huge, magical company scoop you up and do all the heavy lifting (or if they do, they’ll charge you 100% of your income for the service).

I got asked today on Twitter: “why is an artist your size using kickstarter? shouldn’t you leave crowdfunding to the peple who need it?”

I answered: all artists at every level (even the Gagas and Madonnas) have to somehow raise capital for their work, whatEVER level it’s at. some artists go to labels/companies for the capital to fund albums & tours. Now artists (at any level) can go direct to their fans. The end.

The basic tenets of success in music are still true: have good songs, touch people, work hard. But as far as getting around from place to place… musicians are no longer traveling by limo with one-way glass protecting them from view. Now we’re all going on foot, door to door, in the open sunshine… with the internet as our magical, time-space defeating sidewalk.

love,
amanda
@amandapalmer

ALSO:

Here’s is a note from Sean Francis (@indecisean) , who’s been working with me behind the scenes for over 5 years, helping me run my blog, socials, mailing list and general net-land:

The internet’s been synonymous to Wild West’ian outlaws and lawlessness for so long, I think people forget that it’s also got another REALLY appealing attribute: it’s a giant safety net. And if you spend time nurturing and engaging the people holding that net, you KNOW you’re going to get caught.

For several years, I’ve watched and aided, as Amanda’s interwoven strategies predicated on those two things – pioneering and connection.

As new media has emerged, we’ve looked at how it’d be advantageous to her career, and in what ways it could be potentially beneficial to the fanbase… and as she’s toured, written, recorded, and Twitter’d away, we were privately (and sometimes publicly) playing with puzzle pieces which are culminating in the release of this new album.

To get this right, Team AFP have spent hours on the phone and sent literally hundreds of emails, every week (sometimes daily)…and with the launch of our Kickstarter this past Monday, the public is seeing what several years of work can do.

When Amanda fell or misstepped in the process of trying to get this right, her net was there. And now that she’s ready to do this on her terms, they still are.

Maybe it’s a small collection of fans in some people’s eyes – but it’s a SOLID one – that believe in art and connection. And I’m watching it grow in size by the minute… not just monetarily, either.

While you were sleeping, Amanda Palmer built an army.

With our CwF + RtB experiment in full swing, we’ve asked some of the participating artists/authors to provide some guest posts about their own experience with new business models and new promotions. Amanda Palmer, one of the artists involved in our Techdirt Music Club, is someone you’re hopefully familiar with by now. She’s really been at the forefront of experimenting with these sorts of business models and agreed to write a guest post about her experiences.

And here’s Amanda’s post:

i’ve been talking with a lot of folks lately about “why this works”.
the things i find myself saying over and over to people is that
twitter and the new networking technologies are simply new tools for
artists who have been super-connecting with their fans all along.

i started my band in 2000. we didn’t play rock clubs. we played in our
friends houses, in our own houses, in art galleries, in lofts, at
parties. then we gradually brought the party indoors, into clubs that
would book us once they knew we’d bring in 50 drinking/paying bodies.
i treated our email list like gold. i obsessively stayed up all night
and added named after every show. we took the time to meet every
single fan who wanted to meet us after every show (i still do this,
and i know that brian does it in his current punk band, world/inferno). but this wasn’t because i felt it was mandatory….i did
this because we LIKED it.

i got into music-making in the first place because i was so hungry to
just CONNECT WITH PEOPLE. to me, the meeting&greeting was part of the reward, not a chore. but
not all bands think like this. we were lucky. we liked it.

i’m still lucky, because i STILL LIKE IT. i actually love sitting down
for an hour or two and bantering back and forth with my fans on
twitter. they’re all intelligent, funny, cool people. very few of them
are mundane or obnoxious. very few of them ask stupid questions.
there’s a huge amount of respect between me and the fans and between
the fans themselves. i feel proud that my music has brought all these
freaks together, and i still like attending the party.

for artists who have NO desire to do this, it’s quite a quandary
nowadays, because many fans have come to expect it.

it’s a slight catch-22: it’s impossible to hide and it’s impossible to
fake.

and artists who have huge walls about what they’re willing to share can
end up seeming irritated….and letting someone else tweet for you is
the kiss of death. the last tweet a fan ever really wants to see is : “hey THE ARTIST’S
fans!! check out THE ARTIST’S new single, available now on itunes!!!” people hate that shit. not when you know you can go somewhere else and
get: “fucking hell, let me share with you guys i’m feeling…”

re: the connecting to fans, and giving them a reason to buy….

what i’ve found is that once people trust and love you as an artist,
some percentage of them will buy ANYTHING if they know the actual
exercise is to simply put money in the artist’s pocket. case in point: when i
did my hock-weird-shit-from-my-apartment webcast auction a few months
ago, fans wrote in asking if they could bid on the glasses and wine bottle we were
drinking from. the answer: fuck yes. why not? they sold for a few
hundred dollars each. the reason? these fans knew that it wasn’t the objects themselves that
were important. they knew that i was raising rent money, and they
wanted to help; wine bottle was pure symbolism.

another fan tweeted in that they’d love to get involved by buying a
signed postcard for $20…would i do that? when i told them that sure,
i’d do it, 70 other fans wrote in and wanted one for themselves…. and most of them KNEW that i have a section of my website that states
clearly that if you simply send me your address, i’ll send you a
signed postcard…FOR FREE!

but they wanted to help. and be involved. and involved them i
did…before ending the webcast i read off a list of all their names.
i knew they’d dig that…and i hadn’t promised anything. i just knew that being recognized means so much when you’re sitting
randomly alone behind your computer, watching a webcast, feeling only
slightly connected.

so:
connecting with fans, if they LIKE YOUR ART, automatically gives them
a “reason to buy”, even if it’s NOT ART, because they want to SUPPORT
YOUR HABIT.

i think we’re going to see more and more of that as fans come to
realize that the music is free but comes with the emotional price-tag
of supporting the artist in any way the artist puts their proverbial hat out (merch,
mementos, special packages, literal/web-based tip jars…or wine
bottles).

how much do you think the hardcore fans who buy the $300 vinyl/art-print bundles would simply buy a random pretty book of monochrome
prints by an unknown artist in a bookstore?

my guess: they will look at the bundle book a few times, admire it,
appreciate it, put it on the coffee table or the bookshelf. and they
will listen to the vinyl….probably. but are most of those people vinyl-philes? art print collectors? the point is, they will get two other things that are more important: bragging rights and the knowledge that they were singlehandedly
involved with and supporting an artist’s personal enterprise. because they love the artist, and they want to support him/her, period.

but the nature of fandom & its responsibilities is going to have to
change to the same extent that the musicians are going to have to look
at their lives & livelihoods (as “working musicians”) more honestly.

as musicians rely more and more on fans/listeners/audience within this
kind of honor system, the fans/listeners/audience will have to ante up
or the system just won’t work.

my hope is that the future culture of music will equate the pleasure of hearing a brand new band in a
teeny club with the moral responsibility to toss them a few bucks to keep
going, instead of just walking into the night, feeling lucky.

p.s. i created this video about a month ago with my fans at the beach
at the tail end of a twittered flash-gig in LA. watch it, it’s awesome.