In an update to Xeni's post yesterday about Amanda Fucking Palmer asking her musician-fans to play on stage during her tour. Palmer has written a long, thoughtful note about the non-monetary ways in which musicians compensate one another, replied to critics, reshuffled her project budget and freed money to pay the musicians who came out to her gigs.
for better or for worse, this whole kerfuffle has meant i’ve spent the past week thinking hard about this, listening to what everyone was saying and discussing. i hear you. i see your points. me and my band have discussed it at length. and we have decided we should pay all of our guest musicians. we have the power to do it, and we’re going to do it. (in fact, we started doing it three shows ago.)
my management team tweaked and reconfigured financials, pulling money from this and that other budget (mostly video) and moving it to the tour budget. all of the money we took out of those budgets is going to the crowd-sourced musicians fund. we are going to pay the volunteer musicians every night. even though they volunteered their time for beer, hugs, merch, free tickets, and love: we’ll now also hand them cash.
i hope this does two things: i hope it makes the volunteers surprised and happy (they’ll be getting some dough they had no idea was coming) and i also hope it makes our family circle feel good about speaking out.
when we handed the musicians their surprise cash backstage in new orleans the other last night, they laughed like mad and said “after ALL THAT, you’re going PAY US??!!”
Palmer also includes the welcome news that her single Theatre is Evil is #10 on the Billboard chart.
what we’re doing about the crowdsourced musicians. also: we charted at motherfucking #10.
