Steve Albini Slams Amanda Palmer for Asking Fans to Play in Her Band for Free

Albini says "You're not an idiot...

...but you're still an idiot!"

Steve posts a clarification:

"Well, since the new journalism is just re-posting what other people have lifted from message boards and twitter, there are probably going to be a hundred or so stories on the web with headlines like “Steve Albini calls Amanda Palmer an Idiot,” so I’d better make my position on that clear. I don’t think Amanda Palmer is an idiot, and it was rude and sloppy of me to make that impression. I’m sorry Amanda Palmer, the internet is going to tell you that I think you’re an idiot, and while that’s not true, it’s my fault.

I Don’t know Amanda Palmer, and don’t recall ever hearing her music, though I hear a lot of music. Full disclosure, my wife Heather once tried to contact her through her agents to see if she would play at a charity event, but I don’t know what happened with that other than nothing happened.

I have no problem with bands using participant financing schemes like Kickstarter and such. I’ve said many times that I think they’re part of the new way bands and their audience interact and they can be a fantastic resource, enabling bands to do things essentially in cooperation with their audience. It’s pretty amazing actually.

It should be obvious also that having gotten over a million dollars from such an effort that it is just plain rude to ask for further indulgences from your audience, like playing in your backing band for free.

Fuck’s sake a million dollars is a shitload of money. How can you possibly not have a bunch laying around after people just gave you a million dollars? I saw a breakdown about where the money went a while ago, and most everything in it was absurdly inefficient, including paying people to take care of spending the money itself, which seems like a crazy moebius strip of waste."

that a programmer might be able to set you up an alternative version of Kickstarter where you have more control.

I have not looked deeply into it, but when people go on Kickstarter to donate they can see clearly how much has already been donated, correct?
If so, all those folks that gave to Amanda knew she had reached her goal and decided to give to her anyway.
What's the problem?
Is she not doing with the money what she said she would?
Are people not receiving something they were promised?
What is a person expecting when they give to someone who has already received more than double what they asked for?

PS I am not refferring to the free musician thing here, just the relationship between donater and artist.

Housing situations vary quite a bit, I'd say that nowadays for my band it often goes like this:
Maybe 10-30% of our concerts include a hotel room with the booking offer, mostly this happens in Europe. Or sometimes the concert promoter will offer to have us stay at his or her house.
Maybe 10-30% of the locations we're playing are areas where we have old friends or other sorts of homes where we've stayed many times and can usually count on staying there again - like in Birmingham, UK we are usually pretty sure we can stay with the Misty's Big Adventure folks, and there's other cities around the world where we also have a pretty good chance of being able to stay with the same people we've stayed with for years in those places.
For the rest of the tour dates, which is usually at least half of the shows, we do put the word out to our email list and our website, etc., asking if there are any fans who can house us, and we request that they email us back with any details. If they seem sane and nice then we can consider those cities to be places where we will have housing.
The remaining cities, where the show hasn't offered a hotel, the promoter isn't offering housing, we don't know any friends or family to ask for housing, and nobody has written back to our advance requests for housing, then we just ask the audience from the stage if there's anybody who can put us up for the night. This is more risky because there's the possibility of ending up at some crazy loud drunken party or some chaotic student dorm piled high with garbage and no place to actually sleep, but more often than not we will find some pretty cool and nice people to stay with. Whether it's a good night's sleep or a rough night is usually a toss-up. Could go either way.
If we're really desperate and there's really no place possible to sleep at the end of a night, we'll drive off and try to book a hotel room (usually for one or two people and sneak the others in). This happens once in a while.

How many people go to her shows and how much money does she take in?
Does she earn a profit from touring?

don't necessarily tell the whole story either.

How many people here have received tips or cash payments and not reported them?

I don't quite know what to make of the situation, but it's been nagging at me to weigh in. It's a good topic, whatever the specifics. By the way, once the controversy erupted, she _did_ start paying her volunteering musicians. Maybe that was stated above.

But what was this, anyway? Was she inviting people to show up and make a cacophonous noise on a few songs? (in which case, I think it would have been OK.) Was it sort of like one of those Bobby McFerrin concerts where he turns the whole audience into his vocal orchestra? Or was she offering to audition experienced musicians, rehearse with the very best ones who showed up, and THEN not pay them? (That would have been not so OK.)

I won a "be Michelle Shocked's opening act" contest in the 1990s, and got to play in front of a few hundred people at a very packed CBGBs. I was not paid, and that was the stated deal. I felt honored, not used. It felt like a great opportunity to expose my music to more people, and I had (and have) not a moment of bitterness about it. In fact, it was a peak experience for me. This would be sort of like her "Dresden Dolls supporting NIN" example, on a small scale.

On the other hand, the sort of "entitlement" that Jeff mentions above is a real phenomenon -- whether or not in Amanda P. specifically, in a certain percentage of performers who "make it" and consider themselves "of the people." At some point you have to look at yourself and say "I am getting paid well enough to pay the struggling musicians who are rehearsing and playing with me." Yes, musicians can "choose" to be abused and exploited. That doesn't make it "not exploitation."

It holds them back. It's another "not yet." Someone doing a gig with Amanda as her faceless backing band is not going to make a Dresden Dolls-type career jump from it.

Her example of David Byrne is ludicrous. Err....he gets paid. A lot. He has made it. It is legit to give that kind of charity --which is what David Byrne playing with you would be-- when you've quit your day job, or rather, when you are blessed enough that music IS your day job.

Same goes for playing on people's albums for free. This is "a thing." I think, in the rare cases that an album unexpectedly takes off --and that does still happen-- you find the musicians who offered to play on it for free or a pittance (heck, nobody was making any real money, right?) and you renegotiate and offer to pay them appropriately for their contribution. It's a no-brainer. I was stunned at the case of Pink Floyd not paying the female vocalist on "Great Gig In The Sky." She got a onetime session fee for a prominent, 3 minute solo on one of the best selling albums of all time, and it took the band some 30 plus years and a lawsuit to do the right thing. Why do I bother to bring this up? Because I see it happen repeatedly on the lower end of fame, and even not too far at all from the circles we travel in.

I've said this before....My ex-bandmate Dan Emery still sends me envelopes with cash royalties in them, for online sales from recordings I played on 14 years ago. Sometimes, when a song has been featured on TV recently, it's a nice little amount. But I was moved to tears when, in a lull, he made the effort to send an envelope with 2 ones, a nickel and a dime, which was my fair cut that time around. That's a man who knows how to share the wealth, and respect and thank his musicians. That's gratitude. It's a very good thing. (I wish I could claim to be that good at such things.) When I get such an envelope, what I hear is, "This is all I've got, (or all we got), but you're a real musician, and you helped me." I hope he doesn't mind me putting his name out there like that. But I think people should know, and be more like him.

that she does not earn or have what most people probably think she earns and has, there is really no way of knowing from what has been said why she is broke (or what she means by broke).
Mike Tyson earned $400 million dollars and later filed for bankruptcy.
Tom Petty declared bankruptcy.
I am not saying she ever had the money Tyson or Petty (who had way less than Tyson) had.
I am saying we don't know what she means by broke or why she is broke.

A good guess would be medical bills and having no insurance.

It'd be interesting to see what her accountant sees (if she has one) and know more specifically what the situation is.

There are less popular musicians that are not broke.
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Personally I have no experience (other then a few brief episodes) earning any money at all playing and singing and that's after 47 years of doing it--18 as a solo singer-songwriter.
I attribute that mainly to lyrics that most everyone hate or disagree with.
Hence I deliver groceries (and subsequently have medical insurance).
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