Amanda Palmer is to start paying musicians who volunteer to become part of her backing band.
If you’ve been anywhere near a social network over the past week or so, you’ve probably noticed the tidal wave of opinion on crowd sourced funding. Steve Albini seemed to trigger it, slating Amanda Palmer for using fans musicians on her current tour.
After much to-ing and fro-ing, Amanda Palmer has published a new statement vowing to pay guest musicians in full. The singer intimated that the decision had, in part, been provoked by the current debate but underlined the fact that her use of crowd sourced funding is continually in evolution.
The statement reads in part: (via Pitchfork)
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.
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Amanda Palmer finished by saying: “We’re also retroactively sending a payment to the folks who’ve already played with us. SURPRISE!”
Read the full statement HERE.
