All Amanda Palmer All The Time
You may be sick of hearing about Amanda Palmer, but I'm not…at least not yet. Her $19,000 in 10 hours Twitter stunt may be more about social networking than music; but let's face it, it's time that we all paid attention to both.
Hypebot has a few really interesting Palmer related tidbits up our sleeve for the coming days, but in the meantime here's a video interview with Palmer via Out.com.
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No major label, no commercial radio play.
No commercial radio play, no major tour.
No major tour, no wide fan base.
No wide fan base, no online yard sales.
Without the major label deal, she’d be playing to 100 scenesters at the Middle East Cafe.
@ Reality Check….
so, how long you been at Roadrunner?
AFP had a strong fan base before the major label deal through her non-major label work, major tours, radio airplay, etc. with the Dresden Dolls. The majpr label probably saw her as a tax shelter in waiting.
The album, ‘Who Killed Amanda Palmer’, is a brilliant effort, easily better than all the major label constructed faux star’s records out there today. More power to her!
To the idiots who harp on about the major label thing:
1) Dresden Dolls had a following before they signed to a label
2) Roadrunner weren’t owned by a major until 2007, so Amanda’s best selling albums (Dresden Dolls) were indie (RR did had a distribution deal with a major)
3) Roadrunner have been crap. They didn’t pay an advance for the solo record, didn’t pay for the tour, wouldn’t even help her with $100 for a box to put Amanda’s keyboard on so her audience could see her… They are the ones making money off her.
Whats funny to me is that all the “Expert” music 2.0 blogs do is report and comment on shit like this. The real reason you’re still talking about Amanda Palmer? Trent Renzor and Radiohead haven’t done anything interesting lately and nobody else has pulled a stunt like this yet.
In 2 weeks, someone else WILL pull a new stunt, and then that will be the Next Big Thing and we’ll all be bloviating about Emerging Business Models and quoting the same paragraphs in 10,000 blog posts. The hype cycle is impossible to escape, especially since the all the experts are waiting on the artists to figure what’s actually working.
The only reason I’m typing this here is that you guys would at least listen and understand. If we’re going to be re-writing the rules every month and re-defining success every quarter, let’s just acknowledge that more, make the prose less breathless and the headlines less dramatic.
AP is the shit… There are TONS of other artists signed to record deals that are NOT doing the things she’s doing… it’s about ACTION… it’s all about what you DO. so go out there and DO IT.
Palmer made a business decision to sign with Roadrunner, though she now says, “You only have to glance at the Roadrunner roster to see that there’s not a very sensible connection between me and any of the fucking bands on there.”
http://pitchfork.com/news/34979-amanda-palmer-tells-roadrunner-records-please-drop-me/
Yet Palmer admits, “”When the Dresden Dolls got signed we were able to take advantage of what a major label was able to do for a weird band like us: We got radio play and they did a really good job promoting us overseas.”
Palmer then says Roadrunner did the “minimum to promote” her solo album, but says, “I feel an extraordinary amount of sympathy for anybody working at a major label right now because their lives are over. It can’t feel very good to have had your job for 15 years– with a mortgage to pay and kids to put through college– knowing your company is destined to go down.”
If that’s true, it was probably a good business decision for Roadrunner to allow Palmer to creatively self-promote on her own time/dime given the results, but without the initial benefits of being on Roadrunner she might not be in the position to capitalize that she is now.
It’s called the music “business” for a reason.
She had many more than “100 scenesters” for fans pre-major label.
All you label apologists are just jealous.
Frank Zappa was right about you.
brendan b brown
wheatus.com
I am amused and amazed by all the record label apologists who want to give the label all of the credit and none to Amanda.
I am sure that, for a brief period of time, it was helpful for AFP to be on a label, but the fact is that the label needs artists like her far more than they need the label.
It’s *more* helpful of course when the label has people working for it that are smart enough to understand what they’ve got and how to maximize on it, rather than trying to hammer the corners off of a square peg so they can jam it into the round hole they’ve already decided upon for it.
That’s where Roadrunner has fallen down. The fact is, whether she’s your particular cup of musical tea or not, there is simply no denying Amanda’s talent, creativity, energy, charisma and sheer industriousness. She is one hella hard working lady. You pretty much have to be purposely poking your fingers in your own eyes not to see it.
If Roadrunner as a label, can’t figure out how to make money with an artist like that, then they are pretty much incompetent fuck-ups and all they are to Amanda Palmer is dead weight dragging on the career she’s busting her ass to build. The sooner she can get them behind her, the better off she will be. -They- won’t be any better off, but they won’t have anyone but themselves to blame, either.
For the bozos who keep crowing about it being a business, well they’re at least partly right. And it’s good *business* to maximize your assets and use them and market them efficiently and intelligently. If you’ve got an asset and you can’t figure out what to do with it, then maybe you need to find someone who can.
Amanda understands her market and how to maximize her own assets. Roadrunner clearly does not.
Why be so negative for? I don’t get why people are always so fast to talk badly of someone else’s success. What she is doing with twitter and social networking is awesome. She seems to be extremely dedicated to her fan base as well.
She is accessible, where as most artists aren’t. How many artists are they out there that will wait and sign autographs after a gig, jet lag and all, and make sure they stay back to sign EVERY autograph requested from them???
Some artists don’t even sign autographs let alone spend HOURS doing it.
Her model is quite simly involving her fans, they are part of the music and career, her music/career isn’t just a commodity, it’s a community.
Malixe said it better!
that should have said simply not simly
I entirely agree. What AFP does on her own, it’s what any record label *could* do–along with the clout they could bring to such ventures, in-store appearances, sponsored tours for her and other label artists, press, advertising–in fact, in this case it’s even *easier*, because she’s doing most of their work for them!
I mean, really, how hard is it to say, okay, the audience pays to *see* the performer, let’s shell out a hundred and get her a riser? They could even shell out a little more and make it label property, emblazoned with their logo. Who thought this wasn’t worth doing?
Ultimately, I think it does come down to individual effort versus the corporate bottom line, and that’s why indie artists are slowly starting to make money, and big labels are not so slowly starting to lose it.
It also should be said, it’s all in where you place your mark of success. AFP? Ultimately wants money to keep traveling, to pay rent, to keep recording; and the big labels? Want to do all that *plus* profit themselves, pay their middle management team, their CEOs, *and* any shareholders they might have.
Vastly different expectations, there.
If you’d been following AFP on Twitter, you’d know that this has been going on for a few months now. This isn’t really a flavor-of-the-month thing, this has been building. How do I know this? Because I watched it happen on Twitter. I watched her give away tickets, announce shows and ninja beach parties. And the response from the fanbase has been consistently impressive. #LOFNOTC got a lot of attention, but she’d been doing what she’s doing for a while. To people following her on Twitter, this kind of behavior is old news.
The other thing to remember when someone drags out the “If the Dresden Dolls/Amanda Palmer had never signed with a label, their audience would be a lot smaller” argument is that it has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether she needs the label RIGHT NOW. Or whether the label should want to keep her.
Sure, hypothesize all you want about what might have been in the world where they didn’t get a recording contract, but it doesn’t really matter. That’s in the past, and their decisions need to be based on their present situation.
Their contract specifically had a provision to allow Roadrunner to drop Amanda Palmer from their label this summer, because even for the label it has nothing to do with some misguided sense of loyalty: it is a business deal, pure and simple, and it would be bad business for them to maintain a poor deal simply out of habit, or worse, out of spite. Neither of them should care if the deal was good years ago, they should only care if the deal is good today.
Now, Amanda Palmer has made some good arguments for why Roadrunner should want to exercise their option and drop her: they aren’t making much money from selling her records, for one thing, and since she’s in an entirely different genre from the rest of their artists, she won’t be stealing listeners from them if she leaves. Not to mention that the tanking economy has to be putting pressure on them to seriously cut their expenses and maximize their profits. So you have to wonder, why wouldn’t they drop her? What does Roadrunner get out of keeping Amanda Palmer on their roster this year? Would they be better off waving goodbye to her and concentrating on their other artists?
I have never my life heard Amanda Palmer on the radio. I don’t know if she’s ever had a radio hit, but I sure have never heard about it. Honestly, he label isn’t doing shit for her, because she isn’t “marketable” and they’re not going to spend money on someone who won’t give them buckets of money back.
Emilly,
You are correct and you are touching on perhaps the most elementally disturbing facet of this entire discussion…If AFP can earn $19,000 in 11 hours sitting in front of her laptop on a Friday night, then why can’t the label, with all it’s music business degrees and media relationships, earn 1000 times that Monday – Friday 9-5.
There are 2 possible answers:
1…They can’t.
2…They don’t want to.
Experience with major label personalities has led me to believe that the answer is # 2.
I have come to believe that most label people are the same people who talked a whole mess of shit about music in High School but then were out sick for the talent show….They sought later in life to control and manipulate the energy and fulfillment that those of us who actually create music from scratch enjoy, but by any means other than creation because creation carries with it the possibility of failure.
These people are terrified to fail in public….too terrified to ever actually create something… no, they opt to stay “behind the scenes”. They are the silent partners who really call the shots, spend the money….but they’re just hateful, envious, Philistine cowards who would sooner see the genius of AFP wither and die in obscurity than help her to succeed on her own terms. The major label machine CAN be used to maximize Amanda Palmer’s success, but alas, the people who work there simply loathe her too much to allow that, no matter what it costs her career, the company or the industry. I think they talk about her in those offices like she’s the worst piece of trash ever.
But you label people will disagree with all that so here’s the big question for you:
Assuming that we AFP supporters are wrong and that you are correct and it’s true that AFP only acquired her 30,000 followers because of your diligent efforts and label money spent to promote her….Would it not then follow that the label employees could engage her meager 30,000 fans during weekly work hours and effectively recoup AFP’s account using the same methods she used during her 11 hour run on twitter? I mean, you are the professional promo people are you not?….can’t you do much better than some half-assed spoiled brat, unappreciative, loser artist with her laptop, shut in, at home on a Friday night?….and if so, why haven’t you?
How many Who Killed Amanda Palmer records have YOU sold?
brendan b brown
wheatus.com
I’ve heard the Dresden Dolls maybe twice TOPS on XM (satellite radio), never on FM radio, and I’ve never heard AFP’s solo stuff on any radio ever. So way to go major label, you’re doing a great job there!