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FMQB Thinking Ahead!

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Theatre Is Evil, But Crowd-Sourcing Isn’t: An Interview with Amanda Palmer

By Joey Odorisio

Amanda Palmer released two studio albums as one half of the “Cabaret Punk” duo The Dresden Dolls, and made headlines earlier this year by raising almost $1.2 million on Kickstarter for her new solo record Theatre Is Evil. Palmer has always been hands-on with her fan base, famously signing autographs for hours after concerts and staying in constant contact via Twitter. After finishing the recording of Theatre Is Evil, Palmer used Kickstarter to offer a wide variety of pre-order options to her devoted fans, ranging from just a $1 for a digital download to high-end private concerts. Palmer recently spoke to FMQB about selling directly to her fans, spending a million dollars and the cross-cultural reactions to Theatre Is Evil.
After leaving her former label home of Roadrunner Records, Palmer says the move gave her the freedom to work more directly with her fans. Palmer said, “I could have signed with another label or I could try going direct to fans. I spent a good year looking around and watching the evolving landscape and doing little test runs with the fan base to see if I was capable of running my own business.” These test runs included an EP of Radiohead covers released only digitally and on vinyl, as well as a few other smaller-scale records, as a way of trial and error in selling directly to her fans.
She says the Radiohead covers record “was a lot more strategic than people thought. I wanted to put out a project that was going to be fun and cool and that I could take risks with, but if it failed, it wasn’t gonna break my heart. It was a fun, weird little project that I could take risks with and it really was just about going straight to the fan base. I didn’t do a publicity campaign, market it or put it in the stores. I literally did nothing. I sent an email to my mailing list and posted about it on my blog. I stood back and just wanted to know what my fans would do, if they were willing to simply throw their credit card into my PayPal.” Palmer says there was an immediate reaction, then sales dropped off, but “mostly I was measuring my fan base and seeing who was out there.”

           In early 2011, she experimented some more with direct-to-fan releases with Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, an album she describes as “a hodgepodge collection of live tracks and silly songs with recording budget of five grand. It only had a distribution deal in Australia, you could not buy it in the stores in America, if you wanted to get it; you had to buy it from me online.”
           Palmer says that “the hidden story of my Kickstarter that nobody’s picking up on” is a series of fan-organized house parties she sold. She did a test run of house shows in Australia last year, where fans would pay to have her play a backyard BBQ the day after she played a theater gig. “I’m doing 40 shows next year for $5,000 each that were organized and promoted by my fans. In each city, one fan stepped up and said, ‘I’m gonna be the leader for this show, I’m gonna get 50 people to split the cost and we’re all gonna meet at my house.’ They put a $5,000 check directly in my bank account. None of that money is going to promoters, agents, security, insurance, rental fees… With a $5,000 guarantee to play a show in any city, I would probably be taking home $500. But this way I’m taking home all of the money directly. They are paying to hang out with me, granted in a really stripped down environment. There is no band, no lightshow, but it’s really fun. It’s really possible thanks to the Internet. It wouldn’t have been possible for these specific people to find each other 10 years ago.”
          Despite the headlines about raising over a million dollars via Kickstarter, Palmer says the money is essentially all gone. She says if she’d made her album a digital-only release, not marketed it and played a short stripped down tour, she could’ve kept the money. “But I wouldn’t have made $1.2 million dollars if all I was offering people was a digital download of a solo piano record. I really wanted to offer people something huge and special that was going to take a lot of time and energy. So I’ve spent a lot of time working on the artwork, the stage show and the videos. The whole thing has been a huge, vast undertaking but my fan base knows me and they know where my priorities are. And I think they’ve learned that the energy they put into me they’re always gonna get back.”
          She continues, “The money is already spent or earmarked on marketing and promoting the record and going to radio and really beautiful videos. We’ve made four relatively high budget short film videos that cost a lot of money to make. We’re building a complicated and unique stage show, with lights and a crew. All of that costs money so that’s what all of that budget has gone in to.” (In May, Palmer blogged an estimated breakdown of how the Kickstarter money would be spent, which you can find here.
          I interviewed Ben Folds a few days before speaking to Palmer (look for a Q&A with him next week!) and he suggested a question to ask his friend: “Now she’s a record company, how’s that feel? How hard is that? What were the things that she didn’t appreciate at the time that she does now?”
          She replied, “It doesn’t feel all that different. Even when the Dolls and my solo album were coming out on Roadrunner, I was still effectively managing my own business in cooperation with various managers and team members. I was never the kind of person who just sat back and said I can’t wait to see what my label and my manager do. I’ve been so actively involved in my career, it’s insane. I’ve always been in control of my touring and my merchandise and my album production. All the things that don’t have to do with putting a CD in a store, I’ve always been in control. So it doesn’t feel like this huge seismic shift, like ‘Oh my God, all of the sudden I have to do all this business.’”
          “The nice thing is teaming up with [music publicity firm] Girlie Action, they are functioning more as a label. And also to have the freedom to just say: This is what I want. This is how I want it to look. Everyone says ‘great, we’re putting it into production’ and the whole exchange takes five minutes. I just make the decisions and if I want to lose money, it’s my prerogative. And if someone at management doesn’t understand why I think something is worth spending money on and it’s going to kick me back in the long tail, they can argue with me about it, and we do have these arguments but ultimately I run the business and I make the final call. As an artist, it’s really so empowering to know that the ultimate decision is yours and the ultimate power lies with you.”

           On Theatre Is Evil, Palmer stretches out stylistically, including a number of ‘80s synth-pop influences on top of her piano-rock sound. In fact, before recording “Grown Man Cry,” she says “I literally made my band listen to two full songs from [Depeche Mode’s] Violator and said this, this is the sound!”
          Palmer says that the early reaction to the record has been “Really overwhelmingly positive. It’s really funny because different people in different countries have been reacting culturally really differently. Everybody loves it, no one hasn’t loved it, but some of the European countries are attacking it more intellectually. <affects a German accent> ‘Why have you made this change in genre? We really appreciate it but we want to understand why.’ <laughs> Whereas the Americans and the Australians are high-fiving me and saying It’s great!”
           She adds, “The album is pretty vast, I’ve never sat down to write a record. This is a collection of five years of songs.” Palmer says that it is also “a liberated record” that she was able to make now that she was out of the major label game. “As soon as I got off the label, I was allowed to just approach my songwriting with a totally clean slate and say I can do whatever the f**k I want. If I want to write avant garde art music, if I want to write pop songs, I can and it’s all gonna live under my own personal umbrella. It’s not gonna serve or damage anybody except myself. There’s definitely been an evolution in my songwriting.”