Amanda Palmer hasn’t been able to stay ahead of her own controversy this week, but she’s doing a decent job of cleaning up the mess. She recently came under fire for raising a cool million via her fans on Kickstarter and subsequently asking those same fans to volunteer to perform in tandem with her regular band on her current tour.
Although Palmer initially defended her stance, she’s now announced on her blog that she will pay all of her guest musicians because “we have the power to do it, and we’re going to do it,” and also that, “in fact, we started doing it three shows ago.” Those shows, btw, have been “sick, glorious communions of awe.”
She went on: “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 … 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 … we’re also retroactively sending a payment to the folks who’ve already played with us. SURPRISE!”
Before signing off, Palmer shared a video of her crowd-sourced Theatre Is Evil crew:
