Amanda Palmer Sells $15,000 Worth Of Music & Merch In Three Minutes
from the damn dept
We've talked a lot about Amanda Palmer's various business model experiments on this site, as well as her efforts to connect with fans in new and unique ways. She's also written a guest post, participated in our own CwF+RtB program and done an interview with us where she announced her Radiohead Ukulele project. And, of course, she was recently (ecstatically) dropped from her record label, which is why she can do fun and bizarre things like playing Radiohead songs on a ukulele.While we saw some people in our comments mock the Radiohead Ukulele project, and insist that it would be a clear failure, it seems that's not true at all. In fact, the early results suggest it's been an astounding success. In the first 3 minutes, the project brought in $15,000. Yes, 3 minutes. $15,000. And, of course, it continued from there. The offering included a "pay what you want" for the music, but also a variety of other tiers. Most of the packages sold out within hours.
In the link above, Amanda's tech guy (and regular Techdirt reader and commenter) Sean points out that they did the whole thing themselves, basically involving a team of four people and using some simple internet services like BandCamp (which, if you haven't been paying attention, keeps making strides in being a fantastic platform for musicians). I'm sure we'll start to hear folks explaining why this is an exception or a one-off or something like that. But, given how many times we've seen successful business model experiments like this, at what point are people going to realize that there are so many "exceptions" that it's now the rule?
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Filed Under: amanda palmer, business models, ukulele
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I've finally got around to buying the album and I'm actually now tempted to listen to some Radiohead. Not even The Pretenders' cover of Creep managed to do that previously.
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Exceptions
We have to accept that making a living from music is always going to attract more aspirants than can ever hope to be successful.
BUT it seems that there are more of these "new style" exceptions than there ever were of the old kind.
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Re: Exceptions
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TAM
So, who is TAM?
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Re: TAM
Has anyone seen TAM lately?
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Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
And it says nothing about what happend in the next 3 minutes or the 3 after that, if it is sustainable.
She did not produce the product in 3 minutes, it would have taken her hours and hours learning her skills, and learning those works. Then hours producing, refining and creating a product worthy of sale.
sure, she sold some quickly, and made a small amount of scratch, but not nearly enough to pay for her efforts.
If you just want to make out that selling it in 3 minutes is a good thing, then not mention what happens in the long run. and if that level of sales is sustained. And the profit is enough to pay her staff, and her own living while developing this 'project'.
If I spend 10 years building a boat, and then I sell it, if the sale took 3 minutes to complete I cannot say I made the money from my 3 minutes effort, I made my money from the years of work in building the boat.
sure, I sold it quickly, great, does not mean that im capable of making that kind of money all the time, as I do no have the resources or time to build lots of boats.
Same with music, it takes time and skill to learn how to play an instrument, usually many years, if that time was spend on another persuit you may have made more money, or less.
But that is not what you wanted to do, and expecting musicians or artists to do something different than what they want to do is not right.
They do not have to modifiy their business model to allow for illegal file sharing, or to allow people to not live by the rules.
As for record contracts, its not compulsory, and they are not forced into deals, its a contract both sides agree, so who are you to be critical of an agreement between two parties that you are not a PART of.
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Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
If you sold the boat why don't you have the resources to build another? That is supposed to be part of the selling price.
Also the last three paragraphs of your post just do not make any sense. They don't follow from your initial argument and are really just off the wall. You might want to repharse them so they are understandable.
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Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
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Re: Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
Then, you find yourself in need of a new line of work.
; P
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Re: Re: Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
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Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
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Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
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Re: Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
They pay for people who can't write or argue to write and argue?
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Re: Re: Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
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Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
And she did make $15,000 in three minutes. Also, if you bother to click on the link, you'll see that almost everything sold out in just a few days, just like almost all of her offerings do, because she is an awesome musician.
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Re: Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
I think this is fantastic and I hope it paves the way for many more musicians to be able to take control of their careers.
It isn't necessarily about becoming rich, I don't think that was Amanda's intention with this AT ALL. It's about creating and maintaining a sustainable career and it appears as though she is definitely on the right path.
Success isn't necessarily measured by HOW much money you make... Someone could make $1b on something, but their profit is only $100, where as someone can make $15,000 and their profit is $10,000. Plus for someone like Amanda who doesn't need $1b to conduct her career, $15,000 is success.
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Re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work.
If you want to lay it out across the time to produce the work, $15,000 is, well, $15,000 more than all of the un-recouped artists that made $0 for all of their hard work. So, here is a business model that cut out the record company and put the money directly into the hands of 4 people (including the artist) that did the work. That sounds a lot better than the artist getting nothing and losing the rights to their work at the same time.
Oh, and if you include "time and skill to learn how to play an instrument", I have to ask you what you do for a living that required no learning earlier in life. I hope you do not use any writing or math skills for which the learning of you are not compensated. If you do that, the guy that makes $9 per hour flipping burgers (perhaps you?) makes a heck of a lot more than I do because I had to learn things like math and English to do my job and he was trained to flip the burgers in about 15 minutes.
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Soooo....
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Re: Soooo....
No. She has a guy, Sean, who works for her as her "tech guy." That's why I said "Sean."
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Idiotic Record Label Executives and DRM
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Then why is there a $1000 minimum... pay what you want as long as it starts at $1000 ......just sounds off ... go to her website and check it out
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The actual quote was
The $1000 of which you speak then quite obviously refers to one of the other teirs.
Nice try though.
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re: Not $15k in 3 minutes, but $15k in many years of hard work
Sure, you will always get flippant folks who say "it took you an hour to make that, I'll pay for an hours work", but my response could easily be that I could charge you for the 1 year of training in that one technique to make it. Neither option gets to the heart of the issue. Music is art, and people will pay what they pay. Some music may take years to create, and if you sell only one song, that's a really expensive song. But it you sell 100,000, then the average cost per song is less. Again, the costs matter most to the artist, but the buyer will only pay for the enjoyment or emotional value they derive from the art.
Congrats to Amanda.
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She's really there for her fans, that's the selling point for a lot of us.
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that's why her fans work hard to spread the word and she is working hard in her own way to market the album. you HAVE to get it out there and make it known. if its good, and people know about it, people will buy it.
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I'll be buying the album this weekend and I'm very much looking forward to it.
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You go girl ....
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What's the cost breakdown?
It would probably also be useful to other artists to have a description of the process it took to bring this project to fruition. That way up and comers can get some ideas about how to do things and how much they should cost. Such as studio time, vinyl pressing costs, t-shirt costs, shipping costs, etc. The lack of availability of this kind of information is why many musicians just sign the record deal with a label, because they just don't know what it takes to produce and distribute recordings.
Note I am a Dresden Dolls fan, not so much solo Amanda. I really like the dynamic that Brian brings to the stage.
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