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?

Filed Under: amanda palmer, business models, ukulele