GrindEFX

Amanda Palmer has been a hot topic for music business geeks (like us) over the last few months. Not only has she shown us just how important artist/fan relationships are, but she has also shared her insights into experimental business models on various blogs, the latest of which is Techdirt. In light of their CwF + RtB experiment, Mike Masnick and the Techdirt crew have invited various musicians and authors to write guest posts on the site, Amanda (fucking) Palmer was one of them.

She reveals how much she loves interacting with her fans; staying up all night adding names to her mailing list, meeting every fan after a show and bantering with her fans on Twitter. It’s this personal connection that makes her fans want to support her, she explains:

what i’ve found is that once people trust and love you as an artist, some percentage of them will buy ANYTHING if they know the actual exercise is to simply put money in the artist’s pocket. case in point: when i did my hock-weird-shit-from-my-apartment webcast auction a few months ago, fans wrote in asking if they could bid on the glasses and wine bottle we were drinking from. the answer: fuck yes. why not? they sold for a few hundred dollars each. the reason? these fans knew that it wasn’t the objects themselves that were important. they knew that i was raising rent money, and they wanted to help; wine bottle was pure symbolism.

another fan tweeted in that they’d love to get involved by buying a signed postcard for $20…would i do that? when i told them that sure, i’d do it, 70 other fans wrote in and wanted one for themselves…. and most of them KNEW that i have a section of my website that states clearly that if you simply send me your address, i’ll send you a signed postcard…FOR FREE!

but they wanted to help. and be involved. and involved them i did…before ending the webcast i read off a list of all their names. i knew they’d dig that…and i hadn’t promised anything. i just knew that being recognized means so much when you’re sitting randomly alone behind your computer, watching a webcast, feeling only slightly connected.

Amanda really gets it, she understands exactly what her fans want, and delivers. Read the full post here.