Amanda (Fucking) Palmer of the Dresden Dolls used to be a street performer. She would ask passersby for money in exchange for a flower, and some intense eye contact. In her music career, she and her band have surfed many couches and taken food donations from fans in countless cities.
With all of her practice in simply asking people for things when she needed them, she decided to give her music away for free online. She encouraged downloading, but asked others to help her in a crowd-funding project. She discovered incredible results when she asked people to pay her, rather than making them pay through a record label.
Her goal was to raise $100,000.
Her fans donated $1.2 million - "The biggest crowd-funding project to date."
She testifies that her fans want to help her when she connects to them by asking. "Asking makes you vulnerable," she says.
"Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance. But the internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it – it's taking us back. It's about a few people loving you up close, and about those people being enough."
How do we make let people pay for music?
Amanda Palmer is a copyright libertarian: advocating voluntary funding and free will.
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