Steve Albini Talks Straight About Amanda Palmer’s Money “Woes”

Amanda Palmer raised A LOT of money on Kickstarter. For most people, the amount of her fan’s cash that she got would be far too much, but she was well deserving. So we thought

Recently, miss Palmer made an offer to prospective musicians, asking them to essentially play for baubles. This upset some folks (mostly musicians). These people were angered by the idea of someone who had just raised $1.2 million being cheap enough to pay respectable musicians with t-shirts.

One of the maddened many, legendary producer Steve Albini had his say on the Electrical Audio forums:

I have no fundamental problem with either asking your fans to pay you to make your record or go on tour or play for free in your band or gather at a mud pit downstate and sell meth and blowjobs to each other. I wouldn’t stoop to doing any of them myself, but horses for courses. The reason I don’t appeal to other people in this manner is that all those things can easily pay for themselves, and I value self-sufficiency and independence, even (or especially) from an audience.

If your position is that you aren’t able to figure out how to do that, that you are forced by your ignorance into pleading for donations and charity work, you are then publicly admitting you are an idiot, and demonstrably not as good at your profession as Jandek, Moondog, GG Allin, every band ever to go on tour without a slush fund or the kids who play on buckets downtown.

Pretty much everybody on earth has a threshold for how much to indulge an idiot who doesn’t know how to conduct herself, and I think Ms Palmer has found her audience’s threshold.

Steve has always been one to shoot it straight and plain. Usually, he’s right… What’s your take?

Jacob Tender
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