It’s the 180 we never saw coming – Amanda Palmer will now pay her live backing band of volunteer musos.
Triple j reports that despite an apology from Steve Albini for calling her ‘an idiot’ over her call-out for musicians to be part of her live band (and be paid in beer and hugs) Palmer has re-done her tour budget and is now going to pay all the volunteers that join her on tour.
Writing on her blog, Palmer said that she came to the decision after talking “the whole kerfuffle” over with her band during the week.
i hear you. i see your points. me and my band have discussed it at length. and we have decided we should pay all of our guest musicians. we have the power to do it, and we’re going to do it. (in fact, we started doing it three shows ago.)
my management team tweaked and reconfigured financials, pulling money from this and that other budget (mostly video) and moving it to the tour budget. all of the money we took out of those budgets is going to the crowd-sourced musicians fund. we are going to pay the volunteer musicians every night. even though they volunteered their time for beer, hugs, merch, free tickets, and love: we’ll now also hand them cash.
Albini believes Palmer was “just plain rude to ask for further indulgences from your audience” after fans chipped in $1.2m on her Kickstarter campaign to fund her new album a few months back.
