Her Attitude Changed.

The title is a skogkatt reference, but it comes to me anytime my attitude changes on something.  In this case, my attitude about Amanda Palmer, and, in particular, the dust up over her kickstarter and the ensuing tour.

My general thoughts about her remain more or less the same: I like most of her music, I don't especially like her persona, but I sort of get that she's got reasons for it, it works for her, and it doesn't detract from my enjoyment of the music.  Some of the things she's said I really dislike and one of them was what I knew of the whole kickstarter thing. 

(Quick roundup - raised Palmer 1 million dollars to produce an album, went on tour and put a call out for volunteer backing musicians, offering beer and hugs and hanging out backstage.  People got upset.  Palmer cut checks for her backing musicians.)

I was one of the upset people, and I still think that it would have been nice if Palmer had paid local musicians pro rates up front to do concerts with her, and I fully admit that her own marketing narrative on how she came up plays into that.  But I don't think less of her, anymore for doing what she did.

Been listening to a lot of game designer podcasts, and they are all about kickstarter.  I have backed a few games, most recently Tremulus, which was quite good, and if RPGs have a future, that future is probably going to be crowdfunded.  There are a lot of things kickstarter cannot do, but it's making creators put out games like whoa, ones that would not have come out any other way.  So gamers and designers have been holding forth a lot of opinions on the service (and the others like it - kickstarter just gets to be the synecdoche).

One of the fallouts of kickstarter seems to be that the transparency of the process seems to make a lot of people who back it think that they have bought some level of control over how the money is spent, and a lot of kickstarter-local drama comes from that disconnect.  Because it isn't so.  And while it's reasonable to expect certain parts of the process of whatever you backed will go down a certain way, it's not necessarily what you paid for.  With Tremulus, I paid for a .pdf copy of the game as the creators wrote it, not for a certain interpretation of Lovecraft's fiction as it applies to games or a certain interpretation of the ruleset they used. 

I would be upset if the artists didn't get pro rates for their illustrations, but I didn't pay for the artist.  I paid for the art. 

The people who backed Palmer's album paid for an album.  I don't know if the tour was included in the kickstarter (I assumed it was, and, if so, then there's more to be upset about); if it was, then the backers paid for an album and a tour that might not have even come within 8 hours of a given backer's house.  While it's hard for me to see it this way, there is an extent to which it's just as reasonable to expect Palmer to hire musicians instead of calling for volunteers as it is to expect her to put a tour stop in New Haven, if I backed her, or been able to stipulate that she must or must not perform a Dresden Dolls song per set.  It's not ethically equivalent to my mind, but it is equally up to me as backer.

I still think that artists must be paid for their art.  Palmer still had a chance to do something great and failed to do so, opting to do something I think was right under pressure to do so, but I don't think that the people who backed her kickstarter have any more say over what she actually does or does not do than I would if I bought that album tomorrow. 

I do hear it's pretty good.