Amanda Palmer on Illegal Downloading and Protest Music
Toward a Free Digital Future
Nov 06, 2012 Amanda Palmer Photography by Tommy Kearns
Though musicians have been experimenting with crowd-funding of their projects in recent years, it’s probable that no musician has been as successful as Amanda Palmer at using her fans’ generosity to make record labels unnecessary. Case in point: her latest release, Theatre is Evil, was funded by the $1,192,793 that nearly 25,000 of her fans gave her via the website Kickstarter. Palmer is a forthright advocate of free digital content, and she also has spoken out on a variety of issues that are important to her, from gay rights to pescetarianism, and has written songs that have drawn the ire of record labels and uptight critics. Here, she talks about peer-to-peer trading, the history of protest music, and how the modern era presents fewer opportunities for shared cultural moments.
[Palmer was interviewed for, and is quoted in, the “Giving Back: Indie Rockers Making a Difference” article in our Protest Issue. This is the full transcript of that interview, mainly quotes that didn’t make it into the print issue.]
Matt Fink (Under the Radar): I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about the protest sign you made for us. What was the message on it?
Amanda Palmer: I think I said something like “Free Digital Content (and Tits) for Everybody.”
What inspired that?
It was inspired by the few people left out there who are clinging desperately to the past.
So when did free digital content become an issue that you were interested in?
Ever since I encountered people who really legitimately didn’t understand why the free trade of digital information is a good idea. I read something this morning that was really upsetting. It was an open letter from a university professor to a girl named Emily White, who is a 19- or 20-year-old intern at NPR. And she was interviewed saying that she has 11,000 songs on her iTunes, and she has only legitimately bought 15 CDs in her life. And this open letter to her was a really long explanation to her why this is wrong and why the free trade of digital music is destroying musicians’ lives. And it kept saying things like, “I don’t mean to shame or embarrass you…” and went on to say “I knew this great musician Vic Chesnutt, and his career started to go downhill when people started trading files in 2000. And then he killed himself.” And I was like, ‘you know… something is really wrong here.’
Given that you’ve had so much success with your Kickstarter campaign, it seems like you’ve found a legitimate way to bypass that whole music industry system. Did you have any particular expectations for how successful that campaign would be?
Yeah, sure. I’ve experimented a lot with self-releasing and crowd-funding over the years. I had high hopes but no expectations, like a live musician. [Laughs.] It made me and my team insanely happy, because we worked really hard to make it work.
So, as someone who has written a few politically-minded songs, I was wondering what you think makes a good protest song.
Well, I’ve written a few songs that could probably be classified somewhere within the broad genre of protest songs, the biggest one being “Ukulele Anthem,” which I’m rereleasing on this record. Actually, I think the best protest songs don’t bitch and complain. They actually highlight that there’s a positive alternative to a negative situation. My favorite protest songs and the best political/protest songs of all time are “Imagine” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which are far from saying “Man, the system is fucked up, and we’re really bitter about it,” and say more about the hope of an incoming generation.
Is it a different process to write a protest song than a personal one?
Well, no songwriter lives in a vacuum, and what worked in 1968 doesn’t necessarily work in 2012, because people have different associations and a different palette, and in order to be earnest, there are different tricks you have to go through. To be a good songwriter, you have to be paying attention to the voices inside your head just as much as you’re paying attention to the world around you and how they’re going to hear what you’re going to say. It starts literally with the language that you use and making sure that you can be understood, to the way you’re translating your message.
Do you think it’s more difficult today for a single song to captivate an audience or galvanize a movement? Or do you think we’re too fragmented today for something like that to happen?
I point you to “Friday” by Rebecca Black. Say no more. [Laughs.] I think we look back at the ’60s and really romanticize it, because we’re human beings and that’s what we tend to do. But I’ve been surprised to learn in my research of the things that cross my path about John Lennon that a lot of people were not into his fucking music. It’s not like “Imagine” came out and all of a sudden everyone embraced it and took to the streets with flowers in their hair. There were a lot of people that couldn’t stand him or Yoko Ono and couldn’t stand their music and bitched about it. We just don’t hear about those people today.
From what you can tell, do you think music is playing the same role in the Occupy movement as it played in the Civil Rights or Vietnam protest eras?
No. I don’t think so. When you talk to people who were there, music was a really electric, galvanizing force that really truly was bringing people together, and it was an alchemy of a zillion different things—the way that music was available, and the bands that were coming out, and the war protests that were happening at the same time. Like everything else that’s happening nowadays, shit’s decentralized. There are pros and cons in both directions. Back in the day, everyone would run out and get the new Doors or Beatles record when it hit the stands, and everyone would get together and throw it on the turntable and get stoned. We’re not consuming on a mass level anymore. But that also means that there’s a lot more room for a lot more art and a lot more artists. There’s not so much room for superstars and shared blockbuster moments. But that’s not just music; that’s happening with books and film and visual art. That’s just the way it is. I don’t think it’s good or bad; it has just changed.
As an artist, when you’re writing something that you know is going to be polarizing, do you think about that response, or do you just let the chips fall where they may?
More the latter. I’ve literally never sat down and written a song that I thought would polarize or offend anybody. Seriously. And in the two places where that has happened, I just shrug and say “That’s part of the job.”
Was that surprising when that occurred?
What song specifically? It depends on the song.
I was thinking about “Oasis.”
Yeah, that was surprising. I just thought that was a silly pop song. And since I’m not Katy Perry, it never occurs to me that anyone outside my cool community of smart, left-wing friends and acquaintances are ever going to care about my music. I think if I were a giant pop star, I would have different mechanisms going on in my brain.
Do you think you feel a responsibility as an artist to use the platform that you have to do good in the world or push for change?
I think for anyone to tell an artist that they have a responsibility to be political or create social change is completely missing the point. Artists are here to be artists, and some will be super political and will live and die for particular causes, and some will not. But we’re artists; we’re not politicians. You can actually waste a lot of your artistic energy if you try to be a politician and you lose sight of the reason that people connected with you in the first place.
In general, do you think people hear your music as you intend it or just find it however they find it?
You know, that is a question that fascinates me, and I’m not sure. Sometimes songs will really resonate with people when I didn’t expect them to, and sometimes I’ll write a song that I think really hits the perfect nerve, and it will go over everyone’s heads. That’s a fun part of the job, though. You just never know.
Comments
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November 7th 2012
7:38pm
Some people have all the luck and Amanda you better watch out because karma never sleeps.
First you offer musicians to join you without pay and you took a fairly good beating in the world of public opinion. Now you exercise your right of “free speech” to extoll the legitimacy of supporting offshore enterprises that profit from other peoples work without compensation. You fans of piracy all leave that detail out, especially after you attack the labels for being greedy profiteers. You might want to put your shirt back on and savor your 15 minutes of fame.
November 7th 2012
7:38pm
Amanda Palmer is an attention starved drama queen not artist. She is also a hypocrite. She’s refused to pay her backing string brass players despite earning 1.2 million dollars in a kickstarter for her album and tour. Aside from the pre orders her “successful” album has only sold 9 thousand copies according to soundscan. the sooner she goes away the sooner the world will be safe for real artists. Put your tits away girl.
November 7th 2012
8:10pm
the problem with digital music piracy is not kids in bedroom, but corporations and boardrooms. it’s a mass scale, enterprise level, organized crime - why shouldn’t artists be paid on that revenue? what argument is there that pirates should be making millions/billions annually from artists that the artists do not participate in? even in it’s most basic form, wouldn’t artists benefit from that revenue being collected at legitimate sites like yotube and spotify that pay artists on every play?
Amanda - I just don’t understand why you think it’s ok for tech companies and pirate sites like the pirate bay to profit illegally from artists work offering zero compensation, but yet you had demonized your record label who no doubt gave you a contact and paid you?
November 8th 2012
12:23am
... She really has no idea what the real world is, does she… ?
November 8th 2012
1:14am
She rants about giving away digital versiosn of her music yet she charges for the physical copies. A little hypercritical of her.
November 8th 2012
7:49pm
Tits, music, message all show there really isn’t anything there. Pity the kick starter fools who lost money.
November 8th 2012
10:51pm
Digitial can be free because it literally costs nothing to reproduce. This about that for a moment. It costs $0 to make infinite copies of her album.
Now consider the kickstarter where AP had her costs covered up front. Assume she made no profit on it at all, just for the sake of argument. Why then would it be ‘bad’ for her to give away free copies of her music that cost her $0 to make?
Her fan base grows, people listen to her music who might not otherwise because, what the hell, it’s free. Some of them go back and buy the physical copy or the extended copy because they really like what she’s created. Others don’t. But it’s all positive to her because everything after this is just gravy.
Now, on to specifics:
FarePlay : WTF? How is AP supporting piracy when she’s GIVING AWAY HER ALBUM. Guess what, it’s not piracy when you can go to her website and download it for FREE. She’s advocating the free distribution of a product, which after production costs, has ZERO cost to duplicate. NOT piracy through websites like pirate bay.
amy portland : Have you SEEN her live? She’s an artist, and a damn fine one. Just because you don’t like Picasso’s art doesn’t make him less of an artist. And applying ‘number of copies sold’ as a measure of success to something that is free is stupid in the first place. It’s like saying sunlight is worthless because no one pays for it.
Wilton Said… : ... seriously? it’s NOT free to replicate something in the physical world. it IS free in the digital world. Why would it be hypocritical to charge to cover manufacturing costs, postage, time to replicate etc?
November 16th 2012
5:16am
thanks for sharing post…..
January 14th 2013
8:22am
Yes you can. As long as you have email set up on the phone. And it downloads dltrceiy. But I prefer to use the web base mail application to download the files. So if you use Yahoo, Google, or Hotmail, use the applications that are from the mobile Internet, not the mail app integrated into the phone. But truth be told, I’m not sure if Google or Hotmail does it because I use Yahoo. But I’m almost certain they work.Sorry I get off the topic down here/ / /And as much as I love the iPhone. It doesn’t download ANYTHING dltrceiy from Safari (unless you jailbreak it, which I did XD), except for images. Everything is through App Store, Mobile iTunes, or iTunes on a computer, and it isn’t even free! Except for Apps and Podcasts. I’m not hating on the iPhone, I’m just pointing out the flaws.Hope this helps
January 14th 2013
8:23am
I just had them for the first time over the weekend, tatsed like a cross between asparagus and green beans. I didn’t know they were that expensive, sheesh!
January 14th 2013
8:23am
I just had them for the first time over the weekend, tsetad like a cross between asparagus and green beans. I had no idea they were that expensive, sheesh!
February 12th 2019
10:59pm
Nice tits, dude!
February 12th 2019
11:02pm
Hip for the sake of being hip…