Amanda Palmer Fights Back criticism with new plan

Following the controversy surrounding Amanda Palmer's crowd-sourced musicians debacle, she has since made tweaks to the payment arrangements for all guest musicians.

“Me and my band have discussed it at length,” Palmer wrote in a blog post on her website on Tuesday 19 September. “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.”

Palmer received a wave of criticism by musicians via social media who claimed she was exploiting working musicians, when she made a call out for volunteer musicians to jump on tour as part of her 'Grand Theft Orchestra'. In exchange for their services, she offered the following: “We will feed you beer, hug/high-five you up and down (pick your poison), give you merch and thank you mightily for adding to the big noise we are planning to make.”

The Dresden Dolls front woman first made headlines earlier in the year, raising $1.2 million dollars via crowd-funding site, Kickstarter. The money raised went towards her latest record, Theatre Is Evil, and she thus told the New York Times that she couldn't afford to pay the guest musicians, estimating that paying a “string quartet and three or four sax and brass players” would cost around $35,000 for the tour.

Palmer also notes in her blog post that those guest musicians that have already played on tour will be receiving payments for their work, and that she will soon be putting “the call out for Australia and New Zealand.”