Amanda Palmer Starts Paying Musicians

Photo by Shervin Lainez

Following a week of controversy, Amanda Palmer announced on her blog this afternoon that she has begun paying the string and horn players who she previously asked to volunteer to perform on her current tour.

She writes:

for better or for worse, this whole kerfuffle has meant i've spent the past week thinking hard about this, listening to what everyone was saying and discussing. 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.

She added, "We're also retroactively sending a payment to the folks who've already played with us. SURPRISE!"

Palmer doesn't specify how much each musician is getting paid.

Read her lengthy explanation/thank you to fans/volunteers here.

Palmer also posted video of herself performing with volunteer musicians in New Orleans earlier this week: