Amanda Palmer, sometimes of the Dresden Dolls and sometimes her own sweet (?) independent self, has long been an enthusiastic proponent and exemplar of how to use the internet to connect with her audience. She’s got over 17,000 followers on Twitter, and writes a blog in which she’s profoundly personal (in keeping with her musical identity), and now she’s on a campaign to get her record label to drop her because they don’t understand the connection the internet has enabled her to create with her fans.

In an open letter to her label, she explains why:

i had to EXPLAIN to the so-called “head of digital media” of roadrunner australia WHAT TWITTER WAS. and his brush-off that “it hasn’t caught on here yet” was ABSURD because the next day i twittered that i was doing an impromptu gathering in a public park and 12 hours later, 150 underage fans – who couldn’t attend the show – showed up to get their records signed.

no manager knew! i didn’t even warn or tell her! no agents! no security! no venue! we were in a fucking public park! life is becoming awesome.

also interesting: i brought a troupe of back-up actors/dancers on the tour (we were only playing 300-1000 seaters) and had no money to pay them, so we passed the hat into the crowd every night. each performer walked from each show with about $200 in cash. the fans TOOK CARE OF THEM. they brought us dinner every night, gave us places to sleep. (i couldn’t afford to put up that many people in hotels).

all sans label, all using email and twitter. the fans followed the adventure. they LOVED HELPING.

There are two points here.

First, she no longer needs the label to reach her fans. In fact, she can reach her fans more effectively than they can.

Second, she’s doing what I talked about in my talk at MIDEM — creating a social-exchange relationship with her fans in which they choose to give her (and her performers) not just their attention, but also their money, because they want to. They know intuitively that it is the right thing to do.

It’s not about them feeling guilty if they don’t. It’s about them understanding that she has given of herself to them, and that if they want to keep that relationship in balance, they should give back to her. That’s how loving relationships work. Attention and money are two ways they can repay her for the music, the attention, and the loving that she gives them.

This is what a morality-based relationship between artist and fan looks like.

Hypebot has just wrapped up running a three-part interview with me about music and online fandom. Read it here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Note to those of you who do interviews — this is what being prepared and asking thoughtful questions looks like.

The New York Times has an article about shifting goals for musicians playing SXSW which, for reasons that aren’t quite clear, uses most of its words addressing the role of the internet.  They begin by affirming the importance of blogs, but shift quickly to the “the internet is fickle” meme that was fairly common  a year or two ago. They focus in particular on the band Crocodiles:

Many bands dream of this kind of reception. But over the four or five years that blogs have been the dominant tastemakers of independent music, artists have gradually become more wary of the hype-and-slam cycle of the Web. Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell of Crocodiles have been so distrustful of the Internet’s fickle power that at first they tried to keep as low an online presence as possible, going so far as to ask fans to remove YouTube videos of their shows.

“The Internet is taking all the romance out of music and art and replacing it with this revolving door that just revolves so fast,” Mr. Welchez, 27, the duo’s singer, said before a 20-minute showcase on Wednesday afternoon. Eventually, though, the Internet found them, and their MySpace plays quickly shot into the tens of thousands.

Artists, labels, journalists and everyone else at South by Southwest now depend on the Internet for almost every aspect of their jobs, from discovery to communication, distribution to promotion. But on the patios and hotel rooftops of Austin the conversation often turns to debates about what the Internet’s role should be.

<rant>

Gimme a great big break, people.

What planet did these people live on before? It sure bears no resemblance to the one I lived on as a music fan in the days before the internet.

The internet is fickle?

Does anyone remember a little British rag called New Music Express? Was it not (is it not still) NOTORIOUS for how quickly it turned on those it adored just weeks before? They changed their mind at the drop of the coin WITHOUT ELECTRONIC MEDIATION! Impossible, but TRUE!

There were no one-hit wonders before the internet? That’s why you’ve heard of every band who had a single that charted in the 80s?

Indie bands who had a song that did well and got lots of buzz used to easily maintain that buzz before there was an internet? Tell that to all my friends who almost made it.

The internet is taking all the romance out of bands?

Well, maybe if you had none to begin with, or if you thought that getting mentioned on a blog was romantic and then not getting mentioned on a blog was a romance killer. I have fallen in love with so many bands I would never have found without the internet. If the bands don’t find that romantic, maybe it’s their fault for having weird illusions about what’s supposed to happen.

And what’s with people online still liking the Beatles and the Kinks? What’s with all those old videos that keep surfacing on YouTube? Don’t people know the internet is a revolving door and you’re not allowed to like anything old anymore? And that old is like, uh, yesterday? Nine Inch Nails have been together FOREVER. How can people STILL be talking about Trent Reznor on the internet?

Guess what? If you make great music year in and year out, “the internet” will stand by your side. And if you are a mediocre band who’s got one good song, be grateful the blogs gave it any attention. It’s not the internet’s fault if you can’t sustain your momentum.

You don’t want to find fans online? Fine, it’s your choice. But never forget that “the internet” is nothing but the people who communicate through it. And yeah, we may have a lot more choices now, but that ought to just make you make your music that much better. Great bands hold attention in ways the internet cannot erase. The fact is that most indie bands, like most bands, aren’t really all that special, and if it weren’t for the internet, they would never have gotten any buzz to lose.

</rant>

I’ve got a comments section below. Name me the brilliant bands who got great blog buzz for a moment and then lost it even though they kept releasing fantastic new music. Bonus points if you can show the internet’s causal role in the decline of their audience.

Go:

Over the years, I’ve found myself mulling the differences between fandoms organized around narrative and those organized around music. It’s now a topic on which I have to pull together my thoughts in 1000 words or less for Henry Jenkins et al’s book on spreadable media. This post is really just me thinking outloud in a rough stab at a start. I would LOVE your feedback on the distinctions I’m drawing and those I’ve missed.

Narratives have characters, plots, and holes to be filled by fan creativity. Music doesn’t. Sure, you can get into discussions of lyrics, and there are many fan lyric interpretation sites out there, and heaven knows you can obsess on the musicians, but for all the time I’ve spent in music fandom, lyric interpretation has never seemed all that important to the social life around music. Music fans interpret what’s best and what’s worst in an artists’ catalogue, and they review shows, but it’s just a whole lot harder to talk about the significance of that chord change or the way that bridge takes the song into the third verse than it is to talk about what that shot of the window at the end of the scene was meant to imply or what a character meant when she said what she said.

Narrative also leaves space for much more fan creativity. Music fans may make their own videos to accompany songs, or form cover bands, or write fan fiction about musicians, but with the important exception of remixes, which remain a fairly marginal fan practice, I’ve never seen fans write songs in the same way that fans of a TV show will write stories using the characters. Music fans don’t seek to complete the music through interpretation and creativity. The music arrives complete. Fans can’t fix it or rebuild it in the same way they can with stories.

Music fans are far more likely to focus on news and information. Narrative fans certainly do this, building timelines and keeping abreast of production, casting, and so on, but music fans seem to do this as their primary activity. It’s all about when the album will be released, what the setlist will be, when the tour will happen, and what songs were played what night in what order. This is why music fan communities on the internet tend to get very quiet when the most recent album has been out for a while and the band isn’t touring. What’s to discuss?

Music fans also share the very objects of their fandom by making mix tapes, playlists, writing mp3 blogs, and sending one another recordings and bootlegs. On occassion, narrative fans will share a recording of a missed show with another fan, but, like lyrical interpretation in music fandom, this seems like a marginal practice in narrative fandom.

But I’m thinking that perhaps the most important distinction between the two fandoms is the way that music fans take the resources of their fandom outside of that fandom as part of their self-presentation in other contexts. Think t-shirts with band names (Rob Walker’s excellent book Buying In reports that Ramones t-shirts have outsold Ramones albums 10 to 1). Think playlists embedded on social network profiles. Think bumper stickers (I think “Republicans for Voldemort” is the only narrative fandom bumper sticker I’ve ever seen, though I’ve seen hundreds of stickers naming bands). When I used to work in a record store and grandmothers would come in at Christmas time to buy a gift for the grandkid and ask “what are all the kids listening to these days?” we’d respond “what kind of haircut does your grandchild have?” How does a Lost fan dress? Can you spot a Star Wars fan walking down the street? Narrative fandom is invisible unless it’s being discussed. Music fandom is much more likely to be made visible as an intrinsic part of self-definition in a wide variety of situations.

The upshot is that we should be wary of taking the practices of narrative fandom on which most fandom theory has been built as exemplary of all fandom. Different kinds of materials call for different kinds of practices, and if we’re to build theories that encompass all of fandom, we need to account for these distinctions as well as the similarities.