In a post on her blog addressed to her “dear comrades,” Amanda Palmer says she’s going to start paying all her “crowd-sourced musicians.” Using “tweaked and reconfigured financials, pulling money from this and that other budget,” Palmer and her management team have figured out a way to pay the brass and string players she was compensating with beer and hugs previously, which led to this whole “kerfuffle” (as she puts it). Palmer adds that she started paying musicians three shows ago, and that she’s even retroactively paying the musicians who played earlier in the ongoing tour.
Of course, Palmer still doesn’t seem to grasp why anyone ever got so angry about the whole thing, saying she never expected to “hit that nerve” with her actions, but lamenting that “this is the cost of being transparent.” The singer notes that not a single musician has pulled out of the shows since the controversy hit the media, and that she considers “our payment to them a fucking thank you for standing their ground and standing in solidarity with us and our philosophy.” All the same, Palmer views the debates of the last week as a blessing, noting that even though Steve Albini called her "an idiot," through “discourse about the nature and value of art, energy, time, and money… this is how we grow.”
