The Art of Asking: How can musicians make use of crowdfunding effectively?

'Before I saw your talk, I always thought of street performers as beggars. But now I see them as artists, so I always give them money.' 
Reading things like this broke and burst my heart at the same time, and pierced the core of the very issue I was trying to grapple with in the talk itself. If the mentality was so easily shifted, how could this be taken from the street to the Internet, where so many artists I knew were struggling to accept the legitimacy of their own calls for help?

This is what prompted Amanda Palmer to release her music album through crowd funding in Kick Starter. In her book, The Art of Asking Amanda shares the essence of crowdfunding and several misconceptions and difficulties associated with it.

According to Amanda, crowdfunding can make artists more grateful for feeling that they have a voice that is heard by the patrons. At the same time, the patrons also, feel that they are included in the process.
At its core, crowdfunding is about finding our people, our listeners, our readers, and making art for them. It's not about making art for the masses or the critics but, for our ever-widening circle of friends.
 

The marketplace is messy; it’s loud and filled with disease and pickpockets and naysayers and critics. For almost any artist, carrying your work through the stalls of exchange can be painful. But there is another option, which is to yell from your window. You can call down to your potential friends outside, your comrades in art and metaphor and dot-connecting, and invite them to a private party in your garret. This is the essence of crowdfunding.

One of the biggest misconceptions associated with crowdfunding is mistaking asking for begging. Amanda differentiates the both as follows:
 

Asking is an act of intimacy and trust. Begging is a function of fear, desperation, or weakness. Those who must beg demand our help; those who ask have faith in our capacity for love and in our desire to share with one another. On the street or on the Internet, this is what makes authentically engaging an audience, from one human being to another, such an integral part of asking. Honest communication engenders mutual respect, and that mutual respect makes askers out of beggars."
If asking is a collaboration, begging is a less-connected demand: Begging can’t provide value to the giver; by definition, it offers no exchange. Asking is like courtship; begging, you are already naked and panting.

Another popular misconception is mistaking crowdfunding for charity. Crowdfunding is a business model based on the currency of asking and trusting. Patrons do not donate. Instead, they purchase, in advance, the actual things that artists had to create and deliver.

For crowdfunding to work effectively, artists must put in a lot of work in terms of making and sharing their art for years to lay down a fertile ground for them to step up at a later point and ask for help. Amanda uses the analogy of Chinese farmers to explain this point.

In China, bamboo farmers have planted baby bamboo shoots deep into the ground. And then, for three years, nothing happens. But the farmers will work, diligently watering the shoot, spreading hay and manure, waiting patiently, even though nothing is sprouting up. They simply have faith. And then, one day, the bamboo will shoot up and grow up to thirty feet in a month. It just blasts into the sky. Any small, sustainable artist-fan community works like this.

This is a critical step in an artist's career because most of the audience's misunderstanding stem from missing this point. If people haven't been seeing you farm and just see the fruits of your labor, they may think how lucky you are and it happened by magic.
 

But I’ve never heard of her…how can people want to give her that much money? What a lucky bitch. This is why some lesser-known people have had such real success with crowdfunding—they’ve fertilized over time, and diligently—and some better-known people who appear to have massive reach haven’t done well at all. Fame doesn’t buy trust. Only connection does that.

Even though Amanda's kick starter campaign became hugely successful, the journey wasn't without any hiccups and humiliations. She had to deal with critics calling her shameless for asking money and self-promoting. She thinks such reaction from critics will only add to the real fear of many artists - to share their work with the world.
 

People were calling me “shameless,” but I decided to take that as an unintended compliment. Wasn’t shame…bad? Like fear? I mean, nobody uses “fearless” as an insult. Art and commerce have never, ever been easy bedfellows. The problems inherent in mashing together artistic expression and money don’t go away, they just change form. With every connection you make online, there’s more potential for criticism. For every new bridge you build with your community, there’s a new set of trolls who squat underneath it. The risk is the core cost of human connection.

All that said, if our art touches a single heart, strikes a single nerve, we can see people quietly heading our way and knocking on our door. Amanda explains that being shame-ridden and apologetic will only make us counterproductive. Shame can pollute an environment of asking and giving that thrives on trust and openness. Working artists and their supporters are two essential parts in a complex ecosystem.

I was hoping I could give them some sort of cosmic, universal permission to stop over-apologizing, stop fretting, stop justifying, and for god’s sake…just ASK.

Crowdfunding is a democratic tool and anyone from mega pop stars to an unknown garage band with no fanbase has the right to use it.
 

It’s a 180-degree turn from the eighties and nineties, when most exchanges with big musicians were entirely indirect, and involved—at least in my case—getting on your dirt bike, cycling to the mall, walking into the record store, and exchanging your $9.99 for a physical album, which was rung up for you by an indifferent clerk who had absolutely nothing to do with the artist who created the music.

Lastly, my most favorite part of Amanda's description of crowdfunding is the way she connected it to the grand scheme of things.
 

The very existence of crowdfunding has presented us all with a deeper set of underlying questions: How do we ask each other for help? When can we ask? Who’s allowed to ask?

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Does art need a context?

Joshua Bell, a world-class violinist, teamed up with the Washington Post for a social experiment in which he played his $3.5 million Stradivarius one morning in the L’Enfant Plaza subway station in Washington, DC. During his performance, which ran about forty-five minutes, seven people stopped to listen for a minute or more, twenty-seven contributed money, and he made a total of $32 (not counting the $20 thrown in his hat by the one woman who recognized him). More than a thousand people had walked by him without stopping. In the aftermath, it was easy for many people to shake their heads at the perceived shame of it all: how could music so valuable—some of these same individuals might be paying as much as $150 a ticket to watch him play the same program at the local symphony hall the following night—become so worthless on the street?

Amanda Palmer illustrates that sometimes, art needs context in her book, The Art of Asking. In the above example, the passersby were going to work during the busy hours of the day to pay even attention to the excellent music that was played on the street way. The author mentions that she never takes for granted when people stop by to see her perform as a living statue. She just feels grateful.

That said, there are instances when art doesn’t need a context. The author recollects her experience as The Bride as follows:

It was like breaking down a compound into its essential elements, then down to an atom, then down to an irreducible proton. Such profound encounters—like the deeply moving exchanges I’d have with broken people who seemed to have found some sort of salvation in the accidental, beautiful moment of connection with a stranger painted white on a street corner—cannot happen on a safe stage with a curtain. Magical things can happen there, but not this. The moment of being able to say, unaccompanied by narrative: Thank you…I see you. In those moments, I felt like a genie of compassion, able to pay attention to the hard-to-reach, hidden cracks of someone else’s life—as if I were a specially shaped human-emotion tool that could reach way under the bed of somebody’s dark heart and scrape out the caked-on blackness. Just by seeing someone—really seeing them, and being seen in return—you enrealen each other. What is possible on the sidewalk is unique. No song needed, no words, no lighting, no story, no ticket, no critic, no context. It cannot get any simpler than a painted person in a box, a living human question mark, asking: Love? And a passing stranger, rattled out of the rhythm of mundane existence, answering: Yes. Love.

Every chapter in the book ends with the lyrics of Amanda's songs as though the narrative in each chapter is the story behind the songs. What a beautiful way to put art into context.  

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Why do artists fear the critics?

One common fear of any artist is the inhibition in sharing his work/art due to fear of rejection. So, why are artists afraid of rejection? So what, if others reject you? Why should that matter? Well, it narrows down to some of the inherent needs of human beings - to be seen, to be believed, to feel REAL.

Amanda Palmer in her book The Art of Asking shares some of her fears as an artist and why she thinks that the fear of critics is a common element in the artists community.

Many artists (filmmakers, writers, musicians and so on) who had decided to forgo a life of predictable income and simple tax returns for a life of turning dot-connecting brains inside out and showing the results to the world, ultimately wants one thing from the world - BELIEVE ME!

And, if we want to know what we believe in, we must ask the people we taught. All performers, in fact, all humans, want to be seen, even the shy ones who don't want to be looked at.

There’s a difference between wanting to be looked at and wanting to be seen. When you are looked at, your eyes can stay blissfully closed. You suck energy, you steal the spotlight. When you are seen, your eyes must be open as you are seeing and recognizing your witness. You accept energy and you generate energy. You create light. One is exhibitionism, the other is the connection. Not everybody wants to be looked at. Everybody wants to be seen.

Sometimes, it may not be possible to show or hang our art on a wall still, our work can be art if we have put our heart and soul into making it. That's the only way we can be real.

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. Once you are Real, you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.

Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.

Believe me. I’m real. Here’s the thing: all of us come from some place of wanting to be seen, understood, accepted, connected. Every single one of us wants to be believed. Artists are often just…louder about it.

Amanda explains this inherent need in human beings by sharing an instance from her own life.

And that’s why stripping, even though it often paid way better, when I tried my hand at it a few years later, just didn’t do it for me. I was being looked at. But I never felt seen. The strip joint was like Teflon to the real emotional connection. There was physical intimacy galore: I witnessed hand jobs being given under tables,2 and lots of legs and tits and more being covertly rubbed at the bar. I danced for endless hours, stark naked on a stage, and talked for even more hours with the loneliest men in the world while pretending to drink champagne. We strippers were experts in dumping our drinks back into ice buckets when the customers weren’t looking—it was a job skill you actually had to acquire working at The Glass Slipper. If I’d actually drank all the absurdly overpriced champagne (from which I earned a 15 percent cut) that was purchased for me on a good night by lonely men who wanted to chat, I would have consumed, in the course of my six-hour shift, enough to have brought me to a blood-alcohol level of approximately five-point-dead. Sometimes I would get home and have a nice little breakdown, having no idea what to do with all the loneliness I’d collected. I tried to capture it in a lyric, years later, in a song called “Berlin” (my chosen stripper name): It’s hard to work on an assembly line of broken hearts Not supposed to fix them, only strip and sell the parts People would look straight into your crotch. But nobody would look you in the eye. And that drove me crazy.

Amanda's songs were dark and were mostly written based on her struggles to understand herself. Sharing these songs with the world was a scary deal because any rejection from the world would mean a direct rejection of her. She felt so pretentious and self-indulgent when she wrote songs from her own life.

However, we must overcome this fear and share our art with the world because it matters and it could be our gateway to redemption. Even if we can't/don't want to be in the spotlight, we can still play a supporting role. It helps us thrive and makes us feel useful to the world.

There is a certain sense of indiscriminate gratitude that is essential to hone if you’re going to survive in the arts. You can’t really afford to be choosy about your audience, nor about how they wish to repay you for your art. In cash? In help? In kindness?

The ideal sweet spot is the one in which the artist can freely share their talents and directly feel the reverberations of their artistic gifts to their community, and make a living doing that. In other words, it works best when everybody feels seen. As artists, and as humans: if your fear is scarcity, the solution isn’t necessarily abundance. To quote Brené Brown again: Abundance and scarcity are two sides of the same coin. The opposite of “never enough” isn’t abundance or “more than you could ever imagine.” Which is to say, the opposite of “never enough” is simply: Enough.

[UPDATE]

Seth Godin in one of his blog posts talks about errors that lead to fear when speaking or performing in public. 

“You are not being judged, the value of what you are bringing to the audience is being judged. The topic of the talk isn’t you, the topic of the talk is the audience, and specifically, how they can use your experience and knowledge to achieve their objectives.

When a professional singer sings a song of heartbreak, his heart is not breaking in that moment. His performance is for you, not for him. (The infinite self-reference loop here is that the professional singer finds what he needs when you find what you need.)

The members of the audience are interested in themselves. The audience wants to know what they can use, what they can learn, or at the very least, how they can be entertained.

If you dive into your (irrelevant to the listener) personal hurdles, if you try to justify what you’ve done, if you find yourself aswirl in a whirlpool of the resistance, all you’re providing is a little schadenfreude as a form of entertainment.

On the other hand, if you realize that you have a chance to be generous in this moment, to teach and to lead, you can leave the self-doubt behind and speak a truth that the audience needs to hear. When you bring that to people who need it, your fear pales in comparison.

Media you choose to do is always about the audience. That’s why you’re doing it. The faster we get over ourselves, the sooner we can do a good job for those tuning in.”

Processing feedback is another important untaught skill that comes handy when dealing with critics. It's important to know what feedback to ignore and which ones to work on. Here's how we can process feedback. 

“How do we differentiate between constructive, useful insight and the other kind? How do we decide which feedback is actually a clue about how our core audience feels, and which is a distraction, a shortcut on the road to mediocre banality?

If you listen to none of the feedback, you will learn nothing. If you listen to all of it, nothing will happen.

The place to start is with two categories. The category of, “I actively seek this sort of feedback out and listen to it and act on it.” And the category of, “I’m not interested in hearing that.” There is no room for a third category.”

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What can stage performers learn from street performers?

 I started paying more attention to the quality of street performances during my stay in the UK. I typically notice musicians and painters creating art on streets but, there is another category of artists who perform on streets that I haven't noticed much. They are the living statues. When I went to Vegas a few weeks back, after reading the Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer, I began to notice living statues on streets. The book definitely made an impact on me. 

The author, in her book, says how delicate the relationship between a street performer and a street audience is unlike the one that exists between a stage performer and the ticket-buying audience. The bond between street performers and their audience involves a higher risk and trust. She insists musicians, especially those in rock and roll genres, perform on streets, instead of attending conservatory, as the experience can wear their egos down. Street musicians would be playing 'actively' but, there will be millions of people on the streets ignoring their show and briskly walking by. This serves as an unwitting universal example of how cold and cruel the world can be. 

Amanda shares some real, honest, and heartwarming account of her experience as a living statue and as a street performer. 

She begins by saying how performing as The Bride (the character she played as a living statue) taught her the pure, physical manifestation of asking in exchange for a moment of human connection. For parents with children, the interaction with a living statue is a way to expose kids to a fully supervised interaction-with-a-stranger. She uses beautiful language to describe The Bride as follows:

I’d stand there like a dry plant, passively waiting to be watered. Any source of nourishment would do. It was so simple, really, like the entirety of the human condition distilled down to a single idea: Feeling alone. And then, not. Every pair of gazing eyes that locked with mine, a reminder: Love still exists.

My eyes would say: Thank you. I see you. And their eyes would say: Nobody ever sees me. Thank you.

Amanda mentions that the best part of being The Bride was that it gave her faith in humanity and human connection. The following passage supports this notion.

One of the things I loved best about The Bride was how, though she was silent, she could make it possible for people to talk to one another. I was a ready-made conversation piece. And nothing delighted me more than to see people with nothing in common chatting about The Bride the way they’d chat about an ambulance pulling up, or a flash thunderstorm. Excuse me, is that a person? Dude, is that a real person? Wow, is that a real statue? Oh, look! What does he do when you give him money? There are ingredients that create safe space for communion. It would make me absolutely beam with joy when I saw strangers giving each other money, saying: Wait, hey! Take this dollar, put it in his hat! You gotta see this! That’s a real person!

Here is another reason she loved her job. 

The problem was that I craved intimacy to the same burning degree that I detested commitment. Being a statue was such a perfect job.

Here is what the author learned from The Bride.

Seeing each other is hard. But I think when we truly see each other, we want to help each other. I think human beings are fundamentally generous, but our instinct to be generous gets broken down.

In summary, stage performers can learn a lot from street performers in terms of connecting with an audience in the most humane way while staying grounded.  

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Music blogging: Core elements, marketing, & success metrics

It has been almost two years since I have started blogging religiously. A rigorous blogging regime has reengineered my inner life. I can see the person I have transformed to in these last two years with the help of a disciplined and consistent writing habit. This blog post is an attempt to urge you to start your own creative writing space on the web. Writing is a cost-effective keystone habit and its results can spill over to the rest of your life. 

Bryan Allain in his book, 31 days to finding your blogging mojo lays down some useful ideas and tips to help people who wanted to start their own blogs. The book is an enjoyable read and the author uses some real-world humor at the end of every chapter to keep the audience entertained. Here is an example:
 

Why do grocery store cashiers ask me if I want my gallon of milk in a bag? I couldn't care less. Stick it in the cart, stick it in the bag, stick it in a huge treasure chest with fake gold coins and a hermit crab. Seriously, with all the decisions that must be made in a day, do I really need to make this one? Same goes for my receipt. Just stick it in the bag. If I want it in my pocket, I am perfectly capable of locating and retrieving it from the bag. None of us have time for these irrelevant questions. I'm going to start asking the cashiers if they'd like me to hand them my credit card with my left hand or my right hand. Join with me in this revolution and maybe then they'll get the point.

Coming back to the point, in this post, I will be sharing a few useful ideas from the book that I feel are relevant to artists, and musicians. 

The three core elements of any blog are:

1. Audience - Who are you writing this blog for? 
Write for an audience of one, who could be a real person you know or a fictional person you create. This can help push away the not-so-ideal-audience of your blog over time, leaving you with a quality readership. 

When you start writing for your ideal reader, it does amazing things for your voice.

2. Perspective - What perspective are you writing from? 
This is an important element when it comes to defining your personal brand. Too many blogs on the internet paralyzes people and causes decision fatigue when it comes to reading stuff that adds value to their life. Therefore, it is important to define the scope of your blog to attract the right people who share similar values as yours.

3. Content - What are you writing about? 
Here are some tips to choose different types of content for your blog.
a. Life experiences - For example, did you learn something about music/art from your recent trip to the Himalayas? 
b. Keep the blog posts as short as you can - No reader has ever complained that the blog posts are short. 
c. Aggregation posts - Combining links of similar content that may or may not be yours. 
d. Anchor content/posts - Find/write at least three blog posts that closely represents the core of your blog identity. 
e. Cheater posts - Recycling or modifying existing writings on your blog. Helps save time and serve as good reminders when you are stumped for creativity or energy.

Combining all the above elements, I can say that at Sou's Voice, I write about my own becoming (content) as an Indian classical singer and a writer (perspective) for other artists and musicians (audience).

When it comes to marketing your blog, it's important to ask the following questions: 

1. How can I pitch my blog to this person so that it makes him/her compelled to check my blog later today? - Answering this question will take time and a lot of reflection. A good starting point would be defining the core elements. 
2. Am I confident about the look, feel, and content of my blog so that I can converse about it at ease with another person? If the answer is no, then go back to the core elements and fix it.

When it comes to defining success for your blog, the author provides a brilliant insight.

Here's how I define success as a blogger: 1. When you're writing things that you love to write about. 2. When your number of readers slowly builds each month because you're finding new readers and you're keeping your old ones. 3. When you're building relationships and community with readers because they enjoy what you do on your blog.
Success isn't writing a popular blog about a topic you have absolutely no passion for. Success isn't becoming a well-known blogger for the way you stir up the pot with opinions you're not even sure if you believe. And success definitely isn't losing who you are in your blog because you're chasing traffic numbers.

All that said, remember a few things: 

There's nothing wrong with writing a journal-type blog that covers everything under the sun. But if you DO want to grow your platform, you might need to get more focused."
Even though many of us are not great writers and many of us cannot write a blog that resonates with the masses, we must still blog because our voice matters. Over time, our stories and life experiences WILL resonate with some people and that's all that matters in the end. 

Before you leave, do check out this gem posted by Seth Godin when it comes to adding value to the world through your blog/work. 

Give the people what they want

...isn't nearly as powerful as teaching people what they need.

There's always a shortcut available, a way to be a little more ironic, cheaper, more instantly understandable. There's the chance to play into our desire to be entertained and distracted, regardless of the cost. Most of all, there's the temptation to encourage people to be selfish, afraid and angry.

Or you can dig in, take your time and invest in a process that helps people see what they truly need. When we change our culture in this direction, we're doing work worth sharing. 

But it's slow going. If it were easy, it would have happened already.

It's easy to start a riot. Difficult to create a story that keeps people from rioting.

Don't say, "I wish people wanted this." Sure, it's great if the market already wants what you make... Instead, imagine what would happen if you could teach them why they should.

Give people what they want and they will like you for now. Give people what the need and they will value you forever. - Simon Sinek

Alain de Botton also, writes in his blog regarding how to provide value.

“Being given what I impulsively want isn’t the same as getting what I need. The real cure might not – for a maddeningly long while – feel like a cure.”

[UPDATE]

Developing one's writer's voice is similar to the way a musician develops their personal sound as mentioned in this article.

“Training helps, listening to records helps, but mostly you blow a lot until you resonate and then repeat, prune, experiment, prune, repeat, prune until a groove occurs.
Keep perfecting your voice as a writer and eventually you’ll find your own groove – one that’s true to who you are and resonates with your audience. Using your voice makes your writing better, but it may also make it easier and less time-consuming.”

A counter-intuitive method that works to prevent writers' block is as follows:

“I write like I talk. The reason that’s important is that no one gets talker’s block. And so if you wake up in the morning unable to speak, then you need a physician. Everyone else doesn’t have that problem. So if you can train yourself to talk in complete sentences, and actually come up with thoughts that are worth sharing, then writing isn’t particularly hard—you just write down what you say.”

— Seth Godin

And, here is why you must blog daily.

“One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice. You won’t get it for a while, but you’ll get it. To one person who wrote in and said he didn’t think he had anything interesting to say, I asked him whether he was boring in person too? Boring at breakfast? Boring on a date? That boring?! Probably not.”

— Seth Godin

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