While I did note that a few people could potentially take advantage of her free merchandise, I also mentioned there were several ways around it. Here’s another: as it is, I’m sure she still makes a profit off selling shirts, CDs, Vinyl, etc. She could, I presume, lower the price to the point where she was making $0 per sale and then trust her fans to support her with the rest. If she wants to do something a bit more impressive like that and still succeed – nay, thrive – because of it, she’s more than welcome to. That would make for a better talk. By the sounds of her $250,000 debt, though, she clearly hadn’t been thriving up to that point, and she wasn’t even being terribly risky in her trusting.

For the case of paying for concerts: she does impromptu free shows (as she shows in the TED talk and as you can find by hunting around youtube) and for the case of larger concerts, she is responsible not only for herself, but also her band, venue-host, backstage-folks, etc… she cannot assume that all these contacts are also willing to extend their trust to her fans. Of course, you could argue that she could just front all the venue costs herself, but then you are being very unreasonable, in your analogy: you are a girl that is asking for a diamond ring before we even had a drink.

This brings me to your final point of merchandise. Here, I think your point is valid, she is not willing to trust the internet arbitrarily. However, as you also noted (with the malignant users), this is not a matter of trusting only fans, this is a question of trusting the whole internet. In the case of distributing music, it only has value to her fans and thus the trust is between herself and her fans. In the case of t-shirts, they have more value to her fans, but they still have a certain base value to everyone (including not her fans). A free t-shirt is a free t-shirt even if it has some band you don’t know on it. Is it strange of her only to trust her fans and not the whole internet at large?

As for the Kickstarter, yes, a certain proportion of how much she makes goes back out to the promised services she said that others would get for their donation. Presumably, however, she was taking that into account when she was asking for the money in the first place. So what she asked for ($100,000) is not what she would ultimately get (say she’d only end up with $50,000 after what she promised for the donations). That, it seems, makes her request seem even more ludicrously low-balled. Using that half-of-what-she-got estimate, Amanda would have been able to pay off a collective fifth of her debt. This, to me, would seem to suggest that paying off said debt was never what Amanda initially intended to do with the money (though, admittedly, I can’t find her stated intentions for the money anywhere. If you could direct me towards them, I’d like to see). From that, there’s really no way around the conclusion that she was making up additional uses for the money she received only after she had received it.

Phrasing it as “setting the goal lower so her fans get something out of it” is another positive spin on the issue that, like her TED talk, may have very little to do with her initial motivations. That’s the problem with cheap talk: it’s basically impossible to assess.

I think the distinction between the fee structures of her music and her merchandise is this: Where she is able to eliminate the middleman, she does. Where she can’t, she is subject to structures that are not entirely in her control, and she can’t always do business the way she would prefer to.

Amanda’s site no longer links to postwartrade.com, which had long been her outlet not only for merchandise but for experimentation in e-commerce. (I’m not sure what its current status is, I know late last year she was looking at changing fulfillment houses because she wasn’t happy with the shipping and handling costs.) At least 3 times that I know of, and probably many more that I missed, inside jokes erupted on Amanda’s twitter feed that resulted in someone designing a t-shirt, which Amanda then cobranded and sold for the artist in super limited editions that sold out in a few hours (thus avoiding the overhead of warehousing). I am lucky enough t oown one, and devastated that I spilled spaghetti on it. But anyway. She also experimented for a while with allowing fans to create their own Amanda-inspired jewelry and art items to sell to each other on postwartrade.

So while it’s a valid point that the business model of trust comes to a hard stop where physical merchandise with lots of overhead is involved, Amanda does look for better solutions here, and uses the e-commerce part of her business to continue her mission of creating a multidirectional community with her fans.

The other thing I wanted to mention is the Kickstarter expenses. Apart from the $250k in expenses coming into the Kickstarter, the remaining expenses are on a sliding scale with the revenue that the Kickstarter would generate. The materials cost of all the amazing high-end limited edition CD-cases (which were actually 4-color books … so beautiful), the cost of the record players, etc. Since her explanation is based on what seemed then to be the wildly optimistic scenario of hitting the million dollar mark, the expenses she describes are the cost of fulfilling all the rewards at that level — they are not fixed costs that would have left her horribly in debt had she not hit it. You could ask, why didn’t she set her goal at $250k if that’s what she needed just to break even, and I think based on Amanda’s history with Kickstarter she had consistently made at least 2.5 times what she asked for. Setting the goal lower is more fair to the fans if the Kickstarter does NOT reach its goal, because in that case they get nothing.

On an evolutionary-psychology-related note, I think this Northwestern study about the effects of trust on relationships is relevant here: http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2013/02/trust-makes-you-delusional-and-thats-not-all-bad.html Just as in romantic relationships, trust between artists and fans makes us a little bit delusional in the best possible way, which is the essential underpinning of loyalty. She works hard to achieve and deserve that trust, and it pays off for her with a cadre of loyal fans who are eager to support her.

I think the more familiarity you get with Amanda the more you’d realize how authentic she is. But regardless, I do think you raise interesting points about the scalability of her business model to sales of physical goods.