The Art of Asking – an awesome TED Talk

08th March 2013

Amanda Palmer is probably better known for her ability to raise money than for the music for which she originally became known.  Her Kickstarter Project to fund her new tour raised over $1.2 million dollars last year, well beyond the $100k that she had initially sought.  She presented at TED last week on ‘The Art of Asking’, which looks at how asking for money, whether through Kickstarter, or at a performance, forms part of her natural connection with her fans.

Amanda believes that in the music industry “People have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, How do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, How do we let people pay for music?”.

Her words echo those of ex-Google ad exec Susan Wojcicki who blogged last year about the future of advertising and her belief that “In years to come, most ad views will effectively become voluntary.” – That is with time-shifted TV and the growth of online content advertisers will no longer be able to rely on paid placements to reach their audience. As it becomes more difficult to force people to pay to see content, it also becomes nigh on impossible to force them to see your advertising.  We should instead be focusing on developing relationships of trust, and then leveraging those relationships in order to support the work that they want us to do because, in the future, all media will be voluntary.

Amanda’s talk really made me think, if you have a spare 15 minutes there are far worse ways you could spend it than watching the video below:

Thanks to the wonderful Faris on Twitter for sharing.

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