D.I.Y.

Amanda Palmer To Distribute Fan-Funded Album Through Alliance Entertainment

2860556175_50316587ff_zKickstarter queen Amanda Palmer has announced that Alliance Entertainment will exclusively distribute her fan-funded album in the United States. Alliance is the largest wholesale distributor of home entertainment audio and video software in the U.S. and serves some 3,000 merchants including Target, Best Buy, and Barnes and Noble, and Internet retailers such as Amazon.com. Alliance’s recently acquired Audiolife division will distribute other fan-funded products (books, art, etc.) associated with the multidimensional album project Theatre Is Evil, set for a September 11th release.


Hailed as “one of music’s most productive users of social media” by the New York Times, Palmer funded the album from her 8 Ft Records label with nearly 25,000 album presales via Kickstarter, and raised $1.2 million in support from her fans.

“Amanda Palmer is a music and marketing visionary and we’re thrilled that both Alliance Entertainment and Audiolife provide a distribution solution for her groundbreaking new release,” said Mike Davis, President of Alliance Entertainment.

Audiolife will handle the packaging and shipping of products to fans who contributed to the massively successful Kickstarter campaign to receive physical versions of Theater is Evil, which depending on their level of contribution, is either a CD, a vinyl album, or a series of 7-inch singles from the album (or all three). 

MORE: Amanda Palmer Signs With Indie Label Cooking Vinyl

Hisham Dahud is a Senior Analyst for Hypebot.com. Additionally, he is the head of Business Development for Fame House, LLC and an independent musician. Follow him on Twitter: @HishamDahud

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10 Comments

  1. So, apparently, writing songs all by yourself, seeking band members, arranging the songs with them, recording an album by yourself, touring it by yourself, designing all the editions and extras you want by yourself with your own team of artists, photographers and designers—all of this a process also entirely funded by yourself…
    … that’s not DIY and you’re part of the evil capitalist engines the moment you choose (yourself!) an entity to distribute the results from this work all around the globe.
    … How is this even logical?

  2. Shut yo mouth. She paid all the artists for the rights to use the images out of her own pocket before the landslide of public funding. I certainly feel funded by her. Helped me pay rent for a few months anyway.

  3. Wonder what Laura Keating has to say about that. I suspect Amanda Palmer’s massive batch of pre-orders of products from different suppliers, all needing to go out at once, is a special case, as DIY artists go.

  4. No matter what, as part of every DIY project you’re hiring out SOME kind of basic services. Is it no longer DIY if you used the giant corporation FedEx to ship your CDs out, instead of bicycling them to each purchaser and handing them out individually? The artist hiring a big efficient distributor to deal with fulfillment and distribution of the album once it’s in full release is an utterly necessary part of any scalable DIY project. Of course “she” funded it all herself – the whole point is that she took over the role that labels did, finding sources of upfront money (some of her own as seed, and then a lot of presales) and hiring who she wanted to do all the many pieces of a big release. To say a music project is not DIY as soon as anything isn’t personally done by the artist is insane. The ‘it’ in ‘Do It Yourself’ in this case is funding and management. That’s what she’s doing herself instead of allowing herself to be ‘hired’ by a label to fulfill the ‘art’ part of their business.

  5. I swear some of you are trolls with probably terrible music and no fans that basically sit here and knit pick everything posted looking for something adverse to say. Get a life. Seriously.

  6. I’m in total agreement with Pgraham. DIY doesn’t mean do everything yourself. That would be DEY….wouldn’t it 🙂

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