Earlier this year, former Nine Inch Nails drummer Josh Freese announced that he would be funding his new album directly from his fans, with some genuinely creative rewards that got him a lot of press. In addition to the standard download and CD offers, these included:

For $1,000

Josh washes your car OR does your laundry

Get drunk and cut each other’s hair in the parking lot of the Long Beach courthouse (filmed and posted on YouTube, of course)

For $2,500

Pick any 1 member of the Vandals or Devo (subject to availability) to accompany you and Josh to either the Hollywood Wax Museum or the lunch buffet at the Spearmint Rhino

For $10,000

Twiggy from Marilyn Manson’s band and Josh take you and a guest to Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n’ Waffles in Long Beach for dinner

Josh takes you and a guest to Club 33 (the super-duper exclusive and private restaurant at Disneyland located above Pirates of the Caribbean) and then hit a couple rides afterward (preferably the Tiki Room, the Haunted Mansion and Tower of Terror)

At the end of the day at Disneyland, drive away in Josh’s Volvo station wagon. It’s all yours … take it. Just drop him off on your way home, though, please.

For $75,000

Josh will join your band for a month … play shows, record, party with groupies, etc.

If you don’t have a band he’ll be your personal assistant for a month (4-day work weeks, 10 am to 4 pm)

Take a limo down to Tijuana and he’ll show you how it’s done (what that means exactly we can’t legally get into here)

(View the full list in all its glory.)

Wired did an extensive interview with Josh, and he talks a lot about his experience with this project. Some choice bits:

[T]he bottom line for me is, “How am I going to market this myself — literally, just myself, no marketing team, no company — on the internet to have people know that I’ve got a record coming out and talk about it. So exactly what I wanted to happen has happened, which is a bunch of people have taken notice of the fact that Josh Freese has a record coming out.

I’ve had folks ranging from people hitting me up on MySpace going, “I want the $50 phone call” or “I want to go have lunch at P.F. Chang’s” to a few people who have discussed the more serious packages, but no one’s officially taken me up on it. A friend of mine knows a big advertising agency out of Portland, and they said they want to buy, like, a $5,000 one where I write songs about their agency and put ‘em up on iTunes.

When I came up with these, like, someone goes, “Man, do you really need money or something?” It’s like, if I really needed money — well of course, we all need money, right? — but if I really was wanting to make money, I would make them a lot less [expensive] than I did, because I really — put it this way, I’ll be floored if someone buys the top package. I’ll be completely shocked.

Setting those prices so ridiculously high worked to get attention in a humorous way…. People that know me, and people that don’t know me, go: “This guy’s got a record coming out. Here’s his website.” If it means they get directed to my website and they spend seven bucks to buy the album? Great.

Some nice lessons to be learned from there. Well done, Mr. Freese! To buy the album, entitled Since 1972, do so here.

Amanda Palmer, the infamously fan-friendly artist who recently took a very public stand against her record label, has written an article detailing her experience leveraging Twitter and her fanbase into cash. You can read it here, and you should.

The gist is that Palmer decided on a lark to do a big T-shirt push via Twitter (earning her $11,000), followed quickly by a Twitter auction and selling tickets to a private concert. As the $19,000 tally makes clear, this was an enormous success, to say the least!

Palmer’s gambit worked for two reasons: 1) she interacts with her fans regularly and openly, generating a huge amount of loyalty and, most importantly, 2) she is not afraid to ask for their help. That might seem a trivial or stupidly obvious point, but it shouldn’t be.

As creative people, we have always been trained (and with good reason) to view money like an illegitimate child — don’t ever ever talk about it; if you have it, don’t admit it; and if you find yourself without, definitely don’t ever openly desire to have some. And from this we got a world of sharks and minnows, the major label system and all of the other injustices that have made pursuing creative interests while trying to remain clothed and housed a monumental undertaking.

We like to think Kickstarter answers that call and offers people an alternative. But it takes effort. And it takes being willing to fail and be vulnerable. We know these are not easy things by any means. But the payoff, as we see here with Amanda Palmer and have seen before with Radiohead, Jill Sobule and Allison Weiss, is so worth the risk and effort it’s not even funny. To be a creative force in this world now requires this mindset, this level of dedication. There really isn’t a choice anymore.

One last point: the next time you are looking to raise money, Amanda, use Kickstarter. You won’t have to spend the time and resources building a quickie site and Paypal store (which you had to do for your Twitter success), you can easily leverage your incredible online networks into action and you can offer different levels of reward based on the level of involvement. No need for one size fits all. How many of those folks who bought a T-shirt for $20 would have been willing to pay $50 for one autographed by you? Or $5 for a refrigerator magnet? Or $3,000 for a private performance, like the Rural Alberta Advantage managed to pull off earlier today? With Kickstarter, you can find out. Amanda — or anyone else reading this — get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.