Cult singer Amanda Palmer has agreed to pay the amateur guest musicians performing at her shows after her plan to compensate them with beer and hugs sparked outrage.

The star, who raised $1 million (£625,000) in public donations to fund the recording of her new album, issued a public appeal for "professional-ish horns and strings" players to join her on stage during her current U.S. tour.

She wrote in a post on Twitter.com, "We will feed you beer, hug/high-five you up and down (pick your poison), give you merch (merchandise), and thank you mightily for adding to the big noise we are planning to make."

However, Palmer's plan attracted criticism from many professional musicians and union members and she has now opened up about the controversy in a post on her blog.

She writes, "We've clearly hit a huge cultural nerve with this whole 'crowd-sourced musicians' kerfuffle. We didn't expect to hit that nerve, we did, and now we're dealing with it. A few of them (the cowards, the trolls) threw some pretty nasty stones... I'm sad to realise that our creative intentions of crowd-sourcing - something that I've done for years - are getting lost in the noise of this controversy... To be clear, I have always paid my band, who are on salary for the entire year... This sort of s**t sucks to read."

Palmer goes on to reveal she has now agreed to pay all of her guest musicians.

She adds, "We have decided we should pay all of our guest musicians. We have the power to do it, and we're going to do it. (In fact, we started doing it three shows ago.)... We are going to pay the volunteer musicians every night. Even though they volunteered their time for beer, hugs, merch, free tickets, and love: we'll now also hand them cash.

"I hope this does two things: I hope it makes the volunteers surprised and happy (they'll be getting some dough (money) they had no idea was coming) and I also hope it makes our family circle feel good about speaking out.

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