Kate Nash and Lily Allen on OnlyFans should be a wake-up call for the music industry
Kate Nash and Lily Allen on OnlyFans should be a wake-up call for the music industry
With paltry streaming royalties and a cost-of-touring crisis, it’s harder than ever to make money as a musician. Claudia Cockerell on the household names who are taking up side hustles, and what it says about the state of the music industry
For the majority of artists, making music is financially unsustainable. According to a census conducted by the Musicians’ Union, nearly half of working musicians in the UK earn less than £14,000 a year from their craft, while a further half have to sustain their careers with other forms of income. It’s easy to imagine that these are the aspiring performers making tunes in their bedrooms and moonlighting as bartenders, but even household names are turning to alternative income streams.
British singer Kate Nash announced on Thursday that she would start posting pictures of her bottom on adult website OnlyFans to raise money for her tour. The Foundations singer has nearly a million monthly listeners on Spotify, and is playing all across the UK, including a sold out gig in London, but says that touring is a loss making exercise.
She started her “Butts 4 Tour Buses” page in order to ensure “good wages and safe means of travel for my band and crew”. Nash would rather you gawk at her gluteus maximus than listen to Foundations on Spotify. "No need to stream my music, I’m good for the 0.003 of a penny per stream thanks," she told her followers on Instagram.
For an independent solo artist to make the UK living wage they would need 9 million streams a year. But most artists need far more as revenue is split between bands, with record labels often taking a hefty cut.
While Spotify can provide a reliable if paltry source of income, touring is only profitable for musicians playing big venues to sold out crowds. A survey conducted by rehearsal space network Pirate Studios found that only 29% of artists make a profit from tours. Rising costs and a flailing economy have exacerbated this, and a government report earlier this year found that artists are facing a “cost-of-touring” crisis, with travel, accommodation and food prices all higher than ever.
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With her backside hustle, Nash follows in the footsteps of Lily Allen, who started selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans over summer. She had the idea after seeing that her feet had a perfect five star rating on WikiFeet, a photo-sharing foot fetish website. Subscribers pay £8 a month to access her posts. In October, Allen claimed that shots of her well-pedicured trotters were earning her more money than Spotify streams – and that’s saying something, considering Allen has over 7 million monthly listeners and more than a billion streams on her top three songs.
And all those music mogul cunts in the executive seats have never made a song in their lives. Mammon takes all, Mammon leaves none.
50Remember when Spotify's CEO, Daniel Ek, said that it essentially cost nothing to produce "content"? Then he tried to walk it back when people pointed out what it said about his attitude to musicians who dedicate their whole lives to making music at great cost to themselves.
This word "content" needs to die. It conflates art with crap, because execs see both in terms of dollars and are too ignorant and incurious to tell or care about the difference.
39I just needed to say I agree with everything you said, fuck Spotify, and I love you for saying the truth about "content". It has consumed us.
18
we've returned to the days of record labels and box offices railroading, using and abusing artists to make billions without a care in the world for the artist.
2Can we end the gilded age part 2 please? Its a global problem it seems. But theres a lot of people around here absolutely fed up with this omnipronged fucking of everyone not wealthy.
1
This sounds like a typical musician's life before there even was a "music industry". The point of record companies has never been there for musicians to make a good living, it's for people who own record companies to make a ton of money selling copies of their work, usually giving them nothing back but exposure that might help them get bigger and better gigs and sell more tickets - performing is how 99.99% of musicians actually make money. If an artist burns out, no big deal, there's always an endless supply of naive hopefuls knocking on the door, thinking a record deal is their Golden Ticket.
30Hang on, she’s never going to be able to sell out a big stadium tour, so she’s effectively raising money for a tour that won’t make money….
Am I missing something?
Or is this just purely advertising for Kate Nash’s arse photos as that’s her new and only way of making any money?
The cracks are starting to show.
27People like to listen to their favourite artists live. She is raising money to make that a possibility without having to underpay the people involved or break her own bank.
Not everyone does everything for money. For a lot of artists, musicians included, they do it for the love of the art.
18I see what you did there you sonnuvabitch
12So uh... Got a link?
1You can here, but I couldn’t find them.
2
The cracks are starting to show.
SNORT
1
If you want to support artists, try bandcamp, it has streaming but it's more of a "try before you buy service", and money goes directly to the artists' accounts. Mp3/flacs with no DRM or just stream as much as you like. For an old-head like me who still has an SD card and a headphone jack on my phone, it's perfect.
24It doesn't quite go direct to the artists accounts except on Bandcamp Fridays. But its a hell of a lot better than the majority of the other options even without that.
8bandcamp gets the crown for "most least worst." i've even met a few artists who say they prefer fans to stream on bandcamp to spotify or qobuz because they make enough more money per purchase than per stream, and enough streams convert to purchases, that they get paid more the more people are listening on bandcamp
7Well, bandcamp bill their cut later as far as I'm aware, but when you buy an album you are paying into the artists PayPal account, you even see a partial email address. Unless that system is somehow lying.
1
Exactly this. I'm disappointed when smaller artists I love are not on Bandcamp.
2What's great is all the stuff I used to listen to in Uni (I'm 37 now) is also up there, like Torche and Manatees. Now I have the money to, I can chuck all these artists that I found in what.cd all those years ago a few quid. Whilst I'm sure they would have appreciated it more back in the day, I couldn't afford it and spent most of my uni years flat broke.
2
According to a census conducted by the Musicians’ Union, nearly half of working musicians in the UK earn less than £14,000 a year from their craft
Interestingly just under the income tax threshold. So you could quite easily set yourself up as a Ltd with you as the director and sole employee, claim the full income tax threshold as the employee and live off the dividends as a director whilst saving tax there too.
I wonder if these musicians have considered a more tax efficient route for their craft? What a crazy idea. Of course musicians are famous for assiduously paying all the taxes they can.
Someone with more time than me might be interested in looking up the holding companies for Kate Nash or Lilly Allen and checking out their finances. 🙃😄.
15I'm lost, if they're under the threshold why would you need to set up a company to make yourself under the threshold?
1That's not how it works. It's not about setting up a company to make yourself under the threshold. They're only under the threshold because of how they've structured their finances.
- Set up company.
- Be director of company.
- Also be only employee of company as a separate legal entity.
- Get people to pay the company for any work the employee (i.e. you) does.
- Pay the employee (i.e. you) a maximum of just below the threshold for income tax each year.
- Anything else starys in the company.
- The company pays the director in the form of dividends (i.e. you) at a reduced tax rate any extra money it may have collected.
- You've saved income tax entirely and you've reduced your tax liability on anything else.
Here's Kate's registered companies which are free to look up online by anyone. Whilst Kate the employee scrapes by under the tax threshold and has to graft on Onlyfans, Kate the director is in charge of a company that at the year end 2023 owed £164,586 (2022- £172,382) to the director (i.e. Kate).
1
I don't necessarily say it is or isnt spotifies fault, but how I see it is music kinda changed due to the digital age. Before the digital age, most people mostly needed to get into, or the eyes of a record label to get anywhere, and that had its fair share of dirty laundry (e.g whats happening with P Diddy). The digital age flipped the book around, where being able to publish music nowadays is extremely easy, but the problem is you're competing against a wave of other users. It's also significantly more expensive to do live concerts nowadays too (which is completely separate from spotify) as more and more concerts are getting canceled
15What do record labels actually do in this day and age? Artists don't need their capital to produce physical media anymore, so is it just promotion? Are artists able to make promotion deals with the likes of Spotify so they can at least cut out one of the middlemen?
6I think this is a mature take. Spotify should be more heavily regulated ultimately. Without some controls then their service is inevitable. If it wasn't Spotify it would be something else doing the same thing.
Likewise with touring, breaking up ticketmaster and livenation would be a great start, but then you still have the cost of running a venue which is harder in the current economic climate. Ultimately local governments should be subsidising venues to ensure that artists have viable spaces to perform.
Leaving it up to the market results in the situation you have now where people think it's logical to pay 1000s for a Taylor Swift ticket, an insane exercise of pure greed.
6
Don't know why sexual content is so distained.
Thought with the liberty movement in the 70's, near 50 years later no one would be bothered.
13That's not the point. The point is that the music industry doesn't pay artists a fair share.
20
[off topic?]
Andrea True was a porn actress who achieved success as a disco singer.
10Corporations are vile and cruel, more at 11.
9OnlyFeds - new instance funding model: Admins gone wild. The feddit.uk one would be a bit like Calendar Girls meets Austin Powers.
8I would somehow make negative money I think
9Maybe it's worth bearing in mind Lemmy's older, nerdier audience?
You remember those build-a-model magazines they used to rip off grandads with?
"Build your own model Lancaster Bomber! Only £1.99! You'll receive a large piece of the model with your first issue! Then the rest of it in pieces over future issues! (Future issues cost £9.99 a week, for 500 weeks)"
So you get your "special interest" photographs produced into jigsaws, then sell one jigsaw piece a week, eventually completing the full photograph at the end of the year.
7
More power to these ladies, sex work is thankless. I do wish the music industry was in a better place to where people didn't have to subsidise it with a secondary gig, even as heavily established professionals in the music industry.
8Friggin immigrants again, I guess.
6While she was working there, the Jamaican government banned asset transfers in response to sanctions imposed by the U.S. after the election of Michael Manley, a supporter of Fidel Castro. In order to return to the U.S., True would have had to either forfeit her pay or spend the money before she went home.[13] True, who by this time was trying to break into the music industry, chose to invest the money in recording a demo of "More, More, More",
I love everything about this.
5Anyone who listens to Shitify, even if they don't pay is supporting the royal ripoff of artists. I pay for a service that offers a much higher quality stream, and actually pays royalties.
4I already avoided this step by simply wearing arseless chaps onstage.
4Guess Jay-Z was on to something about Tidal.
3Eventually we'll only have female artists, who the hell is going to pay top dollar to see bon jovis hairy sweaty arse?
2If anything it should be a warning about signing bad record contracts. If I make something at work and they sell it, I don't continue to get paid if I do no more work.
She's a millionaire from past work. She doesn't have to sell her body on Only Fans. She's doing that for a laugh. Frankly it makes a mockery of the platform for the people that do use it to make a real living.
-3Ughh another women forced into sexual acts wrapped up in empowerment and feminism story.
-7Forced? They're already making a shitload of money, they just want more.
There are real people forced into sex work, this isn't an example of that.
5