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.
Remember 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.
Spotify’s CEO got roasted by artists after he said the cost of creating content is ‘close to zero.’ Now he’s trying to walk back his ‘clumsy’ remark
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.
I 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.
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.
Can 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.