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.
Even artists who are ostensibly at the top of their game suffer. English singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri released a critically acclaimed album this year, played the Other Stage at Glastonbury and will open for Sabrina Carpenter on the UK and European leg of her tour in 2025. Yet in August Chinouriri had to cancel a series of shows and festivals in the US, saying that "the financial strain of touring has become too much".
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.
It’s not just a way to bring home the bacon, though: Allen appears to enjoy it. “I’m finding this actually quite empowering,” she said on her podcast, Miss Me, in July. “Having been very sexualized from a very early age, and literally everybody else in the process profiting from that sexualization, it’s actually really fun to be like, in power and in control of something that I find so silly,”
Similarly, Kate Nash is not looking for pity. “Don’t be ‘sad’ that I started an onlyfans to fund my tours,” she wrote on Instagram today. “It’s very empowering and selling pics of my arse is fun and funny”. Nash says her “arse is shining a light on the problem” that “music has little to no value”.
While Nash and Allen can use their large social media presences to promote their OnlyFans content, most musicians don’t have a following who would be willing to pay for pictures of them. Nash thinks that there needs to be “drastic change” in the music industry. “We need HR departments, we need fair wages. I have had lots of experience of being exploited,” she told LBC. Perhaps this will be the start of industry reform, from the bottom up.
