The singer Kate Nash has revealed that she makes more money selling photos of her bum on OnlyFans than she does from touring. Indeed she’s made this fact a selling point – under the slogan ‘Butts for Tour Buses’ she announced last week that she had opened an account on the online subscription as a way to cover the losses on her current UK and European tour.
She told the BBC it was “the only way I could find to make a profit on the tour”, saying that it was either this or hoping she’d sell enough T-shirts, or cutting people’s wages or travelling dangerously.
The 37-year-old singer-songwriter said wasn't willing to cut corners or the quality of her shows. "So that leaves me in a position where I'm not profiting from tours. So is this a job, or is it a passion project?"
Nash is serious about the OnlyFans shots. But don’t worry - it’ll all be tasteful. "I think the arse is the perfect combination of comedy and sexuality," she said. “I actually like bums. I think they're just quite great. I think it's funny. I enjoy taking pictures of my bum. Always been a bit of a flasher. So I'm going to enjoy doing it, and I'm already putting it online anyway.”
So a genius piece of marketing? Or a sad indictment of the modern music industry? Or, actually, both?
Nash took to social media after the initial announcement and defended the move: “Don’t be ‘sad’ that I started an onlyfans to fund my tours,” she wrote on Instagram. “It’s very empowering and selling pics of my arse is fun & funny, sex is fun & funny. Women being in control of their bodies is vital and something we should all be standing by & fighting for.”
“Are you sad music has little to no value? Would you be interviewing me or writing about me or talking about me if I had simply posted ‘going on tour, the business is shit, help me protect my employees &integrity of my show’.
"Would my tour be on the front page of Reddit 2 days in a row? Fuck no it wouldn’t. My arse is shining a light on the problem.”
Nash caught her first break during the dying days of the ‘old’ music industry - her second single Foundations went to Number Two in 2007 at a time when people still bought physical records and Spotify was a little-known Swedish startup. She has had first hand experience of the long inexorable decline of incomes for mid-range artists such as herself.
She told the BBC that musicians could learn a thing or two from sex workers: "You've got all this control, and you're deciding what you want to do and how you want to do it, and people want to pay you for it. We just haven't taught any of those lessons to anyone with music and art - that art is so valuable and so worthwhile in our lives and so meaningful. (But) we’re totally happy to devalue it.
"Where can we learn from the sex workers? Maybe we can learn something from this industry. How do we get empowered as artists and take a bit more control?"
