In 2007, Kate Nash hit the charts with a song about a deteriorating relationship. Until November 21st this year the text of Foundations it also seemed to describe the singer's now frayed relationship with the concert industry, whose prohibitive production costs have driven her into debt. To get out of it, Nash had a brilliant idea: finance a tour by selling photos of his butt on OnlyFans. And so he started a campaign called Butts for Buses, asses in exchange for tour buses.
In case you feel sorry for Nash, know that's not the case. First of all, the thirty-seven-year-old singer-songwriter, who broke through about fifteen years ago with her debut Made of Bricks and has topped the British charts, has a “fantastic bum” (she says so) and “gets lots of compliments”. And then, charging $9.99 a month on OnlyFans, he effortlessly funded 's tour 9 Sad Symphonies in the UK and Europe. The economic problems “were resolved in a week”.
He has earned so much in such a short time that he is already thinking about future projects to finance with his B-side. “My little business is electrifying… ass,” he says jokingly. «I have to register the company name. I want to see Butts for Buses written on a credit card.”
To clarify, Nash has many fans (he currently has 926 thousand listeners a month on Spotify) and regularly sells out venues around the world. But, like many professional musicians who release music and tour regularly, he loses money every time he performs live. By her calculations, each concert costs her about $10,000 in production, including the band's musicians, stage staff and maybe a sound engineer. These are expenses he doesn't want to skimp on so as not to lower the quality of the show. Add to that stagnating artist compensation and skyrocketing costs for travel, accommodation, food and petrol, and Nash found herself plunged into debt even as she worked.
“I have a successful career,” he tells me over FaceTime. «I'm one of those who don't play in stadiums or arenas, but have lots of fans. I can tour all over the world, yet I can't make any profit from it. I'm in red. I lost some money. What the fuck is the problem?”.
The problem is the high costs of touring. «It's the exact same problem that ordinary people face, dealing with petrol prices and inflation. If today I go to play in a venue where I performed seven years ago, I risk being paid exactly the same amount as then, but I spend much more time putting on the show than I used to.”
Nash has an effective solution in mind to address the profound inequality that plagues the music industry. If £1 for every stadium and sports hall ticket sold went to what the UK-based charity Music Venue Trust calls 'grassroots venues' (i.e. venues with a capacity of 350 or less) , around £30m would flow into medium-sized or independent spaces each year, many of which are at risk of closing. According to Music Business Worldwide and the Music Venue Trust, an average of two live music venues per week closed in the UK in 2023, for a total of around 125 over the year. No firm numbers on business closures are available for the United States, but industry experts agree that a similar crisis is on the horizon.
«I have great regard for musicians who give concerts, not only at the highest levels. And the fans have it too,” Nash says. «In France, a tax has been applied for more than ten years which brings around 30 million euros a year to support French music and musicians. It's simple, we should all follow the French model which has already proven to work.”
In addition to funding her tour, OnlyFans represented a form of personal empowerment and a valid protest tool. «Look what's happening in America. It's more important than ever that women have the ability to manage their bodies, do what they want, be independent, make strong statements about female sexuality.”
Photo: Alice Baxley
Since Nash launched her OnlyFans more than a month ago, she has risen to first place among the site's content creators. She says the platform has brought her more money in a week than music streaming services make in a month (OnlyFans pays creators 80% of their earnings, while Spotify pays artists $0.003-$0.005 per stream ). Her followers on Instagram increased by 10,000 in a week and she gave interviews to all the main English media. “Because it's a bit scandalous, it's itchy stuff,” he says. “No one would look for me if I just posted a tour poster and wrote: 'Touring is very difficult right now and your support means a lot to me.'”
With or without the media attention, Nash's campaign would still have gained traction. Just over a week after launching her OnlyFans, and just hours before performing a sold out show at London's Koko, the artist teamed up with Save Our Scene UK to place a giant poster of her butt on a truck firefighters who, while traveling around London, stopped in front of the offices of Live Nation, Spotify and the House of Commons.
Nash explains that she was inspired by what happened to the former host of Top of the Pops Gail Porter, who in 1999 had nude photos of herself projected onto Parliament, without having given her consent, as part of an advertising campaign for the magazine's “Sexiest Woman” survey FHM (Porter had agreed to do the photoshoot, but not for his image to be used that way.) «She was really sexy on the front page of that magazine, but she didn't get paid for the shoot. They exploited it and there were also unpleasant consequences. I thought: I'd like my bum projected onto the House of Commons. It's a very punk stance and kind of a fuck you to the music industry. It also seemed like a nice way to balance that bad story.”
She didn't manage to have her bare butt projected onto the facade of the lower house of the British parliament, but placing it on a fire truck and driving it around London in pink thongs was a great alternative. And in any case he would still like to get his butt to the House, as well as several other places. “I want a billboard of my OnlyFans in Times Square, right where the Spotify ones always place.” If she succeeds, Nash will probably be hit by a wave of appreciation and support from colleagues and fans. “People cheered me on the street,” Nash says of the truck ride. “People care about this stuff. We're sick of hearing about millionaires trying to fucking ruin everything. In the age of late capitalism, if you are a musician like me, you should earn money by touring.”
Nash isn't the only pop artist on OnlyFans. In every article about her butt, Lily Allen was also mentioned, who has an OnlyFans dedicated to photos of her feet (a fact that is less talked about, but still worthy of note, is that many, from Kathleen Hanna to Courtney Love to Cardi B, they were strippers at the beginning of their careers).
When, on social media, a follower criticized Allen by writing “Imagine being one of the biggest pop stars/musicians in Europe and being reduced like this”, the singer's response was in line with Nash's observations on the music and entertainment industry. entertainment: «Imagine being an artist and having almost eight million monthly listeners on Spotify, but earning more if 1000 people signed up to look at photos of your feet. Don't blame me, but the system.”
Despite the media's approval, there are still detractors who consider any form of selling one's body (even consensual of course) essentially oppressive. In an editorial dated November 30, theIndependent he asked himself: “Is OnlyFans really an expression of female emancipation or is it harmful to women?”. In response to feminists who consider it a form of oppression to profit from nudity, even if done ethically, Nash says that “we are all indoctrinated. And we are all sexually repressed too. Our mentality is still influenced by Christianity and behind phrases like “women cannot feel pleasure” there is religion.”
She continues: «I don't understand the logic of a woman trying to speak on behalf of all women. As a feminist, I think the bottom line of feminism is: you can't define me. It reminds me of the Terf thing (trans-exclusionary radical feminist, i.e. radical feminists who do not consider trans women as women, ndt). Stop telling people what they can or can't be. Support can be given to sex workers and at the same time combat exploitation within those jobs. As a feminist, you should do just that, you should make women stronger and help them when they are exploited… You may like sex and not porn, but why do you have to try to decide whether porn should exist or not, speaking for women too who want to watch it instead? For me it doesn't make sense and it doesn't even make sense within the feminist movement.”
British lawmakers are debating changes to the live music industry, including a proposed stadium ticket tax. At the beginning of December, the government set a deadline to evaluate the music industry's reaction to this proposal. The Honorable Sir Chris Bryant (Minister for Media, Tourism and Creative Business) wrote in a letter that 'we want a voluntary tax on arena tickets to come into force as soon as possible for concerts in 2025 and of the stadiums. For this timeline to be met, we want to see tangible progress across the music industry by the first quarter of 2025.”
Meanwhile, in addition to placing a billboard in Times Square (message to potential investors: “Send me an email”), Nash wants to ask Lisa Nandy, British Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, to discuss the issue over tea. “Nandy has been the most important person in music in the UK for about ten years,” explains Nash. «It could help us change things in the fields of live and recorded music to make them more ethical. It's all in his hands. I would like to convince her to become a hero, because we need her. She is our savior.”
Ultimately, the problem of small venues closing and indie and mid-level artists being unable to perform affects everyone who loves music, regardless of income level. «Someone asked me what's the worst that could happen. My answer is that if bands can't afford to tour, venues will close,” Nash says. «If they all close, only the stadiums and arenas will remain and therefore we will only be able to attend concerts of that type. People will start to get bored. Eventually those fucking gladiators will return: poor people who kill themselves in a stadium to entertain the public.”
He laughs. «I'm joking… more or less. We want to protect musicians at all levels. And there's a way to fucking fix this. We must not let late capitalism destroy the one thing we all agree on: we like going to concerts and we like listening to fucking music.”
From Rolling Stone US.
