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.
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. 🙃😄.
I’m lost, if they’re under the threshold why would you need to set up a company to make yourself under the threshold?
That’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).
Sorry, I’ve misunderstood I thought you were talking about the average musician earning £14k.
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.
That’s not the point. The point is that the music industry doesn’t pay artists a fair share.
In general yes. But this article is using the fact that those poor artists need to do dirty sex work to earn money to make it’s point. And this is stupid. Where is the “musicians have to work minimum wage jobs in fast food joints” outcry?
Show me the demand for my body parts on only fans and I’ll give up my minimum wage job.
Why should they work menial labour if they can make much easier money?
Guess Jay-Z was on to something about Tidal.
Eventually we’ll only have female artists, who the hell is going to pay top dollar to see bon jovis hairy sweaty arse?
[off topic?]
Andrea True was a porn actress who achieved success as a disco singer.
I already avoided this step by simply wearing arseless chaps onstage.
Ughh another women forced into sexual acts wrapped up in empowerment and feminism story.
Forced? 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.
Whatever replace “forced” with “coerced” or “pressured” if you don’t like that word. Doesn’t change the fact that young women are taking up sex work for financial stability when they shouldn’t have to.
Anyone 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.
What service is that?
I’ve bought albums from Bandcamp, but I use Tidal for streaming. Also, I’ve heard Deezer is excellent. And all my old CDs on Jellyfin. Even Mixcloud? ANYTHING except Spotify and YouTube!
Probably Bandcamp.
That’s my bet, it’s the best one right now. Not sure why OP didn’t just say it.
I am also curious.
What service would that be?
Corporations are vile and cruel, more at 11.
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.
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.
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.
Part of the point is that touring and gigs are no longer profitable either.
No longer profitable FOR THE ARTIST. Profit is absolutely being made from touring musicians, it’s just not going to the people actually making the music.
Yeah, fuck TicketMaster.
OnlyFeds - new instance funding model: Admins gone wild. The feddit.uk one would be a bit like Calendar Girls meets Austin Powers.
I would somehow make negative money I think
Maybe 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.
So you get a puzzle piece with a photo of a that might be a bit of boob, and after six months you have enough pieces to see that it is, in fact, a man’s very smooth knee?
Hahaha, yes, exactly this - and perhaps the same situation with “bum crack or inner-fold of a bent elbow?”.
A classic party game!
If 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.
Friggin immigrants again, I guess.
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.
