With paltry streaming royalties and a cost-of-touring crisis, it’s harder than ever to make money as a musician. Claudia Cockerell on the household names who are taking up side hustles, and what it says about the state of the music industry
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”.
Good for them! I hope they have lots of fun and make tons of money at it.
Re: the value of music: Music certainly has value, but I understand her meaning: music can’t bring in the money in this late-stage-capitalism meat grinder, and it’s probably best for most people to get a job that pays the bills (like OF) to support their hobby—at least until capitalism collapses into socialist/communist revolution or neofeudalism.
See also the annoying burst of AI “musicians” who can churn out entire 12+ track albums in a month or less.
To be fair, human thieves can also churn out a plagiarized album of uninspired trash with no emotional content fairly quickly if they’re brazen enough about it. ‘AI’ scrapes the bottom of the barrel for a relatively high operating cost. It won’t last.
Good for them! I hope they have lots of fun and make tons of money at it.
Re: the value of music: Music certainly has value, but I understand her meaning: music can’t bring in the money in this late-stage-capitalism meat grinder, and it’s probably best for most people to get a job that pays the bills (like OF) to support their hobby—at least until capitalism collapses into socialist/communist revolution or neofeudalism.
See also the
annoyingburst of AI “musicians” who can churn out entire 12+ track albums in a month or less.To be fair, human thieves can also churn out a plagiarized album of uninspired trash with no emotional content fairly quickly if they’re brazen enough about it. ‘AI’ scrapes the bottom of the barrel for a relatively high operating cost. It won’t last.