Want to lose money at work? Become a touring musician

The cost-of-living crisis is affecting everybody, and you’d be hard-pushed to find anyone, least not any business, unaffected by food, energy, mortgage and staff costs, plus recent National Insurance tax hikes for those with employees. These ongoing impacts demand a great deal of creative thinking: do I raise costs? Reduce staff? Borrow more? All questions that a business can explore and investigate.

But what if you’re a musician, an artist who, through no fault of your own, has seen the simple act of plying your trade decimated by ever-rising costs? Higher hotel and travel costs: tick. Higher venue costs: tick. Higher musician costs: tick, tick, tick. Perhaps extend your credit with a bank or your record label? Good luck with that.

Desperate times call for desperate measures for today’s fledgling and established musicians, and creatives of all kinds have been stretching their fertile imaginations for financial lifelines to ease the pain. Step forward Kate Nash, a singer-songwriter who found immediate fame in 2005 with the massively successful ‘Foundations’, a track that acted as a springboard for five LPs, including this year’s 9 Sad Symphonies. Not content with pop fame, Nash has extended her creative repertoire to include acting triumphs too, appearing in films and TV.

Throw in the fact that she’s a prominent feminist activist who campaigns against gender inequality, and the broader picture is of a successful and talented artist. But not an artist who can make any money, it seems. Her solution? OnlyFans. Her slogan? ‘Butts For Tour Buses’, along with an announcement that her OnlyFans income will subsidise her gigs on the basis that “touring makes losses not profits”.

“I think it’s a bit of a punk protest as a woman to take control of my body and sell it to be able to fund my passion project, which is actually my 18-year career” she explained to the BBC. Whilst plenty will probably argue against Nash’s chosen path to self-sufficiency, the point here is that without exploration of innovative ideas artists can no longer rely on the industry itself to cover touring costs, which have gone up by 30.3% in the past two years.

“I’m losing money from those tours,” Nash told BBC News. “The only way I could find to make a profit on the tour – you’re either going, hopefully I sell enough T-shirts to cover the debt, or you cut people’s wages, or you fire band and crew, or you travel dangerously.” Whilst Nash emphasises that her OnlyFans posts are revealing but not explicit, she focuses on her own identity by stressing that it’s “an important time for women to take control and to feel empowered.”

We’ve reported before in this series about musicians like Nadine Shah and Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien telling the government as well as the industry itself about the risible returns to songwriters and artists from streaming, set against eye-watering profits generated by the likes of Spotify. So it’s no surprise Nash is keen to point out the paucity of income actually earned by musicians on these platforms, writing on her Insta: “No need to stream my music, I’m good for the 0.003 of a penny per stream thanks”.

Indeed, Lily Allen, a fellow OnlyFans creator, revealed she generates more funds by selling pictures of her feet than she does from Spotify. So is Nash’s response to the seemingly never-ending tightening of income opportunities through art merely opportunistic or a refreshing demonstration of creative innovation?

Take your pick. But against a backdrop of ever-increasing cancellations – Rachel Chinouriri, Ratboy and Duke Spirit’s Liela Moss have all recently pulled out of tours because of cost – what alternatives are there left for artists to explore in a world where, to quote Nash, “festival prices and ticket prices have gone up drastically, but the musicians’ wage hasn’t”.

The government has set up a new working group, supported by The Musicians Union, to improve streaming income, and have suggested that they might take legislative action if they can’t get better deals for artists any other way. Positive words indeed. But as with Lisa Nandy’s equally supportive narrative around grassroots venues, musicians will grow tired of hearing political noises and rhetoric without tangible action to start redressing the balance for UK musicians.