Updated March 31, 2025 at 16:49 PM ET
Last fall, English singer-songwriter Kate Nash was crunching numbers in between her North American and European tours when she realized she was "essentially going into debt" touring her latest album, 9 Sad Symphonies, as she told NPR. For someone who has been making music and selling out shows for nearly two decades, that was concerning.
Nash first broke out in 2007 with her indie pop album Made of Bricks, which earned her widespread commercial and critical acclaim. Across several more records and a move into acting including a role on Netflix's GLOW, Nash established herself as a multihyphenate, unafraid of raising some eyebrows. And in November, when she found herself with a pile of unpaid invoices, she came up with a way to make some quick cash: she joined OnlyFans.
OnlyFans was created nearly a decade ago as a social media platform where "creators" upload content that "fans" pay to access, either through a subscription or on a pay-per-view basis. Creators can set their own subscription tiers, some of which may include personalized messages and content; fans can also tip creators.
It quickly garnered a reputation as a hub for sexual content, given that it gave adult performers and sex workers the ability to create and upload content on their own terms, or at least without a production studio as the middleman. The platform takes a 20% cut and the rest goes to the creator. In 2021, the website briefly considered banning explicit content but then reversed course. In a statement shared with NPR, an OnlyFans spokesperson noted that the platform has amassed more than 4 million creator accounts and 305 million fan accounts since its inception.
When Nash opened her account, she joined the ranks of celebrities like Lily Allen, yeule and Tyga, who have all at one point or another dabbled in the website — though not all of them shared sexual content. Many artists, including Cardi B, Rico Nasty and Kash Doll, have also used OnlyFans to promote their music or release exclusive content. In 2022, rapper and DJ Shygirl became the first artist to premiere a music video on the platform.
Nash — who sang the line "Don't tell me that you didn't try and check out my bum / Cause I know that you did," on 2007's "Merry Happy" —- started off mostly sharing photos of her butt, though she also has pay-per-view feet content and recently ventured into erotic food comedy videos (one is aptly titled "Cake Nash"). She says selling sexy pics to pay off her tour invoices was like killing two birds with one stone. She named the campaign "Butts 4 Tour Buses," and within six days, all her bills were paid. "I just thought it was funny," she says. "My arse is always out anyway."
Not everyone got the joke. On Reddit and Instagram, people were quick to criticize her decision.
"The only precedent you're setting [is] telling young girls and women that it doesn't matter how talented you are — that you'll find more success in selling yourself as a commodity," reads one comment on an Instagram post where Nash discussed her choice. "Your choices don't exist in a vacuum. Choice feminism is insidious."
Nash says she thinks most critics are threatened by her personal agency. But she also hopes the outcry over her OnlyFans is helping shine a spotlight on the conversation she really wants to have: why making a living as a musician has gotten so hard.
The streaming and touring crisis
The first problem, she says, is the reduced value placed on recorded music by streaming sites like Spotify, which pays $.003 to $.005 per stream on average. In October, Lily Allen shared on X that she makes more money from 1,000 subscribers on OnlyFans than she does from her nearly 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
"It's been structured really poorly for artists, but very well for millionaires that want to just treat music as content and then profit from it and move on to the next thing when music eventually collapses," says Nash. "Which it will, because venues are closing and bands cannot afford to go on tour anymore."
That leads to the next problem: live music is not making up for the loss in streaming revenue. Nash emphasizes that her show on the road is nothing flashy, but there is a lot of work behind the scenes: hiring a band, a crew, a tour manager, a backline tech, light and sound engineers. And she refuses to cut corners when it comes to paying her band and crew a living wage, which means she's constantly at a loss at the end of the day. Although she's still selling out the same venues she was seven years ago, Nash says the fee she's getting paid now is close to what it was back then, but the cost of everything else it takes to tour has gone up.
Nash is not the only artist grappling with the financial toll of going on the road. The last few years have seen a number of artists forced to fully or partially cancel tours, including The Black Keys, Animal Collective and Santigold, who wrote a letter to her fans explaining how the rising cost of touring — paired with the risks and uncertainty of playing shows as the pandemic waned —- has pushed many artists to their limit. And even festivals like Coachella, New Orleans' Jazz Fest and Governors Ball in New York City saw slower ticket sales than usual last year.
In the band's first interview since the tour cancellation, The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney told Rolling Stone they largely blame a consolidation of power in the live music industry for their cancellations. Stephen Parker, Executive Director of the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), is a little more specific.
"The biggest threat to live touring in the United States is Live Nation, their monopoly," Parker tells NPR. "They continue to take anti-competitive practices and make it harder for up-and-coming artists to be able to survive on tour, and make it harder for independent venues to book shows that can ultimately allow them to keep themselves open."
In a statement to NPR, Live Nation Entertainment said it is invested in the future of independent venues. "Live Nation operates just 4% of music venues in the U.S., and the majority of shows we promote take place in venues we don't own. In 2024 alone, we promoted nearly 6,000 shows in independent theaters and clubs across the country — more than 3x the number from a decade ago, so we have every reason to see those venues thrive," reads the statement. "It's true that small venues, including our own, often operate on slim margins, but that's largely due to broader economic pressures faced by businesses across all sectors of the economy — rising costs for rent, insurance, labor, and operations."
When it comes to artists' pay, Live Nation also says its "payouts to club and theater acts were up 25% last year compared to 2019. And, on top of that, our On The Road Again program, which includes artists keeping 100% of their merchandise profits, delivered tens of millions of revenue."
Last May, the Justice Department and 30 states filed an antitrust lawsuit to break up Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, citing concerns of an illegal monopoly that controls ticketing, promotion, venue ownership and artist management, all of which could cause a concerning rise in ticket prices. Then in August, the United Kingdom's Competition and Market Authority launched an investigation into Ticketmaster's use of dynamic pricing for Oasis reunion ticket sales. Though the two legal cases against the company are not related, they come down to the same accusation: Ticketmaster could be abusing its market power to take advantage of its consumers.
"The DOJ's lawsuit won't lower ticket prices for fans or address the issues they care about—service fees and access to in-demand shows," Live Nation said in a statement to NPR. "The real problem is the secondary market where resellers drive up prices and siphon billions out of the industry, hurting both artists and fans."
Parker says the current system doesn't only hurt fans and artists; it hurts everyone involved in putting on a show.
"The costs of putting on a tour are borne by the venue and the promoter and the artists and their teams," he says. "I think it's important that so many people are profiting off of tours right now who put no skin in the game in order to make sure that those venues and those artists can continue to keep their doors open and continue to tour."
Liberation behind a paywall
Folk singer and independent artist Lizzie No is among the artists feeling that cost. She spent most of 2024 touring her third full-length album Halfsies, which landed them one of 25 coveted spots on Rolling Stone's "Future of Music" issue last year. But good reviews don't pay the bills.
"I hadn't really made any money after working non-stop for 10 and a half months, not a week off. I missed the birth of my nephew because I was in England playing a festival, and that's the job to some degree," No says. "But at the same time, we put in the work as a band and I came home with nothing in my pocket and a lot of good press about me."
In November, No — who also co-hosts the podcast Basic Folk — opened an OnlyFans account. They're still building a subscriber base on the platform, which they say is a mixed bag of people who follow them because of their music and people who discovered their music through their OnlyFans. What No posts is a work in progress too; recently, she conducted an informal survey to see what kind of content people are willing to tip for. The results range from videos of No putting on lotion to sexy voice memos to recordings of her reading poetry out loud.
"I'm learning a lot about what people are willing to pay for and what people consider to be valuable, which is actually really beautiful," they say. "It's about like, 'I will pay a monthly fee to have access to you as a Black woman,' where people almost always think they have access to me. It's been incredibly empowering to be able to monetize that digital intimacy that people have been taking for free for a long time."
Another benefit of OnlyFans has been the freedom of speech. As a folk and Americana musician, No says political protest is key to her art. She's constantly figuring out how she can use her reach on and off tour to promote reproductive, social and environmental justice — but her ideas aren't always welcomed by people online or in the music industry. OnlyFans, she says, provides a space where she can share without filters, and its reputation helps her charge more than she would on a site like Patreon. "If people are afraid of what I have to say, then I have a censored adults-only site where I can put all of that stuff that nobody really wanted to hear from me," she says.
Some of that now includes unreleased music they're working on, and No is far from being the only musician who finds liberation behind the paywall. Dembow provocateur Tokischa did sex work before her music took off, and she's spoken in interviews about how OnlyFans gave her the funds to invest in her career. But she told the outlet hypebae the real reason she opened an account is because she got banned from Instagram for posting the kind of sexual content she enjoys making.
No says it's not a coincidence that artists who've endured objectification in the music industry — particularly Black women and women of color — are finding financial and bodily autonomy in using those same tools against a system that does not compensate them fairly. Which is not to say it doesn't come with backlash; No says they've been surprised by how even people who are close to them have responded to their OnlyFans with pity or condescension.
"I don't care about what's acceptable in American society. Slavery was acceptable in American society," No says. "I have nothing to be ashamed of. I'm trying to set up the economic conditions under which I can create radical, visionary Black art. Of course it's going to ruffle some people's feathers. That's what we're up against as women in this industry."
Gig work and the creator economy
A lot of the work that goes into turning a profit on OnlyFans — curating a social media presence, captivating an online audience's attention and constantly churning out content — can already be a not-so-unspoken requirement of being a musician today.
Aryana Safaee is a sociology PhD student at SUNY Albany specializing in labor rights and the commodification of personal connections. Her master's thesis, titled Sex, Love, and OnlyFans, explored digital sex work as a labor issue. She says OnlyFans is uniquely positioned at the intersection of gig work and the creator economy.
"OnlyFans is different from other gig work because if you're a DoorDash driver, you get sent customers to do deliveries for," she says. "On OnlyFans, you are responsible for finding your own subscribers. That's one of the biggest elements of unpaid labor that doesn't get discussed: you have to have a preexisting platform for it to be economically viable for you."
That's one reason musicians often find success on the platform; OnlyFans gives them a way to directly cash in on the fan base and social media following they've already worked to build. But Safaee says the presence of celebrities on OnlyFans comes with its own complications.
When former Disney star and singer Bella Thorne joined the platform in 2020, she immediately set a record by becoming the first creator to earn $1 million in one day. But after disappointed customers complained for refunds, OnlyFans announced changes to payment structures, including a $50 charging limit for exclusive content, a $100 cap on tips and monthly rather than weekly payments. Other OnlyFans creators took to social media to criticize Thorne for hurting their bottom line, though the company has denied that the new rules were caused by one user. Still, the singer issued an apology on social media and said she was meeting with the platform to discuss the reasoning behind the new policies. Thorne's team and OnlyFans did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
Safee says sudden changes to OnlyFans' policies can have major impacts on the sex workers who depend on it as a primary source of income. "So getting abruptly banned or having their account frozen or they're not able to withdraw — that might really be a matter of being able to eat that day, which isn't necessarily the position that some of these musicians might be in," she says.
Safaee says digital sex work is flawed, but that artists who join OnlyFans should be conscious of how they can use their platforms to destigmatize sex work and advocate for better working conditions for all creators. Kate Nash says she hopes her time on OnlyFans can help raise visibility for sex work as a labor issue.
"I think the more that you can empower the sex worker, the better. People are exploited in sex work as they are exploited in nail salons," says Nash. "I don't think the answer is like, don't ever get your nails done or don't ever do sex work. I think it's: empower workers as much as possible."
And Nash also wants to see working conditions improve in the music industry. She's been a vocal supporter of a voluntary levy backed by the British government that would invest £1 of every stadium or arena tour ticket sold into grassroots venues. Both No and Nash, who come from working class backgrounds, also emphasize how important it is for artists without a financial safety net or family money to be able to see a future for themselves in the industry — especially women. Nash says no matter what her Instagram haters say, she's proud to be using this moment in her career to speak up for them.
"I think I'm a great example to young women because my entire career, I have put women and girls first and fought for them to have a place in the music industry," she says. "I want them to be paid fairly for their work. I want them to see a future. I want them not to be signed to a label and then just told to make TikToks all day. I want there to be sustainability and longevity."
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