More and more successful musicians are joining OnlyFans to make a living after failing to sustain themselves off of music and touring alone.
Mainstream artists including multiplatinum pop star Lily Allen, Brit Award nominee Kate Nash, Anora artist Brooke Candy, and rapper Rubi Rose have all turned to the platform to boost their bank balance.
Nash, who was one of the UK’s most celebrated singer-songwriters in the late 2000s, revealed in December that she had to start selling photos of her derriere to fund her tour due to rising costs in the music industry.
‘I don’t have rich parents. I don’t know a millionaire that would invest in me. And I was like, “Well, butts for tour buses is a funny campaign.” I was like, why don’t I just do this and make a punk protest about how little our music is valued and let’s see if my a**e is worth more,’ she told The Sunday Times.
The Foundations songstress also explained how touring is now too expensive for many independent artists, with many musicians now going into debt just to tour.
‘The cost of presenting live music has gone up by 30.3 percent over the past two years. There were 125 venues that closed last year in the UK. And, the value of recorded music is extremely low. You’re paid 0.003 of a penny per stream,’ she said in a statement.
Smile hitmaker Allen has shared a similar sentiment, claiming that she makes more money selling feet pics on OnlyFans than she does from her Spotify streams.
‘Imagine being and artist and having nearly eight million monthly listeners on Spotify but earning more money from having 1,000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet. Don’t hate the player, hate the game,’ she posted to X, formerly Twitter, in October.
Underground pop artist Brooke Candy, whose song ‘Drip’ was featured in Oscar winner Anora, is the latest celebrity to join the platform.
Despite her success and and impressive discography that features collaborations with pop A-listers like Sia and Charli XCX, the 35-year-old still joined the racy platform to share ‘uncensored’ content with her fans for $9.99 a month.
Meanwhile, rapper Rubi Rose joined OnlyFans in 2020 during the pandemic after struggling to get her budding music career off the ground.
‘It was cool for the first couple of years, but now it’s like I have to keep doing it,’ she told podcaster Bobbi Althoff last week.
‘It’s just definitely put a damper on my reputation, but, you know, it’s a choice I made, and I’m just going to stick it out.’
The 27-year-old now earns six figures a month on the platform – far more than she ever made from music.
Another big name on the site is former teen heartthrob Austin Mahone.
The pop star, now 29, was signed to Republic Records as a teenager and touted as the next Justin Bieber, but his pop career never quite took off.
Much like Rose, Mahone joined OnlyFans in 2020 during the Covid pandemic and is still active on the platform, despite attempts to relaunch himself as a country artist.
While doing OnlyFans can bring in big bucks for its celebrity creators, the site still comes with a stigma.
After Nash launched her account, some of her longtime fans were far from impressed with her side hustle.
‘Sex work may be “clever and funny” to you but many women have no choice but to sell their bodies and that’s the reality of sex work tbh,’ wrote one fan.
Another commented, ‘Pornography will never liberate women.’
Nash defended herself at the time, stating the importance of women ‘being in control of their bodies’ and claiming to ’empower women’ with the move.
However, she also admitted that her OnlyFans venture was fueled by the struggles of being a working artist in today’s economy.
‘Are you sad music has little to no value? Would you be interviewing me or writing about me or talking about me if I had simply posted “going on tour, the business is s**t, help me protect my employees and integrity of my show!” Would my tour be on the front page of Reddit two days in a row? F**k no it wouldn’t,’ she wrote.
‘My a**e is shining a light on the problem. Honestly I’m such a legend for this.’
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