In 2007, Kate Nash released a hit song about a gradually decaying relationship. Until Nov. 21 of this year, the lyrics to “Foundations” might as well have described the pop singer’s own worn-out connection with the live music industry, whose high production costs were literally putting her in debt. So Nash had a brilliant idea: Why not fund a tour by selling pictures of her bare butt on OnlyFans in a campaign called “Butts for Buses”?
If you’re feeling bad for Nash, don’t. For one, the 37-year-old singer-songwriter, who broke through a decade and a half ago with her U.K.-chart-topping debut album, Made of Bricks, has a self-proclaimed “great derriere” that “gets a lot of compliments.” By charging $9.99 per month on OnlyFans, she has more than comfortably funded her ongoing 9 Sad Symphonies U.K./Europe tour: She tells Rolling Stone that her financial issues were “solved in seven days.”
Nash has earned so much from OnlyFans in such a short time, in fact, she’s currently dreaming up future projects she can fund with her butt. “It’s very exciting, my butt enterprise,” she jokes. “I need to get a [corporate] name. I need to get ‘Butts for Buses’ on a credit card.”
To be clear, Nash has plenty of fans on streaming platforms (she currently has 972,983 monthly listeners on Spotify), and she regularly sells out venues around the world. But like so many career musicians who release music and tour consistently, Nash loses money with every live show. She estimates each performance costs her about $10,000 in production, including backing musicians, a stage crew, and potentially a sound engineer — components she doesn’t want to scrimp on and risk losing out on a show’s quality. Coupled with the rise in dynamic ticket pricing (which fluctuates based on demand), stagnant performance wages, and the skyrocketing cost of travel, accommodations, food, and gas, Nash was in a sinkhole of debt just for doing her job.
“I have a really successful career,” Nash tells me over FaceTime. “I’m talking about career [artists] — bands and artists that are not in stadiums and arenas but have thousands and millions of fans. I can tour the world. But I cannot make a profit from those tours. I’m in the red. I’m losing money. What the fuck is up with that?”
Ultimately, she says, the high costs of touring are a labor issue. “It’s the same problem as what’s happening to people at home with gas prices and everything going up. It’s the same millionaires making everything shit for everyone… I could play a venue now that I played seven years ago and be paid the exact same amount, but what I’m paying to make that show happen has gone up.”
Nash has a workable solution in mind for the deep inequality afflicting the music industry. As Nash lays out, if £1 of every stadium and arena ticket sold could be diverted back to what the U.K.-based charitable organization Music Venue Trust calls “grassroots venues” (spaces with a 350 and under capacity), it would add about £30 million a year to mid-size or indie performance spaces, many of which are currently being forced to close. According to Music Business Worldwide and the Music Venue Trust, in 2023 an average of two live music venues shut down each week in the U.K., totaling about 125 venues that year. There are no firm numbers of closures available in the U.S., but industry experts agree that a similar crisis is approaching.
“I personally value musicians and gigs across the board, not just at the highest level. Fans do as well,” Nash says. “In France, a levy has been implemented for over 10 years, and the taxes bring in about €30 million a year to support French music [and] musicians. It’s simple, the rest of us should follow the French model that’s already been proven to work.”
In addition to funding her tour, getting on OnlyFans online has been a source of personal liberation — not to mention a handy protest tool. “I mean, [look] what’s happening in fucking America,” Nash tells me. “It’s more important than ever for women to have agency over their fucking bodies, to be able to do what they want, to be empowered, and to make statements that are powerful about female sexuality.”
Since Nash launched her OnlyFans page a month ago, she shot to the site’s top percentile of content creators, and she says she’s brought in more income in one week than she does in a month on music streaming services. (OnlyFans pays creators 80 percent of their earnings, as opposed to Spotify paying artists .$.003 and $.005 per stream.) Likewise, her Instagram followers went up by 10,000 in one week, and she’s given interviews in every major U.K. media outlet. “Because it’s kind of scandalous, you know, the sex appeal of it,” she says, adding, “No one would be talking to me if I just posted a tour poster and said, ‘Touring is really hard right now, your support would mean a lot.’”
Kate Nash poses in London with the fire truck that featured her butt.
Emily Marcovecchio
With or without the media chatter, Nash’s campaign has undoubtedly taken on a life of its own. Little more than a week after launching her OnlyFans — and mere hours before performing a sold-out show at KOKO in London — Nash teamed up with Save Our Scene U.K. to put a giant poster of her bum on a traveling fire truck, which made stops at the London offices of Live Nation and Spotify, and the House of Commons.
Nash says she felt inspired by former Top of the Pops host Gail Porter, who in 1999 had a nude photoshoot projected onto the Houses of Parliament without her consent as a publicity stunt for the magazine FHM‘s “Sexiest Woman” poll. (Porter had consented to the photo shoot, but not to her image being projected this way.) “She was really hot on the front of this magazine, but she didn’t get paid for the shoot. She was exploited,” Nash says. “It had bad consequences for her… And I just was like, ‘I would love my bum [to be] projected on the House of Commons. It’s such a punk statement and sort of a ‘fuck you’ image to the music industry. [I thought] it would be a cool way to reclaim that story.”
The singer wasn’t able to literally project her naked butt onto the U.K.’s legislative body, but putting it on a fire truck and sailing through London in a pink thong sure sounds like a great alternative. She still wants to get her butt onto the House of Commons, among other places. “I want a billboard of my OnlyFans in Times Square where those Spotify billboards always are,” she says. If she succeeds, Nash can likely expect a wave of praise and encouragement from fellow musicians and everyday fans. “People were cheering me on in the streets,” Nash says of her fire truck stunt. “People care. We’re all sick of hearing about millionaires trying to fucking ruin everything. Late-stage capitalism is at the point where if you’re an artist like me, you should be able to walk away from a tour with profit.”
Nash isn’t the only pop artist on OnlyFans, either. Every article breathlessly discussing Nash’s tush has also name-dropped fellow Brit Lily Allen, who has an OnlyFans account dedicated to feet pics. (Less discussed but still worth mentioning: Everyone from Kathleen Hanna to Courtney Love to Cardi B did exotic dancing early in their careers.)
When a social media follower criticized Allen, writing, “Imagine being one of the biggest pop stars/musicians in Europe and then being reduced to this,” Allen’s response mirrored Nash’s points about the music and entertainment industry: “Imagine being an artist and having nearly 8 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.”
For all of the media admiration, there are still detractors who view any act of selling one’s body – even consensually – as fundamentally oppressive. In a Nov. 30 op-ed, The Independent asked, “Is OnlyFans really ‘female empowerment’ – or is it damaging to women?” In response to feminists who view profiting from consensual, ethically produced nudity as repressive, Nash reasons: “We’re all very indoctrinated. I think that we’re all quite oppressed sexually, anyway. I think our minds are affected by Christianity, and religion seeps into the history of ‘women can’t really have pleasure.’”
She continues: “I just don’t understand the mentality of a woman who would try to speak for all women. As a feminist, I think the point of feminism is, ‘you can’t define me.’ It reminds me of the TERF thing. Just stop telling people what they can or can’t be. You can support sex workers and fight exploitation within the sex work. As a feminist, that’s actually what you should do. You should empower women and then help them when they’re exploited… You can like sex and not like porn, but why would you try to dictate [whether] porn should or shouldn’t exist for women that want to watch? It’s an argument that doesn’t make sense to me, and it very much doesn’t make sense within feminism.”
U.K. lawmakers are currently arguing for changes in the live music space, including the proposed stadium ticket levy. Earlier in December, the U.K. government revealed a deadline for the music industry to respond to that proposal, with Sir Chris Bryant MP (Minister of State for Media, Tourism and Creative Industries) writing in a letter: “We want to see a voluntary levy on arena and stadium tickets come into effect as soon as possible for concerts in 2025. To meet this timeline, we want to see tangible progress across the music industry by the first quarter of 2025.”
Meanwhile, in addition to manifesting a Times Square bum billboard (“Email me,” she says to any potential placard investors), Nash is planning to ask Lisa Nandy, the U.K.’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, to discuss the issue over tea and cake. “[Nandy] could be the most important person in music in a decade in the U.K.,” Nash says. “She could push us through to changing how things are in the live arena and how things are in recorded music to make things more ethical. It’s in her hands. I’m championing her to be the hero, because we need her. She’s our savior.”
Ultimately, the issue of small venues shuttering and indie-to-mid-tier acts being unable to perform is something that affects everyone who loves music, whatever their income level. “Someone asked me, ‘What is the worst that could happen?’ And my joke is, if bands can’t afford to tour, venues won’t stay open,” Nash says. “If all of them close, and we [only] have stadiums and arenas, and we just watch shiny concerts for a few years, everyone’s going to start missing a bit of edge. What we’re going to bring back fucking gladiators, with a few poor people killing each other in a stadium for a laugh.”
She laughs. “I’m sort of joking. We want to watch musicians at all levels. And there’s a way to fucking fix it. Don’t let this late-stage capitalism fucking destroy the one thing we all can fucking agree on: We like going to a gig, and we like listening to fucking music.”
