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.
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.
"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."
This comparison to gig work is insightful. OnlyFans is also way more scalable being a broadcast, one-to-many, medium.
"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."