Lily Allen Makes More Money from OnlyFans Than Spotify

ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to Not The Onion@lemmy.world – 481 points –
Lily Allen says she earns more money from feet pics on OnlyFans than Spotify
consequence.net
144

Damn, spotify truly is a scourge to artists.

The entire music industry is built to grift money from musicians and Spotify is a second layer of musician grifting industry built on the first.

You know what, you've convinced. Your specific suggestion of 'guillotine' was particularly compelling.

Yep, spotify pays a fraction of what napster, tidal, and apple music pay while raking in record profits each year.

Some years ago, an artist who was not a mega-star but was on all the major music services published an article detailing how well each one paid. I'm now kicking myself for not bookmarking it. I clearly remember Spotify being among the worst, if not the worst.

The musician I saw last week mentioned that he'll get more money if you buy a CD from him now than if you stream his catalog on spotify for the rest of your life.

Snoop Dogg said he got 45k for a billion streams.

Holy shit. I have feet. Does anyone want pictures of a guy's feet? They're big and weirdly shaped.

I'm positive there is an audience for men's feet, but if you aren't 5 stars on wikifeet, you'll probably have to market yourself. Study the foot fetish community to find out what the dude foot fan needs more of. Etc.

Is there any way I can do this without finding out any more about this fetish?

Hmmm...the problem is, even if you just post pictures at random, you're going to find out unwanted info based on what pics bring in money. Sounds like you'd need a manager!

You can even call me a foot doctor, because I help rappers with defeat.

5 stars on wikifeet

Something about this part of your post made me giggle.

I wear a men's 14. Basically the DD's of feet. My wife says I'm not allowed to show them off for free so get our your wallets folks.

I'm a big feet man and damn is it annoying when I go to a rollerskating or ice skating rink and the largest size they rent is 13 :(

You feel my pain. Literally! Last time I had to cram my feet into size 13 ice skates it sucked some of the fun out of it.

What’s up fellow size 14s!

I often joke that I’m the person happiest that malls have died off because as a kid I was always forced to go there and try on a a bunch of 12s and 13s that never fit.

These days I’m still upset that so many good looking shoes only go up to 13

I've got a toe shaped like an alien. Maybe that's worth something!

I have a small bag of nickels. Tell you what, I'll even throw in a rubber ducky.

Me too, the one next to my big toe.. On both feet.

I think the estimated by billboard is fucked up but yeah the article seems completely broken

I'm a girl, in a healthy BMI and with nice hair, pretty and freckled face, but my feet are super crappy. Like, crusty, toes bend at weird angles, hard skin in random places. Even my own husband is like "plz no, stop" if they get too near to him.

I'm now wondering if there's a market on the other end of the scale...

There is. There’s a fetish for everything. Certainly when it involves your feet, I’d ask your husband if he’d be ok with some internet strangers paying you every month to see your feet, the worst is he says no, and on the other hand if he says yes you have a second source of easy income

He'd probably have empathy pains for any future subscribers.

It is my firm belief that, given a proper pitch, ANYTHING can be sold at a profit.

Also, there's rule 34: If a thing exists, it's someones fetish.

If it exists there is porn of it... Not sure where you got that other version from

You can probably extrapolate from "if it exists, there is porn of it (no exceptions)".

If there is porn of something, the most likely reason is that someone has a fetish for it.

If the person making the porn doesn't have a fetish for said thing, then they're making it for an existing market of people.

QED, you can say "if it exists, someone has a fetish for it"

P.S: What if there isn't porn of something? Rule 35 states that if it doesn't exist, it will be made.

You have fundamentally misunderstood millennial meme culture ca. 2006 (roughly when the rules were made).

No one having a fetish for it would be extremely motivating to create such porn. People realized after it was made that they had a fetish for it. See: Shrek.

So technically you can still say "if it exists, someone has a fetish for it" but you've relied on correlation to determine causation and gotten it backwards. This is a great example of why we don't do that.

Just because you can extrapolate something from it, doesn't mean you can change the words in the rule. They got the rule wrong, simple as that.

I used to know a dude that would have gotten hard at your written description here. No bullshit. Dude was obsessed with feet, and what he called "real feet" were his particular favorite. Feet that had seen some life, had been used was one of the few things he would talk about. Literally obsessive about feet.

I guarantee he is not the only one. The only question is if there's enough like that to make any useful money out of a feet only business.

There's something about foot fetishists that's extra obsessive compared to any other fetishists I've run across over the years.

I wonder how onlyfans pay model works. If they take a percentage and you don't need to put any initial funds down to start then you'll basically have nothing to lose.

See, I can kinda get it for some elegant and well kept ones and I'd definitely down for some foot play in such cases. But I don't know if that would even classify as a foot fetish when I constantly hear about how bad people have it for the (pardon) "ugly" and unkempt ones, which I just find weird.

But yeah... I mean, there's like 8 billion people on this planet. There's always some niche where one fits into that would get someone off and could be capitalized if they'd be willing to do so. Just keep in mind that you're, in the end, still selling your body for sex in a way.

To be honest, I'd rather sell my body for sex instead of selling my body to backbreaking warehouse work

Post pictures of them on Onlyfans.

Add the caption "Listen up, degenerates. I'll only warn you once. I will release a new photo, closer than the previous, every hour, on the hour, until my subscriber goal is met."

Some people just don't like feet / being near them etc. Had girlfriends who would freak out if we somehow touched feet (even with socks on).

Due to the people being people, who knows who has what kinks. I suppose there is only one way to find out.

And no, I'm not into feet myself.

Maybe, but do you really want someone jerking off to video of your super crappy feet?

I'm indifferent, especially if I get money to distract me from it.

The article contradicts the heck out of itself.

Says billboard estimates she earns roughly $4k a day from Spotify streams. Then they speculate she makes roughly 8k a month from OnlyFans.

That would be like $120k a month from Spotify and $8k a month from OnlyFans.

That is FAR from more money from OnlyFans. Even if those numbers are hugely off I don't see how the discrepancy would be THAT large.

That also happens to be exactly the kind of math error AI is notorious for making. I bet the article was written by AI and likely not even proofread by a human.

Or it wasn't making any kind of claim and just posting what the celebrity claimed and providing estimated revenue from both service based on what she claimed. Why are you falsely blaming this on AI for no reason?

The article didn't contradict itself since it did not make the claim that she made more money from Only Fans, the celebrity did. They just posted the estimated revenue from both services which doesn't match up with what she said. The only conclusions we can come up with is either their estimation is completely off or she was exaggerating her example.

Am I missing something? Does it not say she makes an estimated $4000 per DAY from Spotify and $8000 per MONTH from onlyfans?

https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/lily-allen-feet-pictures-make-more-money-spotify-streams-1235811354/

Allen’s daily stream count on Spotify as of Oct. 17 was about 851,623. Assuming that number is correct, the Music Streaming Royalty Calculator estimates Spotify would’ve paid a total of $4,077 a day, with $3,239 going to sound recording for the copyright owner; $336 of mechanical royalties going to the publisher, who pays the songwriter; and $503 in performance royalties going to performance rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, etc.).

Which of these numbers goes to her? I'm just confused, I think.

Everybody likes to hate Spotify but if they pay out 4000 dollars a day and the artist gets nothing, that doesn't sound like Spotify is the main problem.

That's pretty well known. They cut shitty deals with the record labels so they can have a large library. The record companies are making massive bank on Spotify, unlike pretty much every other party involved, including Spotify.

There's a definite industry problem, but that doesn't excuse Spotify.

Apple Music pays artists 50-100% more than Spotify do per play, and Tidal pay triple to quadruple. Even Amazon pay artists more than Spotify; only YouTube is worse.

An unknown and probably pitiful fraction of $336, by the looks of it.

$336 of mechanical royalties going to the publisher, who pays the songwriter

Ok I did a little searching. She might get some of the $336 to the publisher/songwriter, but only if she is credited as a writer. Not every song is written by the artist. There doesn't seem to be anything in that breakdown that goes to the artist specifically. The bulk of the money is going to the copyright owner, who is often the record company, and seems to be who owns her songs. It seems like whatever she gets paid would be up to whatever contract she signed with them.

This pdf file explains that a typical major label artist might make 18% of the $4077 per day.

https://www.manatt.com/Manatt/media/Media/PDF/US-Streaming-Royalties-Explained.pdf

If she makes $266 a day from onlyfans, she has to be making around 8% of the $3,239 the record company is getting daily for it to be less than onlyfans.

$503 in performance royalties going to performance rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, etc.).

Performance rights organisations would pay her for performing. She's get a fraction of that.

She’d owe a dollar at the end of each day. Which means she would lose money being on Spotify.

If those are the numbers I don't see why people are complaining about Spotify, the problem doesn't seem to be there

The article is missing the content from the quoted article for the 4,000 a day. It pays out 4,000 a day to the studios and publishers, whatever actually % of that she gets is probably less than 10.

That’s what the article says. So sounds like Lily is full of it.

1 more...

I wonder how much her record label makes from her music on Spotify...

Industry average is 2/3 goes to the label 1/3 goes to the artist.

Hmm, so we may have a culprit in the case of the missing money.

And although I like Lily, she's not really done a lot of music recently, and was never really that big outside the UK.

Spotify itself takes an even bigger cut

I wouldn't really call it "missing" while it seems kinda shocking at first that labels take that much of a cut, people don't really realise just how many people are involved in music production. From marketing to designers to video editors, social media teams, managers that get them interviews and talk shows and spots at festivals etc. And then all the overhead that comes with those jobs, so finance, HR, IT and facilities etc.

So 1/3 is actually pretty decent and a much bigger cut of the profits than most people get from their labour.

Something I've noticed in British media as of late is that OnlyFans makes some serious money - enough so that a creator can essentially use local journalism as an outlet for promoting their page.

I doubt some of the figures, but if you were to dig into them you'd probably see that number after the media have basically told people "look! Lily Allen has OnlyFans!"

Alongside that, funny enough, OnlyFans is probably one of the UK's biggest tech success stories. They make a lot of money, have only a few employees, and are basically leaders in their field. That's probably another weighing towards this being a promo piece.

Do they make that much? I read only top creators do. Especially those who are already famous from other fields.

The previous commenter is saying that the company makes serious money.

What's fun is that some people who read this article are probably into feet (good for them!) so it's like an ad and now she'll probably make even more on onlyfans. While still making ludicrously little from spotify.

While still making ludicrously little from spotify.

"Allen’s daily Spotify earnings are $4,077, or about $1.4 million per year."

If that's "ludicrously little", I want to be as poor as she.

What's her cut of that? If she gets all of it, then, yeah.

What’s her cut of that?

I don't know, you made the comment that she's "making ludicrously little from spotify", so you should know.

Also, nobody should care because: "Allen’s most recent album, No Shame, dropped in 2018." Those are royalties for doing no work since then. She got paid handsomely by the record company for the distribution rights. She gets paid handsomely whenever she's on concert. Ongoing royalties are a BS concept.

I wish I was still getting paid for work I did 6 years ago...

You have a point, but remember that musicians aren't getting an hourly wage when they record an album.

Also, major record companies seriously screw artists. They give them an advance, which is basically a loan, that is supposed to include the costs of recording the album. If the album tanks, the artist is in debt to the record company. It's ruined people who's debut album didn't chart.

Same. :( People should send me money every time they walk into a room I worked on.

She makes next to nothing from putting previous works on spotify, and more from keeping previous pictures of her feet on onlyfans. There's another article that we were discussing further down, about the likely percentage artists get, but that wasn't your point, since you think she should get nothing from both spotify and onlyfans. I assumed you were questioning my numbers, but you think the number should be lower, so you were questioning my use of the word "ludicrous." I get it now!

My main disagreement is that I'm positive now that all that 4000/day does not go to her, so she is probably not lying about the number difference. She does still make plenty off some old music in other ways, of course. To a ludicrous degree perhaps? No?

since you think she should get nothing from both spotify and onlyfans

I don't know where you got that "both" from.

Regular people don't get royalties for their work either. Factory workers who assemble ovens don't get a cut from each meal a restaurant cooks, for example. Those filthy rich musicians, Hollywood actors, etc. keep leaving out that they've already been paid millions for their work. They leave out that they sold the publishing rights to record companies. They act as if they earned less than you and me. They are doing absolutely fine. No need to fight for a right to better royalties or anything like that. If they need more money, they can just make new music.

Seeing how this thread is full of hate for Spotify by seeming large number of people who are fans of streaming music/podcast services, I'll pos this question here:

What are the better alternatives for someone seeking to get their favored audios, in terms of library selection, able to form custom playlists and how much if any support to the artist/content creator actually gets to them and what is pocketed by the app?

I don't think there's all-in-one best option

library size

Deezer

how much is paid to the creator

Bandcamp

Tidal, or buy albums and self host if you're up for it but I feel like that's not a real option for most.

Self host and buy the albums

How big is the percentage artists get for the album really though?

At a recent (niche) music festival, they said it takes 50,000 streaming songs to pay the artist as much as a single CD sale.

That is a complex question but my line of thought is this: artists have accepted legal agreements on how to sell/stream their work and how much they get for it. You as a consumer don't need to worry about this. If there is a way to buy/stream the product legally then the artist has approved of getting money that way.

Basically i don't think this should be a point to discourage buying audio and owning it. The alternative is never owning music and tough luck if a song gets pulled because of legal disputes or whatever.

tough luck if a song gets pulled because of legal disputes or whatever.

This is the thing I hated about Google Play Music. I had some playlists where half of the songs were missing due to various issues between Google and the music labels.

Go to their concerts, buy the official merchandise and get CD’s or pay the whole albums like on qobuz (they also have streaming, but they sell hi-res flac)

Streaming is not designed to benefit the artist

There are none.

All of the services steal from artists, so I'd recommend ripping MP3 tracks from Youtube. There are several tools online for this purpose. Yes, the artist gets nothing, but the more important thing is the services stealing from the artists don't get anything either.

Do this and then compensate the artist in other ways. Buy music directly from them if you can, or buy their merch, or something of that ilk.

I'd recommend ripping MP3 tracks

This is how you end up with a library of very low quality tracks. YouTube's compression isn't great.

Yes, the artist gets nothing, but the more important thing is the services stealing from the artists don't get anything either.

Why do you feel that YouTube is different to those other services? Does YouTube pay more per view than Spotify pays per listen?

I doubt the artists agree with your take.

Totally, man.

I'm sure they miss the two bucks a year they get off Spotify more than they like the $25 they get for a t-shirt from me.

The thief is Daniel Ek, and no one knows that better than recording artists.

If you really do that with every artist you listen to then sure.

Buy CDs, rip them to FLAC, and self-host something like Plex + Plexamp. Plexamp is a very nice app, but I'm sure there's others.

Perhaps this just means people value her feet more than music? I'm not into feet, but I really didn't like her music, so maybe this is reasonable.

Not really. It just means onlyfans pays more than Spotify... which seems obvious to me??? A direct subscription to an artist vs only a few cents per play... yeah, no brainer, the artist is going to make less money in the latter deal.

The article is just garbage, it says it's estimated she makes 4k a day with Spotify and 8k a month with OF

The article didn't claim she made more money on OnlyFans than on Spotify, Lily Allen did. They just then provided the estimated revenue from both services using the numbers claimed by her. It could be that they used the wrong estimation for one or both of the revenues, but what's more likely is that Lily Allen exaggerated her example.

It’s worth noting that Allen doesn’t actually claim she earns more money from OnlyFans than Spotify. “imagine being and artist and having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on spotify but earning more money from having 1000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet. don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

According to the singer, the decision has already paid off, as her monthly revenue from the subscription site has surpassed her Spotify income.

Seems like she claims monthly revenue from OG surpassed Spotify revenue.

The reporting doesn’t match her statement.

Which reporting?

That reporting. Imagine her quote was an answer to a yes/no question. “imagine being and artist and having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on spotify but earning more money from having 1000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet. don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

From creating toe tappers to taping her toes.

Who?

Theon Greyjoy's sister

Is it weird that I used to think the reverse? Alfie was Lily's brother, and a nepo baby. I be damned if he didn't earn it though. Also, my first thought was the woman who played "Asha" was not Lily Allen.

I love how the whole crowd of people that used to be all "what, you don't have a Spotify account?!" Are now starting with the "wait a minute, these guys are domineering and bad!" Like the signals for crowd abuse aren't plain as day.

This exploitative behavior will be down by literally any company that sets themselves up to be "the streets" that you gotta navigate to interact with someone else or their media. That means YouTube, Facebook, and also all those physical places on Earth.

I had a 6 month trial of Spotify for $1 so I thought I'd try it to see if it would help me discover new music. It only has about 70% of the albums in my collection. I wasn't willing to lose 30% of my music so it's back to USB in the car and plexamp everywhere else.

USB in the car and plexamp everywhere else.

Why not Plexamp in the car too? If you don't have great mobile data, in Plexamp you can download playlists for offline playing.

I prefer to use native music app in my car. The same music is on USB. I use the same rsync script to copy media to USB drive and my plex server. I did just have a rental for two months and it had android auto which supported plexamp.

So come on over, what you waiting for?

No strings attached, no you won't be ignored!

We could be family; you'll be comfortable

Ever expanding; fully functional!

You won't have to answer to anyone!

You'll always have room to breathe!

We all worship at the house of fun!

We are the well intentioned!

We only fight in the name of peace!

My dumbass didn't think "damn Spotify doesn't pay artists"

Instead I immediately thought "damn more people are paying for their onlyfans than listening to their music"

OnlyFans reportedly takes 20% of subscription revenue

That's a mobster-loanshark level cut.

Leaving you with 80% of the revenue you, yourself, directly generate is unheard of in this day and age. If you have anything like a 9-5, you're probably getting around 10-20%. The rest goes to all your bosses, and most importantly of all, the company shareholders.

If you have anything like a 9-5, you're probably getting around 10-20%.

My wife works as an associate attorney (a lawyer that's not a partner, meaning they don't own the company they work for) and I think she makes maybe 1/4 of what the company bills clients for her time. Of course, some of the money would go towards things like property taxes for the office, bills, etc.

And that's not as bad as someone working in big tech who may make a decent salary (senior developer at Google or Meta is around $270k/year salary plus $300k/year stock) but the company may make hundreds of millions of dollars per year from your work.

20% is considered low

All others take at least 30%

Maybe. Without it, though, the individual would have to build and maintain a site, direct traffic there, and handle payments, as well still do all of the community management and content creation they already do. Now either they'd spend their own time doing this if they have the knowledge, or pay others, which might meet or exceed that 20% depending on their income level.

This would mean something if anyone knew who she was as an artist

That's wild, I guess she was only popular in Europe? She had a bunch of big hits around 2010, like "Fuck You" which was about George Bush

I'm American and I knew about her. Smile was at least a modest hit.

I said above that the album that was on, Alright, Still, is a really good album.

Edit: from Wikipedia-

Alright, Still debuted at number 20 on the Billboard 200 in the United States, with first-week sales of 34,000 copies.[51] The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) awarded the album a gold certification on 6 December 2007,[52] and by November 2013, it had sold 627,000 copies in the US.

That's a bit less than half of UK sales, which is pretty good for a British artist in the U.S.

Would it? Another way to word this might be "Platform with 8,000,000 monthly streamers/listeners pays less than platform of 1,000 subscribers to view pictures."

I don't think this individual's identity enters into it at all. That sentiment comes across as a deliberate, mean-spirited attempt to denigrate this person.

Whether or not selling pictures of one's anatomy is a viable career, or a morally questionable career, or any questions along these lines are a separate discussion. This article to me points out the drastic discrepancy in two services, yet again calling attention to the issue of artists and their earnings when utilizing Spotify as a distribution platform.

Another way to word this might be "Platform with 8,000,000 monthly streamers/listeners pays less than platform of 1,000 subscribers to view pictures."

Think about it for a minute and it becomes pretty clear that shouldn't be surprising at all

You subscribe directly to someone on Onlyfans, you subscribe to Spotify as a whole and your listening habits help split the bill. If both are ~10 bucks a month of course one is going to make you more money than the other

Especially if they're a lesser known artist. Even if they're getting listened to, if the same people listen to 3x as much swift or whatever that will impact the lesser known persons earnings

This article is a dog shit way to bring attention to Spotifys issues, simple as

I'm haven't searched yet but I don't know who this is.

Cultural fragmentation is definitely a big thing when it comes to music these days