Tara Isabella Burton
speaker
213 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 26 Dec
Tara Isabella Burton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
feasible for middle class artists to sort of you know strike a middle ground where it's like if you're not a Taylor Swift if you're not a Beyonce if you're just trying to play small clubs and theaters and you know be able to come back home and work on an album that's becoming less and less possible so I think we're seeing a larger financial discrepancy within the music industry and
And it's becoming harder and harder for middle class artists, especially those who don't have a financial safety net. And again, I think this was one of the big things we saw during COVID.
You know, one of the musicians that I interviewed, Lizzy Ngo, who's now on OnlyFans, she told me during COVID she was going to medical trials as a way to pay her bills because like some of her friends in the music industry, she didn't have family money or she didn't have like, you know, a cabin upstate where she could just go hang out and write music while she was writing out the pandemic.
So I think these inequities in the music industry are are becoming more and more stark.
Yeah, it's super complicated because, like you said, I think OnlyFans took out sort of the studio middleman for a lot of people who did some kind of sex work or who did pornography. And it made it a lot safer for them. And we've seen that when major celebrities join the platform, it can really hurt their bottom line.
A couple of years ago, former Disney star and singer Bella Thorne joined OnlyFans. She broke records, right? Because like so many people subscribed to her within her first 24 hours. She made all this money. Then there was like allegations that she wasn't sharing the kind of content she had promised. A bunch of people asked for refunds.
And even though, you know, OnlyFans issued statements to other outlets saying that it was not related to Bella Thorne, but shortly after all of this happened... they changed policies. So they, like, capped how much fans could tip creators. They changed payout structures.
And sex workers were very, very upset because they felt that someone like Bella Thorne, who, you know, is probably not what's called a survival sex worker, like, she doesn't depend on sex work to pay her bills, as far as we know, to eat, you know, on a day-to-day basis. She could sort of, like, dabble in and out of OnlyFans.
And it has real material impacts for everybody else who really depends on that, you know, to make a living. So... I think it's a sliding scale because obviously someone like Kate Nash or Lizzy Ngo, who's one of the other singers I interviewed, I don't think they're crashing OnlyFans in the same way that Bella Thorne did.
But definitely when you see a huge celebrity join the platform, it can have very real implications for quote-unquote regular sex workers who don't have all these fans and all the support behind them, and that can really hurt them financially at the end of the day.
The music industry could become a place where only the wealthy and only the ones who have this incredible financial safety net can be creative and can express themselves. We lose a lot if those are the only people who are afforded those opportunities.
Yeah. I mean, I think the understanding is that like in the 1990s, again, pre-streaming, like you could record an album, you know, your music, your physical music would sell when people wanted to listen to it. It would get radio play. If your song gets included in a movie or a TV show or a commercial, that's a really big payout for artists.
You could tour and make a significant amount of money from that. You would sell merch, make a significant amount of money from that. And I think the idea is that you were comfortable enough, like maybe you weren't you know, rolling in money or maybe you were still kind of living paycheck to paycheck, but it didn't feel like you were drowning the way that it seems like some musicians feel today.
Like Lizzy Ngo was telling me she toured
for ten and a half months and came home and was like I have all this amazing press written about me but I need to go back on the tour tomorrow if I want to pay my rent next month which also if you're a musician when are you supposed to have time to like to record and write songs yeah how are you going to pay for studio time when do you have down time to like be a human being and focus on making more art to go back out on the road you know
I mean, I think music is something most of us love and enjoy and we find a lot of meaning in. I think, you know, just like any other workers in America, the people who make the music that we love and listen to deserve to make a comfortable living. They deserve to have a comfortable lifestyle.
And I'm not saying, like, everyone should be a billionaire, but I think, you know, it is concerning to think that, like, The music industry could become a place where only the wealthy and only the ones who have this incredible financial safety net can be creative and can express themselves. We lose a lot if those are the only people who are afforded those opportunities.
And I also think when we're talking about like a middle class artist in the 90s, like you used to not also have to be a full time content creator to be a musician.
Right. There's so much added work from the fact that now it's like you have to be making TikToks and you have to be building an Instagram following and partnering with brands. And definitely some of that comes with a payout. But I think we're just expecting more and more and more of the artists that we love. And with that comes like
we have all these kinds of new parasocial relationships with the artists that we love as fans because we're so used to having free access to them on social media.
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