Kesha – Yes, brush your teeth with a Jack Kesha bottle – now the founder of a startup. But if you think her journey from a gross pop star to CEO is unexpected, you’re not paying attention.
Kesha has always embraced contradictions. She exploded into the pop scene in 2010, with impolite ear candies like “Blah Blah Blah” and “Tik Tok.” She didn’t let people dismiss her as a one-dimensional, sparkly, covered party girl. When high school students studied for the exam in Kesha’s fame, they whispered in frustration about how the world’s most famous party girl achieved near perfect scores in the SAT, but then turned down a full ride to Bernard University and sang about champagne bottle pee.
The biggest contradiction in Kesha’s story is that despite living the dream of an ostensibly pop star, her year in the spotlight was a backstage nightmare. Drawing from her own experiences currently struggling at the hands of predatory records contracts, Kesha is building an app called Smash. This is how musicians find each other, make music, and establish clear, artist-friendly contracts among collaborators.
Smash aims to stand out themselves by using embedded systems to generate contracts between artists. The terms of the contract vary depending on what each artist decides. For example, a musician may decide to license a beat at a set fee or request a royalty percentage over time. Smash funds itself by reducing the small amount of payments made through the app.
“One of the leverage, especially beyond younger music creators, is that there’s a need for a path to the club,” Kesha’s brother and co-founder of Smash, Lagan Sebert, told TechCrunch. “With Smash, we want to provide music creators with the key to joining the clubs of professionals and other creators.
After establishing himself as a pop star in the country, Kesha sued producer Dr. Luke in 2014 for alleged sexual, physical and emotional abuse. He quickly rebutted her for a honour and lost her, causing a famous legal battle, and considered the dark side of pop music.
Kesha attempts to break out of her recording agreement with Dr. Luke, but the court opposes her and forces her to release three more albums with her.
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This month was the very intentional date of July 4th that Kesha first released an album without Dr. Luke. But reclaiming her own artistic agency is not enough. She is a completely independent artist, so she wants to ensure that other young musicians don’t fall victim to exploitative record trading like her.
“What really motivated her was when she went through this long legal battle to regain her voice rights and regained her musical rights,” Sebert said. “I think the motivation behind Smash above all was to ensure that music creators have access to the community they need to create music independently.”
Building a Band
If Kesha and her brother were trying to build an app, they needed some technical expertise.
A few years ago, Kesha attended the Actai Ventures event, met Lars Rasmussen, who co-founded Google Maps and was one of Design Unicorn Canva’s first investors. The two were in touch and when it was time to build a smash, Rasmussen introduced her to Alan Canistrolo.
Cannistraro spent over 12 years at Apple where he worked on creative products like the final cut. He also managed a team of engineers to build their first apps for iOS, including Remote, iBooks, iTunes, and podcasts. He started out with Rheo, a social video startup, but he was always interested in music.
“In the late 90s, when all my friends were using Napsters, I was telling them: “It’s always been my value system that I needed to support artists.”
When Kesha, her brother Lagan and Canistraro began working together, Rasmussen became one of their first investors. Kesha has announced the app as part of Rasmussen’s Panasnare Festival in Greece.
“Smash is a community platform for music creators. It’s a place where you can connect, create and hire while maintaining the rights to what you create,” Kesha said at the festival. “The goal is to bring power back to the creators’ hands.”
“The contract is safe – it’s all transparent, you can choose, and you agree on how it goes to the world, while maintaining the rights of what you created as to where your art is, where it goes to the world and how it goes to the world,” she added.
The Smash app is planning to open to some artists later this year and remains a work in progress. However, to test some of the high-tech tools the company has created so far, Smash has hosted a contest where artists can submit remixes of Kesha’s song “Boy Crazy.” The five winners of the contest have called the remix “Sebert Standard Remix Fee” on Sebert’s record label.
“Around a year ago, as a 37-year-old woman, I regained my right to voice for the first time in my adult life,” Kesha said in Panasnare. “That predatory transaction is normal.”
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