Kesha – yes, Brush my teeth with a bottle of jack Kesha – is now a starting founder. But if you think her journey from Raunchy Pop Star to CEO is unexpected, then you have no attention.
Kesha has always hugged contradictions. She explained to the pop scene in 2010 with wicked ear candies, such as “Blah Blah Blah” and “Tik Tok”, which shapes its name with a dollar sign, despite throwing a shadow in Hollywood’s intense wealth. She did not let people reject her as a one -dimensional girl with shine. As senior students were studied for exams in the midst of Kesha’s rise to reputation, whispered with frustration over how it got the most famous girl in the world a nearly perfect score on SatBut he rejected a complete stroll to Barnard College to sing to fly in champagne bottles.
The biggest contradiction of Kesha’s story is that despite the fact that she lived the dream of a pop star on the surface, her years were nightmares behind the scenes. Now, drawing on her own experience suffering in the hands of predator contracts, Kesha builds an application called Breakingwhich is a way for musicians to find each other, make music together and establish clear, artist -friendly conventions between collaborators.
Smash aims to separate using a built -in system for creating contracts between artists. The terms of the contracts depend on what each artist decides – for example, a musician may decide to grant permission for a pace for a defined pay or to request a percentage of rights over time. The Smash would finance itself by taking a small cut of payments made through the application.
“One of the pieces of leverage, especially above the younger music creators, you need a way to the club,” said Kesha’s brother and co -founder Lagan Sebert in TechCrunch. “With Smash, we want to give music creators the keys to enter this Association of Professionals and other creators without feeling that they have to sign anything far away or making great decisions for the rest of their lives.”
After installing herself as a pop powerhouse star, Kesha sued her producer Dr. Luke in 2014 for suspected sexual, physical and emotional abuse. He immediately reacted to defamation, triggering a high profile battle and calculating with the dark side of pop music.
Although Kesha tried to get out of her contract with Dr. Luke, the court ruled against her, forcing her to release three more albums with him.
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It was only this month – on July 4, a date that was very deliberately chosen – that Kesha released an album without Dr. Luke for the first time. But recovering her own art service is not enough. Now that he is a fully independent artist, he wants to help ensure that other young musicians do not fall victim to exploitative bids as he did.
“One of the things that really prompted her was when she went through this long legal battle to regain the rights to her voice, to regain her rights to her music,” Sebert said. “I think the motivation behind the smash more than anything else was to try to give music creators access to the community they need to create music independently.”
Creation of the band
If Kesha and her brother were to build an application, it would need some technological experience.
Years ago, Kesha attended an Actai Ventures event and met with Lars Rasmussen, who founded Google maps and was one of the first investors in Unicorn Canva. The two were in touch and when it was time to build the Smash, Rasmussen introduced it to Alan Cannistraro, who will become the CTO of the application.
Cannistraro spent over 12 years in Apple, where she worked on creative products such as a final cut. He also managed a team of engineers to build the first iOS applications, such as remote, iBooks, iTunes and podcasts. He continued to start Rheo, a social starting video, but he was always interested in music.
“In the late 1990s, when my friends used to all use Napster, I was saying to them,” What the hell do you like this music, why are you screwing the artist? “Cannistraro in TechCrunch.” It’s always in my value system that artists need to be supported. “
When Kesha, her brother Lagan and Cannistraro started working together, Rasmussen became one of their first investors. Kesha even announced the application as part of the Rasmussen Panathēnea Festival in Greece.
“Smash is a community platform for music creators. It is a place where you can go to connect, create and hire, while maintaining the rights to what you are creating,” Kesha told the festival. “The goal is to shift the power back into the hands of the creators.”
“The contract is safe – it is all transparent, and then you can choose, and you get your consent to where your art is going and where your voice goes and how it goes to the world, all keeping rights to what you just created,” he added.
The Smash application remains ongoing, aiming to open some artists later this year. But to try out some of the technological tools created by the company so far, Smash has hosted a competition where artists could submit remixes of Kesha’s song “Boy Crazy” – The five winners of the competition will release its remixes at Kesha’s record label for what Sebert calls “industrial standardized remuneration”.
“I returned the rights to my voice for the first time in my adult life about a year ago, as a 37 -year -old woman,” Kesha told Panathēnea. “The predatory bids as is normal.”
