Kesha – yes, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack Kesha – is now a startup founder. But if you think her journey from raunchy pop star to CEO is unexpected, then you haven’t been paying attention.
Kesha has always embraced contradictions. She exploded onto the pop scene in 2010 with irreverent ear candy like “Blah Blah Blah” and “TiK ToK,” stylizing her name with a dollar sign despite throwing shade at the egregious wealth of Hollywood. She didn’t let people dismiss her as a one-dimensional, glitter-clad party girl. As beleaguered high schoolers studied for exams amid Kesha’s rise to fame, they whispered in frustration about how the world’s most famous party girl got a near-perfect score on the SAT, but turned down a full-ride to Barnard College to sing about peeing in champagne bottles.
The biggest contradiction of Kesha’s story is that despite living the dream of a pop star on the surface, her years in the spotlight were nightmarish behind the scenes. Now, drawing from her own experience suffering at the hands of predatory record contracts, Kesha is building an app called Smash, which is a way for musicians to find one another, make music together, and establish clear, artist-friendly contracts among collaborators.
Smash aims to set itself apart by using a built-in system to generate contracts between artists. The terms of the contracts depend on what each artist decides — for example, a musician may decide to license a beat for set fee, or request a percentage of royalties over time. Smash would fund itself by taking a small cut of payments made through the app.
“One of the pieces of leverage, especially over younger music creators, is you need a way into the club,” Kesha’s brother and Smash co-founder Lagan Sebert told TechCrunch. “With Smash, we want to give music creators the keys to get into this club of professionals and other creators without them feeling like they have to sign anything away, or make any large decisions about the rest of their lives.”
After establishing herself as a powerhouse pop star, Kesha sued her producer Dr. Luke in 2014 for alleged sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. He immediately countersued her for defamation, sparking a high-profile legal battle and reckoning with the dark side of pop music.
Though Kesha sought to get out of her recording 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 chosen very intentionally — that Kesha released an album without Dr. Luke for the first time. But regaining her own artistic agency isn’t enough. Now that she is a fully independent artist, she wants to help ensure that other young musicians don’t fall victim to exploitative record deals like she did.
“One of the things that really motivated her was when she went through this long legal battle to regain the rights to her voice, regain rights to her music,” Sebert said. “I think the motivation behind Smash more than anything was to try to give music creators access to the community they need to create music independently.”
Building the Band
If Kesha and her brother were going to build an app, they were going to need some technological expertise.
Years ago, Kesha attended an ACTAI Ventures event and met Lars Rasmussen, who co-founded Google Maps and was one of the first investors in design unicorn Canva. The two stayed in touch, and when it came time to build Smash, Rasmussen introduced her to Alan Cannistraro, who would become the app’s CTO.
Cannistraro spent over 12 years at Apple, where he worked on products for creatives like Final Cut; he also managed a team of engineers to build the first ever apps for iOS, like Remote, iBooks, iTunes, and Podcasts. He went on to start Rheo, a social video startup, but he has always had an interest in music.
“In the late ‘90s, when my friends were all using Napster, I was saying to them, ‘What the hell, you like this music, why are you screwing the artist?’” Cannistraro told TechCrunch. “It’s always just been 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 app as part of Rasmussen’s Panathēnea festival in Greece.
“Smash is a community platform for music creators. It’s a place where you can go to connect, to create, and to hire, all while retaining the rights to what you create,” Kesha said at the festival. “The goal is to shift the power back to the hands of the creators.”
“The contracting is safe — it’s all transparent, and then you get to choose, and you get consent over where your art and where your voice goes, and how it goes into the world, all while retaining the rights to what you have just created,” she added.
The Smash app remains a work in progress, intending to open to some artists later this year. But to test some of the tech tools that the company has created thus far, Smash hosted a contest where artists could submit remixes of Kesha’s song “Boy Crazy” — the five winners of the contest will have their remixes released on Kesha’s record label for what Sebert calls an “industry standard remix fee.”
“I regained the rights to my voice back for the first time in my adult life about one year ago, as a 37-year-old woman,” Kesha said at Panathēnea. “Predatory deals like that are normal.”
