With her Smash application, Kesha can be the person she wants – even a CEO of technology

Kesha – Yes, “Brush my teeth with a bottle of jack” Kesha – is now founder of startup. But if you think that his trip from the hot pop star to the CEO is unexpected, then you have not been careful.

Kesha has always adopted contradictions. She exploded on the pop scene in 2010 with irreverent ear candies like “Blah Blah Blah” and “Tik Tok”, styling her name with a sign of a dollar despite the shadow on the flagrant wealth of Hollywood. She did not let people reject her as a one -dimensional girl and dressed in glitter. While the lycée besieged studied for exams in the middle of the Kesha’s renown, they whispered with frustration on the way the most famous festive girl in the world obtained an almost perfect score on the SAT, but refused a complete trip to the Barnard College to sing about the pee in the bottles of champagne.

The greatest contradiction in Kesha’s history is that despite the dream of a pop star on the surface, his years under the spotlight was nightmarish behind the scenes. Now, based on his own experience suffering from predatory disk contracts, Kesha builds an application called Smash, which is a way for musicians to find each other, make music together and establish clear and friendly contracts among employees.

Smash aims to stand out using an integrated system to generate contracts between artists. The terms of the contracts depend on what each artist decides – for example, a musician can decide to concede a license for a beat for fixed costs or to request a percentage of fees over time. Smash would finance itself by taking a small reduction in payments made via the application.

“One of the elements of leverage, in particular on the creators of younger music, is that you need a path in the club,” said Kesha’s brother and co-founder of Smash, Lagan Sebert, in Techcrunch. “With Smash, we want to give music creators the keys to enter this club of professionals and other creators without them feeling as if they had to sign anything, or make big decisions about the rest of their lives.”

After being established as a powerful pop star, Kesha continued his producer, Dr. Luke, in 2014, for alleged sexual, physical and emotional violence. He immediately opposed it for defamation, triggering a high -level legal battle and counting with the dark side of pop music.

Although Kesha sought to get out of her registration contract with Dr. Luke, the court ruled against her, forcing her to release three other albums with him.

It was not until this month – on July 4, a date chosen very intentionally – that Kesha released an album without Dr. Luke for the first time. But finding your own artistic agency is not enough. Now that she is a fully independent artist, she wants to help ensure that other young musicians are not victims of exploitation offers as she did.

“One of the things that really motivated her was when she crossed this long legal battle to find the rights over her voice, find the rights of her music,” said Sebert. “I think that the motivation behind Smash more than everything was to try to give the creators of music access to the community they need to create music independently.”

Build the group

If Kesha and his brother were going to create an application, they were going to need technological expertise.

Years ago, Kesha attended an Acta Ventures event and met Lars Rasmussen, who co -founded Google Maps and was one of the first investors of the Unicorn Canva design. The two stayed in contact, and when the time came to build Smash, Rasmussen presented it to Alan Canistraro, who would become the CTO of the application.

Canistraro spent more than 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 applications for iOS, like distant, iBooks, iTunes and Podcasts. He then started Rheo, a social video startup, but he has always been interested in music.

“At the end of the 90s, when my friends were all used Napster, I said to them:” What do you like this music. Why kiss the artist? “”, Told Canstraro at Techcrunch. “It is always fair in my value system that artists must be supported.”

When Kesha, his brother Lagan and Canistraro began working together, Rasmussen became one of their first investors. Kesha even announced the application as part of the Panathēnea festival in Rasmussen in Greece.

“Smash is a community platform for music creators. This is a place where you can connect, create and hire, while retaining the rights to what you create,” Kesha said during the festival. “The goal is to return power to creators.”

“The contract is safe-everything is transparent, then you can choose, and you get a consent to the place where your art and your voice goes, and how it happens in the world, while keeping the rights on what you just created,” she added.

The Smash application remains a work in progress, with the intention of opening to certain artists later this year. But to test some of the technological tools that the company has created so far, Smash has organized a competition where artists could submit remixes of the Kesha song “Boy Crazy” – the five winners of the competition will be published on the Kesha disk label for what Sébert calls a “standard remix of industry”.

“I found 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. “Predatory offers like this are normal.”