Kesha is now a startup founder

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Kesha may have taken the dollar sign out of her name, but now, the singer is thinking about money again — not for herself, but to fund the seed round of her new startup, Smash.

According to Kesha’s Instagram post, Smash will be a “community-based platform to connect and protect music creators,” which aligns with the mission of her new eponymous record label, which she announced last year.

The 38-year-old chart-topper has always been more than a glitter-clad party girl singing about brushing her teeth with Jack Daniel’s. Beneath her infectious 2010s pop music is a darker story — one in which she felt stripped of her power, both as an artist and a person, by a predatory record deal that she signed when she was a teenager.

After a traumatic public legal battle with her producer, Kesha now says that she is a “free woman,” and she’s making new music. Both her label, Kesha Records, and the app Smash seek to help others make music without compromising their creative rights.

“I want a place where artists and music makers of any kind can have community, they can collaborate, they can hire each other and retain all the rights to everything they create,” Kesha said in an interview with WIRED. “There’s no gatekeeping of contacts.”

She went on to describe the app as “LinkedIn for music creators,” or a “Fiverr-style marketplace.” The difference is that Smash plans to prioritize artists’ rights at every stage.

Kesha’s CTO on the project is Alan Cannistraro. He spent twelve years at Apple building some of the first iOS apps, then worked at Facebook, where he built the Year-In-Review feature. He left to start a social video platform called Rheo, which TechCrunch covered in 2016.

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