Having retired from her rap career in 2023, Iggy Azalea says she is now concentrating on her next career as a crypto entrepreneur.
In an interview with ABC's Nightline, the 35-year-old Aussie says her pivot to becoming a businesswoman came from a desire to regain control of her life.
“I think a big part of the last ten years of my life, honestly, have been about getting that control back for me: To be able to navigate my own ship in those ways," she tells host Ashan Singh. "It feels really good to be able to do it.”
In the interview, Singh questions Azalea about why she chose to leave music, after topping the charts in the 2010s with hits like "Fancy" (with Charli XCX), "Black Widow" (with Rita Ora) and "Problem" (with Ariana Grande).
“[It was] a battlezone, and I was stepping on landmines left and right," she admits. "I just…couldn’t survive it. It’s not survivable.”
While she had a string of hits to her name, Azalea also faced backlash after she was accused of cultural appropriation, including the adoption of a "blaccent."
Azalea admits that she "chose to be a white woman and come and be in a black space," but as she's gotten older feels she made some "horrible f**king takes" and was caught in "a bad, perfect storm" in her early 20s.
"I think sometimes I regret having an opinion at all because it wasn't necessarily my place to have an opinion," she explains.
Now out of the music industry, Azalea made headlines last year when she began a partnership with the OnlyFans subscription service.
While she rejects the rumours that she made a reported $48 million from the site, she says it was "a little lower," calling it “life-changing” money."
That success allowed her to co-found Unreal Mobile, a wireless provider and launch her own cryptocurrency called crypto token $MOTHER.
“It seemed to me that, especially with meme tokens, they were central to virality, and that really interests me, obviously,” she explains. “I think I have been pretty successful at it.”
As for music, she says she does get tempted, but knows she's not interested in revisiting that industry and its demands.
"Sometimes I'll have the itch," she says. "'I need to get in the studio, I miss it.' [But] I don't want to be a slave to that cycle of promotion..."
Watch the interview below.