01/14/2022
The music industry doesn’t expect many popular songwriters to emerge in the future, so the trend in recent years has been to buy up all the song rights of aged rock stars for massive sums. So, the highest income musician for a recent year is not the most popular long-run musician, but whoever did the biggest onetime cash in for selling his song catalog that year. From Variety:
Bruce Springsteen Tops 2021’s (Nearly All-White Male) Highest-Paid Musicians List With $590 Million
By Jem Aswad
The pandemic may have completely up-ended the music industry’s traditional business model, but artists found all kinds of ways to make many millions of dollars in 2021 — and the big winners were nearly all white and male, according to a “10 Highest Paid Musicians” list published by Rolling Stone on Friday.
The list, created by former Forbes correspondent Zack O’Malley Greenburg, not surprisingly features several artists who cashed in their song catalogs for nine-figure sums last year, with the big leader being Bruce Springsteen, who not only sold his publishing and recorded-music rights to Sony Music in December for a figure sources say was around $550 million, but also was the rare performer to make a healthy sum from live performances, with his “Springsteen on Broadway” summer reprise.
Seven of the 10 made the list based on catalog sales, with the only exceptions being Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Taylor Swift, who had big years either with non-music ventures like West’s Yeezy shoe empire, Jay’s sale of his half of his champagne line, or a bounty of heavily streamed and sold music, like Swift’s four albums released in just 18 months (along with lucrative partnerships with Peloton and Starbucks). Also notable is a previously undisclosed $50 million catalog deal from Blake Shelton.
And in a sad reflection of the state of the world, apart from those exceptions, the list is all older white men — with Stevie Nicks, who struck a $100 million catalog deal with Primary Wave, just missing the cutoff.
If only white men hadn’t written so many songs that people still enjoy decades later, the world would be a better place.
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