Forbes have up a new article with the top earning musical acts of 2017. Red Hot Chili Peppers tied with Paul McCartney for 13th place with $54 million. Metallica came in 10th with $66.5 million, while Guns N’ Roses were the only rock act to edge out Justin Bieber with $88.4 million, unless you consider Coldplay a rock band.
1. Diddy ($130 M)
2. Beyoncé ($105 M)
3. Drake ($94 M)
4. The Weeknd ($92 M)
5. Coldplay ($88 M)
6. Guns N’ Roses ($84 M)
7. Justin Bieber ($83.5 M)
8. Bruce Springsteen ($75 M)
9. Adele ($69 M)
10. Metallica ($66.5 M)
Below is an excerpt from Forbes‘ article:
“Artists don’t really make the money off the music like we did in the Golden Age,” explained The Weeknd–No. 4 on the list with $92 million, most of it from his latest Live Nation advance. “It’s not really coming in until you hit the stage.”
Indeed, touring is a massive piece of the earnings pie for most big-name acts: of the world’s 25 highest-paid musicians, only Taylor Swift (No. 17, $44 million) and Jay-Z (No. 19, $42 million) didn’t play an extensive amount of shows during our scoring period (though the latter is now touring his latest album and the former is set to do so throughout 2018).
To form our list, we considered pretax income from June 1, 2016 through June 1, 2017, and did not take out fees charged by agents, managers and lawyers. We gathered data from Nielsen SoundScan, Pollstar, the RIAA and interviews with industry insiders.
