Billboard has released their list of Music’s Top 40 Money Makers of 2013. Here’s how our reality show grads/judges fared on the list. Plus, a rundown of the Top 10. Via Billboard.com
Now a bonafiide arena act, it’s no surprise that Carrie Underwood ranked the highest.
16. Carrie Underwood – $11,942,965.65 – Now a bona fide arena-level headliner, Underwood’s career is clicking on all cylinders, topping 1 million in physical units and nearly 400,000 digital album sales and 5.5 million digital downloads. (She’s just behind Taylor Swift, who is at 15)
30. One Direction – $7,955,840.71 – With two No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 last year, U.K. boy band One Direction earned most of its revenue from album sales. More than 2 million physical albums sold earned the group $3.8 million.
33. Maroon 5 – $7,159,923.53 – Behind Taylor Swift, Maroon 5 sold the most digital tracks of 2012, with 13.3 million, earning the band $2.4 million. In addition to hitting No. 2 on the Billboard 200, Maroon 5’s 2012 album, Overexposed, was its first release to generate three top 10 singles on the Billboard Hot 100.
40. Blake Shelton – $5,914,591.11 – Shelton has certainly benefited from the visibility he’s received as a coach on NBC’s “The Voice.” The country star spent much of last year touring, which earned him $3.1 million. The release of his 2012 holiday album, Cheers, It’s Christmas, which debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard 200, also added to his $2.2 million in revenue from album sales.
Here’s the Top 10 Money Makers – The Top 4 are legacy acts who made a ton of dough touring.!
1. Madonna – $34,544,308.62 – Thanks to the material girl’s MDNA tour.
2. Bruce Springsteen – $33,443,606.64 – TOURING
3. Roger Waters – $21,160,131.06 -Thanks, touring!
4. Van Halen – $20,184,709.91 – That TOUR
5. Kenny Chesney – $19,148,525.24 – The most successful touring act in country music history
6. Dave Matthews Band – $18, 903, 334.14 – Phillip Phillips daddy makes consistent megabucks from touring.
7. Tim McGraw – $18,329,167.89 – He toured with no. 5, Kenny Chesney
8. Jason Aldean – $17,578,651.96 – 73% of his revenue comes from touring
9. Coldplay – $17,300,144.34 – They had a successful world tour on the heels of a popular album and singles.
10. Justin Bieber – $15,944,293.10 – His “Believe” tour did very well
Here is the methodology Billboard use to compile the numbers, because I know you’ll be asking about that! – The data used to compile Moneymakers was supplied by Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen BDS, YouTube and Billboard Boxscore. Artists are ranked by U.S. earnings, and Billboard calculated a variety of income streams, including touring, recorded-music sales, publishing royalties and revenue from an array of digital music and video services for downloads, as well as on-demand and noninteractive streaming. Due to a lack of sufficient data, our figures don’t include revenue from sponsorships, merchandise sales or synchronization data.
For album and track sales, we assumed a royalty rate of 20% of retail, minus producers’ fees. We treated all streaming revenue as derived from a licensing deal and thus split that revenue in half to calculate the artist’s take. We also applied corresponding statutory mechanical rates for album and track sales and the Copyright Royalty Board-approved formulas or rates used for the various streaming channels, and further estimated the share of songs written by the artists. For all artist revenue, we subtracted a manager’s fee of 10%. For box office, we credited each artist with 34% of gross receipts, typically what’s left after the promoter’s fee, the artist manager’s cut and other costs are subtracted.
