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Artist News
Madonna tops Billboard’s list of US pop earners
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 25 February 2013
While digital revenues, whether download or stream-based, are booming, and a solid online base is ever more important for artists, if you want to be amongst music’s biggest earners it pays to be [a] an old man and [b] a major concert draw. Or at least that’s what we can take from Billboard’s review of the most commercially successful artists in the US in 2012.
Of course Madonna, at number one in the 2012 US earners list, isn’t a man, and the artist at the other end of the top ten, Justin Bieber, isn’t old, though much of the rest of the ten most profitable American acts last year were of the aging male variety – though if the survey also took artists’ corporate and brand partnership earnings into account, the list might have looked more diverse.
An artist’s ability to pack out some of America’s biggest arena and stadium venues plays a key role in this poll. Of the revenues counted in Billboard’s Top 40 big earners, 68.9% comes from live. And if you remove Adele and Taylor Swift from the proceedings (who are at eleven and fifteen respectively despite not touring), that figure moves up to 72.5%.
Check the full top 40 and other Billboard analysis of the stats here, or just quickly digest the top ten big earners in American music below, complete with each artist’s US earnings…
1. Madonna ($34.6m)
2. Bruce Springsteen ($33.4m)
3. Roger Waters ($21.2m)
4. Van Halen ($20.2m)
5. Kenny Chesney ($19.1m)
6. Dave Matthews Band ($18.9m)
7. Tim McGraw ($18.3m)
8. Jason Aldean ($17.6m)
9. Coldplay ($17.3m)
10. Justin Bieber ($15.9m)
