Transcription
It's official. Taylor Swift is a billionaire.
Welcome to the Eras Tour. Her Eras Tour alone is a party, generating hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a multinational conglomerate with the world's most devoted customer base and an ultra-charismatic CEO. Never before have we ever seen an artist put multiple stadium shows on sale in the same city and blow them all out. But how much of the money has gone into that CEO's pocket? We've crunched the numbers to come up with the most definitive account yet of Taylor Swift's wealth. And here it is.
Bloomberg has a team that tallies up how much the world's wealthiest people are worth. It's based on careful calculation and analysis of all their income and assets. Taylor has become a billionaire not just because people like her songs, but because of a lot of smart business decisions that she's made over the years.
Taylor Swift is a phenomenon, but she's hardly the first billionaire in the music industry. There's the record label scion David Geffen, there’s Jay-Z, Rihanna, the late Jimmy Buffett and plenty of others. While those billionaires use their fame as the foundation for other business ventures, Swift has made her fortune almost exclusively from her music. She has really come out openly about the importance of controlling your music and owning your music as an artist.
So, where exactly does her wealth come from? Let's start with streaming. The rise of Spotify, Apple Music and others has created a resurgence in the recording industry. We estimate that her total income from streaming is $175 million. Clearly not a number to sniff at, but one reason it's not bigger is because of the way royalties are distributed. Typically, what happens is artists don't own the masters of their music, but they get royalties from it. The owners of the masters generally keep 4/5 of the royalties, while the copyright holders, the composers and lyricists, keep the rest.
So what Taylor has done recently and has been a very smart business decision is to rerecord her albums and then own the masters of those. So with this rerecording exercise, she's kind of taking back control of her music. She's reclaiming ownership of it, but she's also diluting the value of the masters to the first six albums that are originally out there.
Swift also took the battle to the streamers themselves. So in 2014, Taylor Swift pulled all of her music off of Spotify. She did it in protest of what she said was unfair compensation from the streamer. That gave her the upper hand when she renegotiated her rates to join Spotify again in 2017.
She's also done a great job in promoting physical album sales online through Twitter, Instagram, other social media networks. So, fans have an incentive to buy physical records. She's leveraged social media and kind of connecting with fans, getting to know them on a personal level, sharing information about herself, kind of creating this intimacy which has created this really, really powerful fan base who connect with her. Bloomberg estimates Swift has made $125 million over the years from record sales.
She also made strong strategic choices at the negotiating table. In 2018, she left her longtime record label, Big Machine, to go independent. She negotiated a new contract with Universal Music Group in 2018 that allows her to take a larger share of the royalties.
The biggest part of her earnings is undoubtedly her concert revenue. Taylor Swift's concerts have generated at least $1.6 billion, and that is only ticket sales, that’s not including merchandise. She's done six tours over the years since 2009. Most recently, the Eras Tour. It came right as everyone was starved for live events. People were coming out of the pandemic and really wanted a chance to gather in person and celebrate. And there are people that are willing to spend anything and everything to get a chance to see her. A splurge, for sure. But I got to do it. We've just been trying without mortgaging the house. Of course, she doesn't keep all of that money. We estimate that Taylor nets about 35% of the ticket sales as profit, about $500 million from touring over the years.
Her tours, her record sales and streaming royalties are all earnings. But she also has assets, including her recording catalog. There's the masters’ rights, then there’s the publishing rights. Catalog is a collection of songs all grouped under one artist. Every time a song in this catalog is played, it generates a royalty, which goes back to the owner. Swift doesn't actually own the first six albums of her catalog. It's now owned by a fund called Shamrock Capital. She's rerecording those albums, meaning she'll get both more streaming revenue and a more valuable catalog. We estimate that her catalog is worth about $400 million.
Then, of course, there's her actual property. That includes a condo and an estate in Nashville, an estate in Los Angeles, a large apartment in Tribeca in New York City, as well as a summer house in Rhode Island. The Rhode Island property is interesting because it's not really a typical haunt for celebrities or pop stars. It's an old world, sort of old money part of the country. But it is kind of in keeping with Taylor Swift's image of the sort of girl next door, a little bit of a homebody. In fact, she's also, has hosted fans there in the past and baked them home-baked cookies at this property. Making bulk batches of chocolate chip and toasted coconut cookies. The total value of her properties is about $110 million.
Subtract her expenses, taxes, staff costs and so on, and you get a net worth of $1.1 billion. This was a huge year for Taylor Swift that tipped her into a new echelon. But with the 33-year-old having just set a concert film record and the international leg of her tour getting underway, she may only be getting started.