Apparently selling headphones and resurrecting your dead friends (in hologram form!) are lucrative business ventures. Dr. Dre is Forbes Magazine’s richest musician for the year 2012 (via Billboard. Dre, in addition to back catalog sales and commanding a hefty fee for appearing at Coachella made a killing when electronics company HTC bought a 51% share in his Beats headphone brand. How much of a killing you ask? Something to the tune of $100 million dollars, bringing his total pre-tax earnings to roughly $110 million, a figure which obviously does not include sales for Detox.
So, what other filthy 1%ers made the list and are therefore better than you in every way, shape, and form? Old dudes Roger Waters ($88 million), Elton John ($80 million), and U2 ($78 million) as well as aging British boy band Take That ($69 million) round out the top five, but unlike Dre, made almost all of their money from long international tours. The rest of the list pretty much falls in line with your expectations, except for Jay-Z. You’d think that owning a small percentage of a mediocre basketball team in the Cool Capital™ of the world would net you some more cash.
A word of advice to all you struggling musicians out there: invest in branding your own line of over-priced, sub-par headphones. It’ll do wonders for your bank account and, really, touring is for the birds.
You can check out the complete list in terrible slideshow form straight from Forbes or the Billboard link above for a more easily digestible format.