Dr Dre dominated this list last year, raking in an unbelievable $620m during the calendar year. It was the highest total grossed by a musician ever, thanks in large part to his deal to sell off his Beats brand to Apple.
However, after a cozy year at the top, Dre drastically falls down the pecking order. Forbes’ list for 2015 has a new queen, and her name is Perry.
Katy Perry’s earnings were in a huge part attributable to her Prismatic world tour, which went on for an unprecedented 17 months. The singer earned $135m over the calendar year.
One Direction finished second, whilst the seemingly invincible Taylor Swift could only finish fourth.
According to Forbes, “to form our list, we looked at pretax income from June 2014-June 2015 from concerts, record sales, publishing, endorsements and other business ventures. As usual, we did not deduct fees for managers, agents and lawyers. We used data from Nielsen SoundScan, Pollstar and RIAA, and information from industry sources including some of the artists themselves.”
Katy Perry already topped the earlier released list of the top earning female musicians for the year.
See the top ten list of highest earning musicians below…
- Katy Perry: $135m (£90m)
- One Direction: $130m (£86.7m)
- Garth Brooks: $90m (£60m)
- Taylor Swift: $80m (£53m)
- The Eagles: $73.5m (£49m)
- Calvin Harris: $66m (£44m)
- Justin Timberlake: $63.5m (£42m)
- Diddy: $60m (£40m)
- Fleetwood Mac: $59.5m (£39.6m)
- Lady Gaga: $59m (£39.3m)