VAN HALEN, RUSH, JOURNEY Make BILLBOARD’s ‘Music’s Top 40 Money Makers’ List
VAN HALEN, RUSH and JOURNEY have made Billboard magazine’s “Music’s Top 40 Money Makers” list, compiled by measuring touring revenue, music sales, publishing royalties and other streaming and on-demand figures. VAN HALEN hit #4 with $20.2 million, thanks to a tour gross of $54 million from just 46 shows. The band’s first album with singer David Lee Roth since “1984”, “A Different Kind Of Truth”, registered 620,000 in physical album sales in 2012 and more than 213,000 in digital sales.
“When it comes to making the biggest score, the most money always comes from high-paying live performances,” Billboard’s editorial analyst Glenn Peoples wrote in explaining the list.
“Ironically, the most popular touring artists are usually well past their peaks on the album sales charts.”
Billboard said streaming music online to paying customers has not caught on with older generations and was small in percentage terms but growing. “Yet even in the coming years, as streaming services become a more important revenue source, possibly replacing digital downloads and CD sales, one thing is unlikely to change: concerts will have the greatest influence of top earners’ overall earnings,” said Peoples.
#4 – VAN HALEN
$20,184,709.91
#22 – TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA
$9,959,362.28
#28 – RUSH
$8,719,834.30
#35 – JOURNEY
$6,983,106.58
Source: E-prog
