Forbes confirms music billionaires for 2024

After ranking the world's richest musicians ranked by net worth last month it’s already time to sense check the top end of that list.  We can do so against the just issued Forbes World Billionaires List 2024. Forbes used a wide range of data, information, and sources including personal interviews to collate their worldwide list of everyone with a net worth of one billion US dollars or more as of March 8, 2024.

The Forbes list records 2,781 billionaires with a combined wealth standing at $14.2 trillion. The top 14 people listed are worth $100 billion or more in 2024. That’s an awful lot of wealth owned by a very small % of the world population.

As we explained last month, the list of musicians in the billionaires list is relatively short. That's confirmed by this new 2024 list which has just three musicians. And even there, two of the three have gathered a hefty part of their wealth from other non-music sources. 

Three billionaire musicians in 2024

Those three are:

• Jay-Z $2.5B
• Rihanna $1.4B
• Taylor Swift $1.1B

Both Jay-Z and Rihanna have substantial earnings from investments and other businesses. Taylor Swift breaks yet another record as she enters the billionaires list this year. After the first parts of her record-breaking The Era’s World Tour are taken into account she becomes the first musician to have a net worth attributable solely to songwriting and performing. 

The music industry is very broad though. If we look beyond actual musicians the music world is still represented in the billionaires list. There are three more billionaires with closely linked to music through record labels.

• David Geffen who started his own record labels, Asylum, Geffen, and DGC Records, and also established Dreamworks films is high on the list with a wealth of $8B. 
• Clive Calder is listed at $2.7B. Caldera cofounded the Zomba Group and Jive, which had Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys, amongst others, on their books. 
• Bang Si-hyuk has a wealth of $1.8B from his Hybe group, previously Big Hit Entertainment, a huge record label in South Korea.

That’s six closely linked to music billionaires worldwide for 2024. As our previous list explained there are others very close to that level and near to breaking through. Both Taylor Swift and Rihanna have done so since the 2023 list, replacing the late Jimmy Buffett at that top level. Who will be next?

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