Reading some stuff about Michael Jackson, and something interesting that has come up amidst the articles is roughly what MJ was making per year from endorsements and royalties/residuals.
Here’s a mindblower for you. A-Rod and Jeter each make more money yearly on their endorsements + salaries. Not double, but more than marginally and definitely not less. Hedge fund managers and investment bank partners blow all these people out of the water in earning power. As quoted, “A magnitude of difference.”
And so someone posed the question, “If music is so broken that Michael Jackson, of all people, cannot pull in more than a low-to-mid eight figures a year, in this economy, then why would anyone want to enter the system?” True, you could be the 10th best band in the country this year, and stick in the top 20 for the next five years, and you will not become wealthy. You will have a flood of income that gets stripped with taxes and consultant fees (your manager, your lawyer, your publicist, your decorator, your stylist, etc.), and then all which is left is probably not enough to secure the future in a nice apartment in NYC. Effortless life? Hardly. You will either be working for a very long time, or compromising heavily on purchases/assets/expenses. That’s if you’re exceptionally popular and successful!
Meanwhile, some dickhead CDS titan is making enough to have a huge spread in the Hamptons and have a helicopter drop them off at South Street each morning for the daily commute. This person is not doing anything suitable for the economy other than pushing some money around, playing Gordon Gekko all day… certainly there is a value in financial services but for the most part these people are sucking money out of the economy that would go into reinvestment, growth, workers’ equity… and let’s not even get started on the CEOs! That’s the real trickle down economy right there. The trickle is upward… except it’s more like a river, because these guys are first in line for profit taking and they came to the party with very big straws.
So, in a very scary way, the most successful person in music was doing exactly what he should have with his money, which was to basically have a ball and buy the finest things a man-child could buy… except the economy changed and he went from being Paul McCartney-rich to being Justin Timberlake-rich and no one said anything about it. That is why Michael Jackson’s estate is in extreme debt, and that is an indicator of how downwardly-mobile the rest of us are.
