Taylor Swift not only made more money than every other musical artist in 2015, she made every other musical artist look like a wretched little match girl pleading for change outside a shuttered Barnes & Noble.
Swift earned $61.7 million from touring (compared to Chesney’s $38.1 million, a tiny pile of change probably collected from within a discarded sofa). She earned $4.1 million in publishing royalties (compared with Chesney’s $313K, a figure so minuscule that you wouldn’t bother to pick it up if you saw it sitting on the street, because it’s not worth the effort of bending over).
She also hauled in $7.2 million in album sales, probably with no small amount of help from Ryan Adams, who transmogrified her already incredibly catchy album 1989 into a lachrymose masterwork. Who helped Kenny Chesney, aside from the family of field mice faithfully employed as his roadies?
Other runners-up include Billy Joel, One Direction, Grateful Dead, U2, the Rolling Stones, Adele and some other broke nobodies. If you stacked each of them toe-to-head on top of one another, they’d still find themselves unable to so much as glimpse Swift’s aerie, even if you equipped Mick Jagger with a long-range telescope and adjusted the focus for him.
Taylor Swift is not a human. She is a statue made of solid gold tautly wrapped in human skin.
Photo via Getty.
