Swift, 35, has seen a personal windfall equal to that figure in just the past 19 months alone. Her net worth currently stands at US$1.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, up about US$300 million from October 2023, when she was in the middle of her blockbuster Eras Tour that made her a billionaire for the first time. The updated estimate doesn’t reflect her recent catalogue acquisition.
A spokesperson for Swift didn’t have a comment on her net worth.
While Swift has framed her fight to reclaim her earlier work as a deeply personal pursuit, she also now stands to profit from licensing her songs in the future.
“She’s in the 1% of artists who have the leverage to work out deals her own way,” said Ralph Jaccodine, a professor of music business and management at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. “She can license them and all the money comes back to her. She can give them away. She can do whatever she wants with her copyrights.”
See also: China’s global income tax crackdown expands beyond ultra rich
Swift’s first six albums were sold by Big Machine Label Group to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in June 2019 as part of a larger deal and then resold to Shamrock Capital the following year. That prompted Swift to announce that she would re-record her earlier work — the source of the now-ubiquitous “Taylor’s Version” — in an effort to undercut the originals’ popularity.
In a letter on her website on May 30, the singer said she now controls all of her work, including photography, album art, videos and unreleased songs. Swift’s recordings are among the most valuable assets in the music business.
“You watch the Taylor documentaries, you see when she’s sitting at the piano and really working hard on her songwriting that she cares about her art very, very passionately,” said Josh Gruss, CEO of private equity music rights platform Round Hill Music. “So for her to own this stuff outright, it’s probably very meaningful for her, I’m sure.”
See also: Over 90% of Single Family Offices make allocations to private equity: report
At a time when many artists don’t own the masters of their work and can’t fully leverage their recordings, Swift is one of the rare few who stand to gain from the ongoing popularity of her chart-topping hits. In addition to the first six albums, she owns the master recordings of five new albums made since 2018 and four re-recorded albums.
The bulk of Swift’s fortune comes from the value of her catalogue and profits from ticket sales and merchandise. Bloomberg estimated in October 2023 that the latter was worth US$370 million and that was before she completed the Eras Tour.
Touring is especially profitable for musicians since their cut of gross ticket sales is much higher than from streams or album sales and they also receive revenue from merchandise sales. During the 21 months of the Eras Tour, Swift sold more than $2 billion worth of tickets and roughly 10 million people attended her shows. She also received an estimated US$130 million before taxes from the concert film she executive-produced, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. — Bloomberg
