Blogocentric Formulations

Counting billionaire chickens before they're hatched

I just read an article from Hello! Magazine (already an auspicious start to a blog post ) titled, "The Billionaire Club: Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift - How They're Singing All The Way to the Bank," and it included some pretty staggering assumptions about Dua Lipa's music. If you haven't heard the Taylor Swift side of this, she recently became a billionaire thanks to her wildly successful Eras Tour, which put her over the line and into the ten-figure net worth club.

This article starts with the sentence, "Forging the way for other young female performers, Dua Lipa is on track to become a dazzling new addition to the exclusive dollar-billionaire club, following in the footsteps of fellow pop star Taylor Swift by hitting a ten-figure fortune in a male-dominated industry. Traditionally, the billionaire club is the province of industrialists and businessmen, but now one of the most successful female artists in showbusiness could be joining trailblazer Taylor in their ranks."

Here's the problem... last I checked (which was quite recently because I looked it up for this blog post), Dua Lipa's net worth is somewhere around $35 million as of 2022. Apparently some new "wealthiest celebs" list this year says it's £75 million (about $94 million USD according to Google's currency converter). Which is certainly an accomplishment in and of itself. But saying someone is "basically already a billionaire" because they have less than 1/10th that amount of money now is kind of like someone who runs a 5K saying, "I'm pretty much a marathon runner already."

It turns out, the article's argument is this:

Displaying a business savvy as sharp as her songwriting, 28-year-old Dua, who ranked 21st in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List for under-35s, with an estimated worth of £75m, could hit the billionaire mark after parting ways with her former management company. She has bought the rights to her publishing catalogue and joined forces with her businessman father, Dukagjin, known as Dugi, to set up a company to manage all her commercial assets. “Essentially, the move has echoes of Taylor Swift – a huge female pop star rewriting the narrative and making money on her own terms,” a source told The Sun."

Okay, so she bought the rights to her own music catalogue so she can make the business decisions about how to capitalize on it. Cool. Great. That's honestly probably a fine business strategy. But if you want a look at what music catalogues are worth, it's probably a good idea to see what private equity firms are paying these days to buy them up from music icons. Here are a few artists that have sold their music catalogues recently... and what they got for them:

          Bob Dylan - $600 million between two separate deals for his publishing rights and his masters
          Bruce Springsteen - $550 million
          Phil Collins & Genesis - $300 million
          David Bowie - $250 million
          Katy Perry - $225 million
          Dr. Dre - $200 million
          Justin Bieber - $200 million
          Imagine Dragons - $100 million

Don't get me wrong, I love Dua Lipa and think she's super talented. She's young, so she has years and years left to invest wisely and continue to grow her business. Maybe she will be a billionaire someday. But I don't think you can look at where she's at now, look at the estimated values of music catalogues that are more extensive that hers, and say that it's a foregone conclusion that she's going to be a billionaire because she and Taylor Swift happen to have a few things in common.

And while I'm ranting a bit here, why is being a billionaire such a big deal anyway? I feel like most people could manage to be perfectly happy with a $35-94 million net worth (and many people are quite capable of being happy with quite a bit less than that!), and yet there are so many media stories like this now where it's like, "You're nobody if you're not a billionaire" or "This person is smart and talented... but how much money will they be able to earn???" I think there's way too much glamorization of wealth right now, and not just wealth but obscene wealth. While I can appreciate a YouTube real estate tour of a sprawling mansion, or imagine how nice it might be to never have to worry about standing in the TSA line at the airport if I had a private jet, that's all just escapist fantasy. The problem is, it feels like everyone's taking those escapist fantasies and trying to convince you that you're nobody if you don't achieve them.

Articles like this make me really sad and more than a bit angry because it feels like nobody's just okay accepting people as they are. It always has to be, "What are they doing next?" or "How will they top this?" or "What's their ceiling in terms of success and wealth?" And maybe it's just me, but I don't feel like I desperately need answers to any of those kinds of questions. What we do desperately need is for people to start accepting each other for who they are and celebrating the accomplishments they've already achieved, not making them feel the pressure to deliver whatever's next.