2013 Music’s Top 10 Money Makers

1. Madonna $34.5 million
2. Bruce Springsteen  $33.4 million
3. Roger Waters $21.1 million
4. Van Halen $20.1 million
5. Kenny Chesney $19.1 million
6. Dave Matthews Band $18.9 million
7. Tim McGraw $18.3 million
8. Jason Aldean  $17.5 million
9. Coldplay  $17.3 million
10. Justin Beiber  $15.9 million

Top 40 list available at Billboard.com

2013 Money Makers Methodology via Billboard

The data used to compile Moneymakers was supplied by Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen BDS, YouTube and Billboard Boxscore. Artists are ranked by U.S. earnings, and Billboard calculated a variety of income streams, including touring, recorded-music sales, publishing royalties and revenue from an array of digital music and video services for downloads, as well as on-demand and noninteractive streaming. Due to a lack of sufficient data, our figures don’t include revenue from sponsorships, merchandise sales or synchronization data. For album and track sales, we assumed a royalty rate of 20% of retail, minus producers’ fees. We treated all streaming revenue as derived from a licensing deal and thus split that revenue in half to calculate the artist’s take. We also applied corresponding statutory mechanical rates for album and track sales and the Copyright Royalty Board-approved formulas or rates used for the various streaming channels, and further estimated the share of songs written by the artists. For all artist revenue, we subtracted a manager’s fee of 10%. For box office, we credited each artist with 34% of gross receipts, typically what’s left after the promoter’s fee, the artist manager’s cut and other costs are subtracted.