£5m apiece: JLS’s Marvin Humes, JB Gill, Oritsé Williams, Aston Merrygold
❚ NO REALLY POPTASTIC SURPRISES in the annual Sunday Times Rich List for the UK and Ireland, published today. Adele, inevitably, tops the Richest Young Musicians after the past year’s runaway success that more than tripled her estimated wealth from £6m to £20m ($33m). There are only five newcomers each worth £5m ($8m) in the top 20 millionaires aged 30 and under. One is Jessie J, 24, the former Brit School student who has sold close to 1m copies of her album Who You Are and is currently mentoring on the television show The Voice UK. The others are all four members of JLS (short for Jack the Lad Swing), the UK’s coolest boy band, who came to fame on The X Factor and released their third album, Jukebox, last November.
♫ View video: JLS performing their January release,
Do You Feel What I Feel?
The under-30s millionaire list is nowhere in the same stratosphere as the main Sunday Times Music Millionaires Top 50. These are the grandees from the headier days of British rock who have had a lifetime in which to amass royalties — ex-Beatles, Stones and assorted moguls. Among pop performers, the 70s are still represented by David Bowie (today valued at £100m, $163m); the Swinging 80s only by George Michael (up this year to £100m); the 90s by Robbie Williams (£100m), as a new entry the joint husband-and-wife wealth of Coldplay’s Chris Martin and actress Gwyneth Paltrow (£72m), plus Take That’s Gary Barlow (£50m).
The same trio as last year head the Young Entertainers Rich List, led by Daniel Radcliffe, aged 22, who starred in eight Harry Potter films and has increased his wealth by £6m in a year to £54m ($88m), helped by the success of his latest movie, the gothic thriller The Woman in Black. At No 2, Twilight star Robert Pattinson has added £8m in a year to his fortune and is now worth £40m. Keira Knightley is the third top-earning movie star, still worth £30m.
➢ 2010, Rich List puts George Michael top of the popstars from the un-lucrative 80s
➢ 2011, Soprano Jenkins tops pop’s young Rich List
Daniel Ek: Swedish entrepreneur who launched Spotify’s streaming service in 2008
➢ Britain’s top ten richest people in the world of social media are worth a combined £15.8bn — The Daily Telegraph reports that, sprinting fast behind the billionaires, is the 29-year-old co-founder of Spotify, the legal online music streaming service. London-based Arsenal supporter Daniel Ek is the highest new entry on the Music Millionaires Rich List as well as No 8 in the…
top ten Social Media Millionaires
1 Alisher Usmanov, Facebook: £12.3bn
2 Michael Moritz, LinkedIn: £1.08bn
3 Niklas Zennstrom, Skype: £600m
4 U2 (Bono), Facebook, Yelp: £514m
5 Andrey Andreev, Badoo: £500m
6 Michael and Xochi Birch, Bebo, TweetDeck: £270m
7 Vikrant Bhargava, SocialGO: £230m
8 Daniel Ek, Spotify: £190m
9 Tihan Presbie, Miniclip: £155m
10 Joanna Shields, Bebo, Facebook: £50m
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 