5 Celebs Who Make More Off Royalties Than From Their Actual Jobs
If you earn a salary, you’re a chump. The real way you should be making money is to make one piece of art and then sit back and get paid every time anyone buys a copy, forever.
This has become increasingly hard in recent years, because lately, no one buys anything. The most famous stars in world are forced to make the bulk of their fortunes off concerts, much in the same way the homeless do. But royalties still do manage to create some fortunes in surprising ways.
Albert Einstein
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Einstein hasn’t conducted much new scientific research in the last 70 years or so, for one reason: He’s a lazy piece of garbage. However, the Einstein estate lives on, and they continue to profit off him. They don’t so much profit off of his toothbrush patents, or whatever it was that Einstein was famous for devising. They profit off his image. Take this photo, for example:
That photo is public domain. We don’t have to pay anyone to use it here. Even so, if we were to put that photo on the cover of a book and sell it, the Einstein estate might successfully sue us, not for violating copyright but for infringing on the man’s publicity rights, which are a separate matter.
This “estate” isn’t Einstein’s bloodline but the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which Einstein founded and to whom he willed all rights to his works. The university has made some $250 million from his image since his death. They’ve made millions of that just from leasing his name to Disney so they can market their Baby Einstein products for infants.
Mariah Carey
We mentioned earlier how artists don’t make much money off royalties anymore, now that streaming has taken over the industry. Exceptions exist. Over 30 years after first recording “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Mariah Carey now makes about $3 million every holiday season in royalties from the song.
The crazy part here isn’t just that she’s making a lot so many years later off of what is surely the most frivolous of her many hits. It’s that virtually no other songs make that much, over the course of the entire year. It takes around a billion streams to net that kind of money, and you can count on just one or two new songs every year each hitting that bar.
Anyway, we thought now was a relevant time of the year to share this with you because it’s officially only four more days till the Christmas season begins.
Jim Starlin
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice gave fans the chance to finally get something from the comics that they’d long wanted to see in live action but never had till now. We are, of course, referring to iconic character Anatoli Knyazev.
Warner Bros.
This might confuse you because if you’re a normal viewer, you have no memory of the above character at all, much less recognize him as an established figure from the comics. But that is Anatoli Knyazev all right, otherwise known as KGBeast, a Russian villain who debuted in 1988. Since this was indeed an established character, the appearance earned royalties for comic writer Jim Starlin, who originally created Knyazev.
Starlin also created such Marvel characters as Thanos, Drax and Gamora. As of the start of 2017, Knyazev’s appearance in Batman v Superman earned Stalin more royalties than every one of his characters’ appearances in Marvel movies.
Granted, this was before the last couple Avengers movies, which we hope earned Starlin a dollar or two. But this was after Guardians of the Galaxy, which featured his characters rather more extensively than Batman v Superman did. Heck, even the glimpses of Thanos in the first two Avengers movies seemingly should have netted him more royalties than that Batman v Superman thing, but that’s because we’re not lawyers.
Michael Jordan
Jordan has made a lot of money off Air Jordans. We expect you knew that already. But you could have known that decades ago and will be still be surprised by how much money it’s making him today. Nike keeps growing, as new sectors of the world get rich enough to buy brand-name clothing, and the amount they owe Jordan each year keeps compounding.
As of a year ago, Jordan was making $330 million per year from his Nike partnership, with that number continuing to grow. For comparison, his entire NBA career as the greatest basketball player of all-time earned him $100 million in total.
The man’s royalties come from all Air Jordan shoes as well as any Nike product showing the Jordan silhouette, also known as the Jumpman logo. “Jumpman,” incidentally, is also the original name of the video game character Mario, from a couple years before Nike signed Jordan. He’s lucky Nintendo hasn’t sued and won the rights to one entire sector of Michael Jordan’s physical body.
Al Green
Music — once more now, with feeling — doesn’t fetch much royalties today. It used to fetch more. But even if we go back to the days of massive record sales and radio airplay, Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” never earned as much royalties from all that as it did from one unlikely source. That source was Big Mouth Billy Bass, which paid all artists for the tunes it played and paid Green more than any other recording of his song did.
Big Mouth Billy Bass, for those of you who don’t , was a cute robot fish that would play and lip sync to several recorded songs. It still is a cute robot fish, because though it was a craze 25 years ago, it’s still around now.
The company should try revamping the product, now pointing to the same lip syncing that it always featured and now referring to it as “A.I.” This will earn the company a $2.3 billion valuation and will result in no additional sales because people today don’t buy anything.
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