This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News
Jay-Z tops richest rapper poll
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 19 August 2010
Hey, it’s time for Forbes’ list of the world’s richest rappers again. It seems to come around quicker every year, doesn’t it? And the shops start putting the decorations up way too early, these days. It really takes the magic out of it.
Anyway, this year Jay-Z has held his position at the top of the list for the second year in a row (and third out of the four years Forbes have published it), having made $63 million in personal income between June 2009 and June 2010. If you’re having trouble visualising that amount of money, it’s enough to fill a really massive sack. Like a really, really massive one. Not one you could actually carry. It would be massive. It would probably take the entire staff of a sack-making factory about six days to make it. That’s how big it would be. Hope that’s helped.
Coming in behind Jay-Z was Sean ‘The Diddy Daddy’ Combs, with a pitiful $30 million. More interestingly, though, 50 Cent is way down at number fourteen. Having topped the poll in 2008 with annual earnings of $150 million, this year he ties with Eminem, both having pulled in just $8 million each.
In 2008, $100 million of Fiddy’s earnings came from the sale of his drinks company Glaceau, though Forbes notes that poor sales of his ‘Before I Self Destruct’ album also account in part for his slip this year. But it adds that his “burgeoning acting career and upcoming tour should push Fifty back toward the top of this list in 2011”.
As for Eminem, whose latest album has sold very well, Forbes points to his lack of business interests, something most others in the list have, for his low placing, saying: “Compared to his peers, he doesn’t really do much outside of music”.
The full top ten looks like this:
1. Jay-Z ($63 million)
2. Diddy ($30 million)
3. Akon ($21 million)
4. Lil Wayne ($20 million)
5. Dr Dre ($17 million)
6. Ludacris ($16 million)
7. Snoop Dogg ($15 million)
8. Timbaland ($14 million)
9. Pharrell Williams ($13 million)
10. Kanye West ($12 million)
