Taylor Swift, Luke Bryan, Garth Brooks Land on Forbes’ Highest-Paid List
It's no secret that celebrities tend to make a lot of money. This year, Forbes has released a report on just this subject, taking their annual turn rounding up the top 100 world's highest-paid celebs for 2018. The list includes athletes, actors, musicians and other entertainment figures — with boxer Floyd Mayweather on top, generating a staggering $285 million — and several prominent country names made the cut as well.
The highest country name on the list would be Taylor Swift, who landed at No. 21 and is not technically a primarily country genre artist at this point. She racked up $80 million. However, she's joined by genre purists Luke Bryan at No. 45 (who pulled in $52 million., and doubtless was helped along by his post on American Idol), Garth Brooks at No. 59 ($45.5 mil.), and Kenny Chesney at No.87 ($37 mil.).
While these artists no doubt added their healthy tallies to the overall pot, the entire celeb biz is, as one might expect, a pretty lucrative one. According to Forbes, the world’s 100 top-earning entertainers pulled in a combined $6.3 billion pretax over the past 12 months, with 11 of these stars crossing the $100 million threshold.
Forbes ranks its Celebrity 100 using their pretax earnings from June 1, 2017, through June 1, 2018, before deducting fees for managers, lawyers and agents. Estimates are based on numbers from Nielsen, Pollstar, IMDB, SoundScan, NPD BookScan and ComScore, as well as interviews with industry experts and many of the stars themselves.
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