NEW YORK – Taylor Swift has topped Forbes magazine’s list of the highest-earning female solo artists in music.
The US business magazine estimated Swift earned $170 million, while last year’s topper Katy Perry has dropped to sixth place with earnings of just $41 million.
Forbes notes that most of Swift’s earnings came from her 1989 world tour, which sold more than $250m worth of tickets, while Adele is unusual in that the bulk of her revenue came from album sales.
Adele’s most recent album, 25 – which was released in November 2015 – became the fastest selling album of all time in the UK, selling 800,307 copies in its first week. In the US, it became the first album to sell more than 3m copies in a week, with 3.38m sales within seven days of release, and was the best selling album of 2015.
The full top 10:
- Taylor Swift – $170m
- Adele – $80.5m
- Madonna – $76.5m
- Rihanna – $75m
- Beyoncé – $54m
- Katy Perry – $41m
- Jennifer Lopez – $39.5m
- Britney Spears – $30.5m
- Shania Twain – $27.5m
- Celine Dion – $27m
