The Smiley Smile Message Board

I have always been interested in learning just exacly how much an artist makes on their music.

Does anyone have any (general) insight on what the boys earn per year in royalties?  We understand Brian and Mike would be at the top respectively but I've been thinking about Al's cut and especially David's take from the early years.  I believe Jon wrote that the success of "Endless Summer" helped David fuel some bad habits.

Just wondering if any of this has been published or posted somewhere before.  ???

Jon Stebbins' book THE LOST BEACH BOY has some interesting insight on this, vis a vis what David Marks received and the finer points of his contract.

Dunno how reliable this site is, but it has info on Brian and Mike.

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/rock-stars/mike-love-net-worth/

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/rock-stars/brian-wilson-net-worth/

Not reliable at all. They say Croz is worth $40 million, something he finds hugely amusing.

I've seen a few estimates from folks on the board that are in that ball park though.

Brian = 50-75 Million
Mike = 20-50 Million
Alan = 10-20 Million


I'd love to know exact figures of course   :)

I was playing a game last week, asking a few musically-inclined friends this question:

"Do you know who Calvin Harris is?"

Overwhelming majority said they did not.

I asked because I heard a report on what his income was in 2012-13.

46 million dollars.

Calvin Harris is a DJ who also made/wrote/produced some records, known in the EDM market. But his calling card is still DJ.

Isn't that an eye-opener of how the "music business" works in 2014? Look at the net worths of what we'd call "legends" in the music business, and a guy who is known mostly for DJ work is making as much if not more after one year's income for spinning records, cutting records, having a few records with catchy hooks, etc.

I don't begrudge anyone for cashing in, far from it, but I thought some similar music-minded folks here would like to play the game:

"Do you know who Calvin Harris is?"

And then consider that income for a year's work totaling 46 million.

The key thing to remember is that the money is always in intellectual property -- which is to say, songwriting.

Songwriter's royalties were (and to a large extent still are) very profitable.  Royalties for recording are usually non-existent to neglible, even for major artists.  I was actually surprised to learn from Stebbins' book that Marks got as much as he did.

This may have been answered before, but do the band get any royalties from the catalogue Murry sold?  Did he sell both the performing and songwriter rights or just the songwriting ones?  And does this mean Brian gets no royalties on any of the early hits?  (I know he got a one-off payment)

Of course they do. Murry "only" sold the publishing rights which is about half the income a song generates. The composer still gets his songwriting royalty (which has always been a significant income stream for Brian), and the group still gets their artist royalty.

Thank you, Jon.  I'm very glad to know that.

Yeah, that makes it suck a little less. Still, selling your own son's songs is pretty crappy. At least Marvin Gay Sr. is keeping Murry out of the worst music dad ever spot.

So does anyone have any idea what kind of yearly income Brian would get from his royalties?  Don Maclean, when an interviewer asked him the meaning of American Pie  famously replied 'It means I never have to work again.'  Nick Hornby, when he needed a reason why one of his characters didn't have a job, invented the fact that he'd written a popular Christmas novelty hit which provided enough in royalities for the character to live comfortably for the rest of his life.  Realistic?  If Brian's net worth is 45 million, how does that translate into what he actually gets to live off?

I think everyone has been hit very hard in the last 10 years or so; there's little question Brian's publishing brings in less now than it did if you're looking at album sales. (Although licensing to movies and TV probably makes up for that to some degree.) I think the BB50 reunion had a significant financial component for him and Mike -- they raked in enough there to cover some of the losses elsewhere.

If Brian had retired (or been unable to work any longer) after the demise of Smile, would he be fine financially today, given the number of hits he wrote in his early to mid 20s? (Taking the money spent on drugs and Landy out of the equation, since we're talking about how much a writer of hits typically makes.)

People may not agree, but if Brian would have retired at Smile, the work Mike (and the others) did touring would have kept revenue coming in for Brian for the rest of his life.  We're not talking about thousands of dollars a year Brian gets from royalties, it's most certainly still in the millions annually.  I'm sure he could live off of that. 

Now if the whole band would have just stopped, and Brian retired?  He'd probably still be living comfortably, lesser known artists like Johnny Rivers, Neil Sedaka, etc. are still fabulously rich even though they haven't had much success since the 60's. 

I'll bet he even still gets a decent check from David Lee Roth...

Many years ago Bruce said on the Brit site he still got $300K a year from 'I Write The Songs'. If one song was worth that money then Brian (and Mike) are probably still doing well with their work.

If considering BW and the band retiring after Smile, you've got to consider the diminished profile of the band from that point on. Takings from the early hits wouldn't likely be so high today if the band hasn't continued recording and playing live. No matter what they put out and no matter how lousy their PR profile has been, stuff like Surf's Up LP and 15BOs right up to C50 have always served as brand awareness and helped shift archive product.