Taylor Swift attends the 65th Grammy Awards on Feb. 5, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Taylor Swift is the highest-paid female entertainer in the world, earning a cool $92 million in 2022 following the success of her 10th studio album "Midnights," according to a new report from Forbes.
Swift, 33, is also the only woman to make the cut of the 10 top-earning entertainers in the world, per Forbes, ranking 9th on the list behind Tyler Perry, Brad Pitt, the Rolling Stones and other older male creatives in Hollywood.
To determine the ranking, Forbes considers entertainers' total 2022 pretax earnings, minus fees for representation (managers, lawyers, etc.) and business operating costs, per its methodology.
After releasing "Midnights" in October 2022, the 12-time Grammy winner became the first artist in history to claim the top 10 spots on the Billboard Hot 100. Although the album was an instant hit, much of Swift's $92 million profit — roughly 70% — came from her back catalog, including revenue from streaming and album sales, Forbes reports.
While 2022 was a strong year for Swift, her annual earnings were still less than half of what the highest-paid entertainers in the world, the progressive rock band Genesis, made last year. Altogether, Genesis earned $230 million in 2022, thanks to a $300 million music rights sale to Concord Music Group in September.
The entertainment industry is far from reaching gender parity: In 2021, less than 25% of the artists on the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Chart were women, researchers at USC Annenberg found, which is a far cry from the percentage of women that make up the U.S population (51%).
On average, women actors earn about $1.1 million less than their male co-stars, according to 2017 research from three professors: Sofia Izquierdo Sanchez of the University of Huddersfield, Maria Navarro Paniagua of Lancaster University, and John S Heywood of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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Women in general continue to face a persistent pay gap, making only 84 cents for every dollar paid to men — and for women of color, the wage gap is even larger, the National Women's Law Center reports.
Hollywood isn't immune to the gender wage gap. There wasn't a single woman on Forbes's list of the top 10 highest-paid entertainers in 2022 — the highest-paid female entertainer, Reese Witherspoon, ranked 12th for making $115 million in 2021.
By contrast, "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson, who claimed the No. 1 spot last year, made $580 million in 2021, after selling part of his visual effects firm Weta Digital to Unity Software for an impressive $1.6 billion in November 2021.
2023 promises to be an even bigger year for Swift as the musician kicks off her 52-night Eras Tour in March, which comes with a potential 9-figure payout, per Forbes's estimates.
Close to 14 million fans tried to buy tickets to the Eras Tour in November, crashing Ticketmaster and prompting a congressional hearing on the ticketing industry.
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