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After more than half a century in the music industry, Bruce Springsteen has reportedly entered his billionaire era.
The 74-year-old New Jersey native, responsible for numerous hits including “Dancing in the Dark”, “Born in the USA”, and “I’m on Fire” now has an estimated net worth of $1.1bn, according to Forbes.
Springsteen joins an exclusive list of music artists who, as of 2024, are worth more than a billion dollars including Jay-Z ($2.5bn), Rihanna ($1.4bn) and Taylor Swift ($1.1bn), who recently cemented her billionaire status in October 2023.
Nicknamed The Boss, Springsteen has garnered international fame as a rock singer-songwriter and guitarist.
Throughout his glittering six-decade-long career, he’s sold well over 71 million albums in the US and 140 million albums globally.
But it’s been his work in recent years that has helped him achieve billionaire status. In 2021, the rocker sold his music catalogue to Sony for an estimated $500-$550m. The sale made history as the largest transaction ever struck for a single artist’s body of work, Variety reported.
In 2023, Springsteen’s world tour generated nearly $380m in ticket revenue from more than 3.4 million tickets sold.
Last September, he was forced to cancel and postpone all the remaining dates on his 2023 tour as he recovered from a peptic ulcer. He’s since resumed performing and is currently touring internationally.
Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, Springsteen grew up in a working class family. He bought his first guitar after watching The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show.
He played as part of the high school band before he released his debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, in 1973. Springsteen has released a total of 21 studio albums over the course of his career, with his latest being Only the Strong Survive in 2022.
Springsteen won his first Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for his song “Dancing in the Dark” in 1985. In total, he’s earned 51 nominations, of which he’s won 20.
Reflecting on his songwriting process in a 2009 interview with The Guardian, Springsteen recalled: “All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records but if you were a kid you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn’t always say – you wouldn’t dare say it was beautiful.
“And those records, some of them sustained their beauty. If you listen to the great Beatle records, the earliest ones where the lyrics are incredibly simple. Why are they still beautiful? Well, they’re beautifully sung, beautifully played, and the mathematics in them is elegant. They retain their elegance. So you’re trying to write elegantly also. I was interested in that kind of a creative pull, and that’s not the stream that runs on top through your farm, it’s the stream where it disappears underground.”
