Do you remember "The Six Million Dollar Man"? If so, sadly, you're a boy or girl of the 20th century. In fact, I, too, remember the man called the Six Million Dollar Man only faintly, like a memory from a previous life. Somehow I've managed to adapt and live in the futuristic world of the 21st century. Strangely, I also remember the unfamiliar name "Sommers." It aired on ABC TV in the United States from 1973 to 1978 and was introduced to living rooms in Korea in a dubbed version (and here, for original 21st-century boys and girls, let me add that "living room TV" is a different concept from "living room Netflix").
$6 million is about 8.7 billion won. At current prices, it could be about the cost of a very prime apartment in Gangnam, Seoul. But at the value 53 years ago when it first aired, it would have been literally astronomical. In the show, the protagonist Steve Austin is an astronaut who, after a catastrophic accident, is (effectively) reborn as a superhuman through a full-body reconstruction surgery funded by massive U.S. government support—namely, $6 million. He isn't a racehorse, but he can run 60 miles per hour (about 97 kilometers), and his eyes aren't a digital camera, but they have a 20x zoom.
This work drew explosive popularity comparable to a Marvel superhero today and remains a distinctive legacy of 20th-century pop culture history. So when a remake starring Mark Wahlberg was announced in 2014, it drew considerable interest. Alongside reboot and casting news, the renaming question also became a hot topic. Because $6 million is too cheap now, it was slated to be produced as "The Six Billion Dollar Man" to fit the times. As half a century passed and the price tag jumped 1,000-fold, expectations were high, but the reboot project ended up sinking. Production costs rose, and perhaps fewer people remembered the Six Million Dollar Man of that era. In any case, concrete figures like "$6 million" and "$6 billion (about 870 million won)" served as keywords that could explain the protagonist's staggering range of abilities in a single phrase.
580 billion won from ticket sales during a three-month concert tour
Music is, by nature, an intangible art. In a word, it is hard to convert into specific sums. But since the 20th century, it has always made sense to approach pop culture as an industry and an asset. Recently, the U.S. business magazine Forbes made an interesting announcement. American star Beyoncé has become the fifth pop singer to join the ranks of billionaires. In plain Korean, we call that an "eokmanjangja," but the original word is "billionaire," so it's closer to a 10-eok-man-jangja. It means her personal net worth has surpassed $1 billion (about 1.4484 trillion won).
According to Forbes, the first pop singer to become a billionaire was Beyoncé's husband, rapper Jay-Z. For reference, his Forbes-estimated personal net worth (as of Jan. 26, local time) is $2.5 billion (about 3.621 trillion won). Combined as a couple, that's well over 5 trillion won.
Since Jay-Z's listing in 2019, Rihanna, Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift have each added their names to the billionaire list. Billionaire rosters vary by outlet. That's because asset valuation methods differ. Bloomberg and The Sunday Times also classify Selena Gomez and Paul McCartney as billionaires. It's noteworthy that despite astronomical sales, Elton John hasn't made such lists because of his equally astronomical spending habits.
How did billionaire singers amass their wealth? As music goes digital and the age of streaming advances, revenue from music itself is trending downward. The industry estimates that on Spotify, the world's largest music streaming platform, artists receive $0.003 to $0.005 each time a song is played. These days, concerts and related merchandise sales help a lot. From April to July last year—just three months—Beyoncé earned more than $400 million (about 579.36 billion won) from ticket sales alone on the Cowboy Carter tour. She sold $50 million (about 72.42 billion won) worth of related merchandise. On the prior Renaissance world tour, she earned $579 million (about 838.6236 billion won).
But in fact, music sales alone aren't enough to reach billionaire status. Billionaire singers usually jump into a variety of other industries using their personal brands. Rihanna and Gomez, "asset seniors" to Beyoncé, made a lot of money in the beauty industry. Rihanna holds significant equity in F Beauty, a joint venture with Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH), the world's largest luxury group, and Gomez holds significant equity in R Beauty. Beyoncé's husband, Jay-Z, entered the sparkling wine and cognac businesses early and succeeded, building wealth through a multitrillion-won equity sale to Bacardi SA. Truly fitting for someone who roared, "I'm not a businessman; I'm a business, man" (a legendary rap line he delivered while featuring on Kanye West's "Diamonds from Sierra Leone (Remix)"). His wife, Beyoncé, runs hair care brand C, whiskey brand S and clothing line I. Of course, some have made music itself the core of their wealth. Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney monetized music in a lump sum by selling the copyrights and master rights to the countless songs they created and performed over their lives to major record labels. The amounts, of course, are beyond imagination.
In the end, one of the iron rules of the pop music industry is "famous for being famous." Industrially, it's a completely different game from classical or jazz. Viral buzz like "That kid is hot these days" and "This track is blowing up on the charts—have you heard it? The look is insane, too" has always mattered, then and now. The main formula for "becoming a billionaire by singing" is to keep layering strong content onto that buzz and connect the resulting personal brand to revenue structures inside and outside music. To build this structure, labels and artists hustle, communicate with fans, and spend hundreds of billions to trillions of won on social media (SNS) viral marketing expense.
News recently broke that Elon Musk has approached becoming the world's first trillionaire. Someday, a trillionaire musician may emerge. In just the five minutes you are reading this piece, people around the world have uploaded about 3,000 hours of video to YouTube. These are days overflowing with content and stars. It is an era when artificial intelligence (AI) composes by the second. Even in this century of flood and chaos, the power of music made by humans and songs sung by people will continue. That's because humans live in time, communicate through language and survive.
Rhythm is the ultimate platform that turns time into entertainment. Song is the finest art that beautifies language into utterance. The value of music never fades.