According to Variety, Forbes pegs Paul McCartney's net worth at roughly $1.4 billion, which makes him the third-richest musician on the planet, behind Taylor Swift at $2 billion and Jay-Z at $2.8 billion.
Third-richest musician. Read that again. It is a music list, which means the asset being ranked is the catalog, and the catalog is doing most of the heavy lifting.
The big chunk of the fortune is not a record. It is MPL Communications, the publishing company he started in 1969 that owns song copyrights, including songs by other people. He did not get to $1.4 billion by playing bass on television. He got there by owning the paperwork. The songs are the content. The copyrights are the product. The tour is the quarterly earnings call with a guitar.
The rest is a museum-grade art collection and four decades of catalog maneuvering, which is the polite version of saying he has been reorganizing who owns what since before most of the musicians on this list were born.
The list is the real joke. Jay-Z is a musician. Taylor Swift is a musician. Paul McCartney is a publishing company that learned the bass. When Forbes makes a "richest musicians" chart, it is charting copyright portfolios and dressing them up in concert tickets.
YOUR TURN: Is a publishing company with a back catalog a musician? Say yes, then explain what "musician" means now.
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