Absolute Madonna

January 31st, 2008 at 15:30
by Stuart Heritage

It’s so easy to become richer than your wildest dreams – all you need is a mockney husband, a giant glittery crucifix and a ghastly purple leotard that shows off your old lady’s tumpsy in more detail than anyone really wanted.

As far as we can tell, that’s been Madonna’s trick, and it seems to have done OK for her – a Forbes survey has declared that Madonna is the richest woman in music, earning about $72 million a year.

Ask yourself this, though – does all that money make Madonna happy? Yes, of course it does. But does it make her look less wrinkled and veiny? No is does not. Ergo we win.

In six months’ time, Madonna will turn 50. But does this mean she’ll start taking up traditional 50-year-old woman pursuits like jam-making, attending WI coffee mornings and crocheting little cardigans for all the babies you’ve just realised you’re too old to have?

No way. Because Madonna is effing loaded.

OK, that’s not really a big surprise – in 2006 Madonna completed the highest-grossing tour by any female in history, plus she signed that ridiculously huge record deal with Live Nation that’ll keep her in leotards for the next decade. So that’s this year and 2006 dealt with, but how much money did Madonna make in 2007?

According to the Forbes ‘Cash Queens Of Music’ list, the answer is ‘a bloody great shitload’. Reuters reports:

Pop star Madonna is still the material girl, earning $72 million in a recent 12-month period to top a Forbes.com list of female singers whom the financial Web site dubbed “Cash Queens of Music.” … The Web site tracked earnings in the period from June 2006 to June 2007 and said it examined concert ticket sales, merchandise revenue, album sales and earnings from ancillary products such as clothing, perfumes and endorsements.

You just have to sit back and applaud Madonna for earning a gigantic figure like that, don’t you? And it’s all the more impressive when you realise that she’s basically a middle-aged failed star of erotic thrillers who makes her living by monomaniacally chasing every single hot new trend she gets a sniff of.

And all that’s without a perfume, too. In an age when every two-bit reality TV schmo has got their own fragrance line, imagine how popular a perfume by a megastar as big as Madonna would be. Unless of course it smelt like Madonna, which we’d imagine to be a mixture of Botox and pickled vulvas.

Rounding out the Forbes Cash Queens Of Music top five, in case you were interested, were Shakira and Beyonce with earnings of $38m and $27m respectively. Proof then, that getting rich from being almost naked and jiggling around isn’t something confined to the horrifically old.

Finally, let’s not forget that Madonna is married to Guy Ritchie, so their household earnings must be incredible – we’d guess at least $72 million plus that £3.50 that Guy earnt cleaning windscreens at traffic lights last summer.

http://www.hecklerspray.com/madonna-just-about-the-universes-richest-woman-now/200812177.php