Hello Everyone,
I was reading and article today on Whitney Houston and the article mentioned the family and Bobby Brown fighting over her fortune. What I found strange in the article was the fact that the amount of her estate was estimated at $20 million dollars. I find that hard to believe that a singer who sold over 170 million albums only has an estate worth $20 million.
Was she short changed somehow? Fraud or just bad money management skills. Or am I totally off the mark and superstar singers really don’t make that much money. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that $20 million is a huge amount of money, however considering her success, it doesn’t really seem like a lot of money. Something just doesn’t seem right.
Simple math is that boils down to 11 cents per album. Not really a particularly low figure, especially since she didn’t write her own songs.
Also figure into it the money she spent on things that have no tangible value to the estate – plane trips, hotel rooms, meals, gifts to family and friends, items she bought and gave away, depreciation, etc.
I’m actually surprised it’s that much. MANY big name artists / writers turn out to be broke, due to a combination of:
1 - pissing away enormous amounts of money while they are making it.
2 - taking exceedingly bad financial advice, and losing it in dubious investments.
3 - the way the music and publishing businesses work, which don’t yield the artist the dollars you think they might. Movie actors seem to have collectively assured themselves a better deal.
She made a lot. Olivia Newton-John made 11 million off of “Physical” which was a similar sized hit to “I Will Always Love You.” She didn’t write it.
I read Houston’s entourage was over 200 people. If you stop to think about all the people you’re paying and if you’re paying them well and doing coke with them. It adds up fast. Houston hasn’t really had a lot of success since 2000. So the spending probably was the same as the 80s/90s but the income wasn’t.
I also read Houston was close to her stepkids and perhaps she gave them money. If she was as big a drug user as they say, there’s your answer.
Nell Carter said, “Sure I made $25,000 a week on ‘Gimme A Break’ but I was spending $30,000.”
Maureen McCormick of “Brady Bunch” fame, wrote in her book she came out of that show with over half a million bucks. Not bad for the 70s. And she says, she put it all up her nose.
In retrospect she really didn’t record that much. Just six studio albums in 25 years, and three of those were in the first five years. There are some soundtracks, a Christmas album. Also even when her first film, “The Bodyguard”, was a huge hit she only made a couple more films.
$20 million does seem kind of low for someone who was a huge star. But when you consider
she didn’t write songs (or grab songwriting credits like Alan Freed did), had drug problems, apparently had a huge entourage, etc it probably isn’t that bad. There are people who say that Elvis Presley would have been bankrupt if he had lived another year.
But I wouldn't be surprised if someday there are reports of embezzling, short changing. It happens a lot in the music business. When asked for career advice for young musicians Billy Joel once said to hire a good lawyer to watch out for you and then hire another good lawyer to watch the first lawyer. Robert Fripp of King Crimson advises musicians to get an audit done of your catalog. Fripp says that musicians will very often discover they are being cheated but it never happens that they were paid more than they were entitled to. Al kooper and Frank Zappa have said similar things.
Here’s a video commentary about Whitney Houston’s financial life after death. They estimate the estate will make $10 million on royalties from record sales in the next year if they are half of what Michael Jackson sold after he died. There is also an upcoming film called “Sparkle”. http://video.forbes.com/fvn/celebrities/whitney-houstons-financial-life-after-death
The key issue for the low figure is because she didn’t write her songs. The songwriting credit is where most of the money is (think McCartney or Prince or Madonna). Every time a song you wrote gets sold or published in a new medium or rerecorded you get royalties. As just the singer you usually don’t. Believe it or not Houston may not have ever earned any per-record-sold royalties at all!
Also, as someone mentioned, being ‘rich’ and having an entourage is cripplingly expensive. If Houston had 200 assistants, handlers, family members, hangers-on etc. figure a modest average salary of $50,000 a year each, that’s $10,000,000 a year in expenses! That’s just a wild guess but you get the idea.
And off the top of that subtract a decade-long plus crack cocaine habit for her and her closest few dozen people. You can easily blow $50K per two or three-day binge!
I have known people who were HARDCORE addicts, I mean gram or two a day heroin addicts, and they would often regret blowing through money like that in a year or several years.
Unless Houston was being fleeced blind by her dealer or source I don’t think the drugs amount to much.
The biggest addicts I have ever known would have trouble blowing through more than $300 dollars in crack a weekend, and thats with no sleep partying 24/7. Now granted they did not have to also keep an entourage of a dozen addicts also doped up, and they weren’t celebrities using fall guys to acquire.
I still say the drugs don’t amount to much, Houston probably spent more on food than crack.
Well, she said in her Diane Sawyer interview she never sank to using crack, 'cause she made too much money to use that cheap-ass drug. “Crack is whack” and all that. Maybe she did, and maybe she didn’t, but my impression is that on the whole, she made a point of buying expensive “high-class” illegal drugs, if nothing more than to keep convincing herself that she was at least better than some ghetto crack ho.
I heard she was broke, hence the tour that went so badly. Her failing voice, combined with the pressure of performing, may have sent her off the wagon, as it were.
The $20 million, is probably sales of her records since her passing, in my opinion.
The problem with earning large is, you begin to live large, and, pretty soon, and pretty easily, the two are not longer connected, the way they ought to be.
I also heard that she had received the sad news her voice was shot, and nothing could be done, just before she was to perform for the Clive Davis party, before the music industry’s A list. Talk about pressure, no wonder she cracked.
I forget which show, but a voice coach she was working with said that he was able to get her about 3/4’s of her voice back, and since she quit smoking he was optimistic she’d be able to come all the way back; albeit after much time and effort. It’s too bad, she was a phenomenon when “How Will I know” first came out.
What would someone need an entourage of 200 people?
(I’ll rephrase that. No one “needs” an entourage.)
What did those 200 people do? I get having a hairdresser/stylist, a personal shopper, a chauffeur, some household staff, but 200? Where did that number come from? 200 all at once or 200 over the years?
Songwriting is where the real money’s at in the music business, and it’s probably fair to say that Dolly Parton made more off of Whitney Houston’s rendition of “I Will Always Love You” than Whitney herself did.
And as others have pointed out, the recording biz is notorious for stiffing performers. Someone like Whitney would of course have had a lot more leverage than some no-name artist when it came to negotiating a recording contract, but even she wouldn’t have been immune from the industry’s dirty tricks especially if she didn’t have a good manager and/or attorney watching her back.
So, considering that she allegedly had an expensive drug habit, didn’t write any of her songs and only did one big tour in the past 10 years, I can’t say it’s too surprising that she “only” had $20 million.
Probably a lot of relatives, friends, friends of friends, friends of relatives, etc. who latched on to her over the years, but aren’t really providing any type of service other than simply being related to her. For some people being generous, for better or worse, is a big ego boost.
Michael Jackson was never so rich as when he kicked the bucket. No entourage to support, no spending like a drunken sailor on the whim of the moment… but the sales keep rolling in. If Whitney made enough money of on-going royalties to keep her in that decent lifestyle, it will be good money for years to come. The future value of her catalog is the fortune they are actually fighting over, I’m sure.
The problem is very few singers plan their career finances like a pro athlete (or like a pro athlete should). You will be big for a few years, pack that away so that it keeps you off dog food in your old age. If you are lucky there will be on-going earnings at a decent amount beyond those few years. If you are really really lucky, you will make a ton of money every year for a long time.