Top grossing music artists

As befits this classic rock mainstay, the bulk of Fleetwood Mac’s earnings came from its 2013 world tour, which covered 34 cities and take-home pay of $17.4 million. The trek’s high point included three nights at London’s O2 Arena. There, Christine McVie, 70, joined the band for the final two shows to perform “Don’t Stop” — a prelude to her coming back full-time for 2014’s Reunion Tour (that trek was potentially sidetracked due to the recent cancer diagnosis of John McVie, 68). The band also released its first new studio material in a decade, "Extended Play." It reached No. 48 on the Billboard 200.

METHODOLOGY: The data used to compile Money Makers was supplied by Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen BDS and Billboard Boxscore. Artists are ranked by U.S. earnings, calculated from touring, recorded- music sales, publishing royalties and revenue from digital music and video streaming. Due to a lack of data, revenue from sponsor- ship, merchandising and synchronization isn’t included. For album and track sales, Billboard assumed a royalty rate of 20 percent of retail, minus producers’ fees. Billboard treated all streaming revenue as derived from licensing deals and split that to calculate the artist’s take. Billboard applied statutory mechanical rates for album and track sales and Copyright Royalty Board-determined rates or -approved formulas for streaming. For labels’ direct deals with interactive services, Billboard used a blended rate of $0.00525 for audio and $0.005 for video streams. Billboard subtracted a manager’s fee of 10 percent. For box office, each artist was credited with 34 percent of the gross, typically what’s left after the promoter and manager’s cuts and other costs are subtracted.