2014’s Most Powerful Musicians

Comments

Rihanna and Beyonce
The music industry may be in a bit of a shambles in recent years, but try telling that to the ten folks listed below; each of whom fell asleep last night on a pile of money and awoke this morning on a different, even bigger pile of money.

This group earns their keep (and oh boy, do they!) making with the tunes, even while the record labels scramble and panic, and we civilians come to regard recorded music on demand as something akin to running water.

Forbes has just — as they do annually — bestowed upon us mere mortals their list of those they’ve determined to be Earth’s most powerful celebrities; The Celebrity 100.

From that list of deities and demigods was culled the 10 musicians who ranked highest upon it. They are, by extension, the ten most powerful musicians in the world.

Forbes elaborates below:

The most powerful musician rankings were calculated as part of FORBES’ annual Celeb 100 package. To formulate the list, we combined yearly earnings with press mentions, social media power and a cultural impact figure (check out the full Celebrity 100 special report here).

As we’ve done previously with other such lists — and will likely do until there’s no Internet left for us to do it upon/within — we’ve arranged these fabulous popsters not by their heights, weights, ages, or numbers of records sold, but according to the sizes of their digital footprints — meaning the breadth and scope of their online impact, presence, prominence, and activity — as measured by our always excellent PeekScore scale.

There are a lot of mega-stars on this list, which finds us with a statistical eight-way tie for first place. But, the tippy-top of our scale does allow for the subtlest of variations within the maximum score; with some of these cyber-giants ever-so-slightly more “10″ than others. With that in mind, the eight-way-tie itself is sorted according to digital footprint size; with Queen Bey and King Jay the biggest wheels of the bunch.

Rank Picture Name PeekScore
1

Beyoncé 8.03 / 10.00
2

Jay-Z 10.00 / 10.00
3

Dr. Dre 10.00 / 10.00
4

Miley Cyrus 10.00 / 10.00
5

Taylor Swift 10.00 / 10.00
6

Katy Perry 10.00 / 10.00
7

Bruno Mars 10.00 / 10.00
8

Lady Gaga 10.00 / 10.00
9

Rihanna 9.53 / 10.00
10

Jon Bon Jovi 9.28 / 10.00