Ever since releasing his first album in 1973, Bruce Springsteen has been firmly established in the music industry as an artist who embodied the working-class family he grew up in. But Boss’s portfolio now shows the opposite: a new asset valuation has officially put the musician in the billionaire category.
From working class to billionaire class
Forbes magazine, via financial publication Variety, has classified Springsteen as a billionaire after assessing the musician’s wealth with what it described as a “conservative” estimate. He is estimated to be worth around $1.1 billion, ranking him 2,584th on Forbes’ billionaire list.
Much of this wealth is believed to have been generated through large scale ticket sales over the past few years and even larger business deals.
The biggest one came in 2021, when Springsteen sold his entire publishing and recorded music catalog to Sony Music for a total of $500-550 million, the third-largest catalog sale of any musician in history, topped by Queen and second-largest by a solo artist behind Michael Jackson.
“I am one of those artists who can truly say I came in the right place when I signed with Columbia Records in 1972,” Springsteen said in a statement after the deal was signed. “For the past 50 years, the people at Sony Music have treated me with the utmost respect, both as an artist and as a person, and I am thrilled that my legacy will continue to be cared for by the company and the people I know and trust.”
Springsteen will also have a highly lucrative tour in 2023, grossing a reported $380 million, enough to put Springsteen and the E Street Band in the top 20 highest grossing concert tours of all time. Additionally, he is one of the best-selling musicians of all time, having sold approximately 140 million records worldwide in a career spanning more than 50 years.
Bruce Springsteen’s Run
This success is a far cry from the life the young man had growing up in the working-class neighborhood of Long Branch, New Jersey: His mother worked as a legal secretary and was considered the family’s breadwinner, and his father worked a variety of jobs, including as a bus driver, but Springsteen was plagued by mental health issues for much of his life.
Bruce Springsteen began playing in various bands in 1964, but went out on his own in the early 1970s and formed his own band in 1971, which eventually became the E Street Band, named after the street in Belmar, New Jersey where the band’s keyboardist, David Sancious,’s family lived. The band released their first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, in 1973 to widespread acclaim but little financial success.
That all changed with the release of his third studio album, Born to Run, in 1975. The album is considered Springsteen and the band’s breakthrough album. From there, Springsteen and the E Street Band were off to a flying start as they became one of America’s biggest musicians. His seventh album, Born in the USA, remains his most successful album to date, and cemented Springsteen’s status as a “superstar” in the music world.
