Who is the best paid solo singer in the world? In 2015, according to Forbes, it was probably Elton John, who reportedly made $100m (£79m).
U2 apparently made twice as much as that, but there are four of them. There’s only one Elton John.
If we’d asked that question 215 years ago, the answer would have been Mrs Elizabeth Billington, to some the greatest English soprano who ever lived.
Almost 60 years after Elizabeth Billington’s death, the great economist Alfred Marshall analysed the impact of the electric telegraph, which then connected America, Britain, India, and Australia.
Thanks to such modern communications, he wrote: “Men who have once attained a commanding position are enabled to apply their constructive or speculative genius to undertakings vaster, and extending over a wide area, than ever before.”
The world’s top industrialists were getting richer, faster.
The gap between themselves and less outstanding entrepreneurs was growing.
But not every profession’s best and brightest could gain in the same way, Marshall said.
Take the performing arts. “[The] number of persons who can be reached by a human voice,” he wrote, “is strictly limited.” And so, in consequence, was vocalists’ earning power.
But just two years later, in 1877, Thomas Edison applied for a patent for his phonograph, the first machine that could both record and reproduce the human voice.
Nobody seemed quite sure what to do with the technology at first.
The French publisher Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville had already developed the phonoautograph, a device intended to provide a visual record of the sound of a human voice – a little like a seismograph records an earthquake.
But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Martinville that one might try to convert the recording back into sound again.
Soon enough, the application of the new technology became clear: you could record the best singers in the world, and sell the recordings.
At first, making a recording was a bit like making carbon copies on a typewriter: a single performance could be captured on only three or four phonographs at once.
In the 1890s, there was great demand to hear a song by the American singer George W Johnson.
He reportedly spent day after day singing the same song till his voice gave out – but even singing it 50 times a day churned out a mere 200 records.
‘Superstar’ economics
When Emile Berliner introduced recordings on a disc, rather than Edison’s cylinder, it opened the way to mass-production.
Then came radio and film.
Performers such as Charlie Chaplin could reach a global market just as easily as the men of industry described by Alfred Marshall.
For the Charlie Chaplins and Elton Johns of the world, new technologies meant wider fame and more money.
But for the journeymen singers, it was a disaster.
In Elizabeth Billington’s day, many half-decent singers made a living performing in music halls.
After all, Billington herself could sing in only one hall at a time.
But when you can listen to the best performers in the world at home, why pay to hear a merely competent act in person?
Thomas Edison’s phonograph led the way towards a winner-take-all dynamic in the performing industry.
The top performers went from earning like Mrs Billington to earning like Elton John.
But the only-slightly-less good went from making a comfortable living to struggling to pay their bills: small gaps in quality became vast gaps in income.
In 1981, an economist called Sherwin Rosen called this phenomenon “the superstar economy”.
Imagine, he said, the fortune that Mrs Billington might have made if there had been phonographs in 1801.
Source: BBC. Photo credit: Getty Images