$100 Milhões Por Um Acordo Com Um Superstar! Eles São Um Bom Investimento?

$100 Million Record Deals For Music's Superstars: Are They A Good Investment?

First of all thanks to Hugh McIntyre for this article.

News broke yesterday that Adele has reportedly signed a $130 million dollar recording contract with Sony . That figure is high enough to give her the largest deal ever offered to a female artist in the music industry, and if it’s correct, this is certainly a good time for the British singer-songwriter to celebrate.

Other record labels have made similarly-sized deals in the past, but they haven’t always ended up being good investments. In fact, it seems like when there is that much money on the table, the company offering the cash is taking a serious risk. There have only ever been a few deals signed that come even close to the $100 million mark, and while some have paid off, others ended up as financial blunders. 

Adele’s reported $130 million might be the largest for a woman in history, but it isn’t the biggest payday for a musician. The largest and most expensive deal of all time belongs to Michael Jackson, though it was only signed after his passing. It has only been a few years since that landmark deal (reportedly worth somewhere between $200 and $250 million) went into effect, but already there’s a good chance that Sony will make its enormous investment back. Jackson’s popularity isn’t likely to fade for generations, and in the years since his death, his estate, which signed the contract with the label, has made over $1 billion. He’s only released one proper album posthumously, but there are many more to come.

Contracts worth at least $100 million have also been signed with the likes of Bruce Springsteen and U2, and while the records that came out of those deals certainly weren’t the biggest or most commercially-successful of their careers, the titles were still big sellers, and money was made.

Other times, investing the big bucks hasn’t paid off, and there are a handful of stories that show just how wrong these situations can go after the paperwork is done. The best-known and most-cited example is that of Mariah Carey’s ill-fated Virgin Records debacle in the early 2000s. The label spent upwards of $100 million on securing her, and it was almost immediately a disaster. While the deal was for five albums, she only ended up dropping one: Glitter, which is still known as the worst of her illustrious career. After the failure of that album and a personal breakdown, the company had to spend tens of millions to buy her out of the contract it had just spent so much money on.

Both Whitney Houston and Lil Wayne have also signed deals reportedly close to $100 million that shouldn’t be considered massive flops on the same page as Mariah’s, but certainly didn’t return dividends like the labels were hoping. Houston only managed two proper albums with Arista before her death a few years ago, and neither one of those made the impact that her previous releases did. 

Things were going especially well for Lil Wayne close to a decade ago, so he re-signed with Cash Money Records, the company he had helped him become one of the most famous faces in hip-hop. In the years since, he has continued to chart and sell, but none of his albums have performed as well as the Tha Carter III, which helped him secure such a profitable deal in the first place. Now he’s in a legal dispute with the company, and there’s no telling how long that will last or how much it will cost.

If Adele’s $130 million deal is done, the superstar likely won’t start releasing albums that count towards it for a few years, as she is still busy promoting her latest, 25, which made history in its debut week and is still selling extremely well six months later. Whether that massive investment ends up being a great or terrible decision on Sony’s part won’t be known for years, or perhaps even decades, but hopefully this story ends well, and not as a cautionary tale on how nothing is certain in the music industry.