Who’s the best-paid solo singer in the world? In 2015, according to Forbes, it was probably Elton John. He reportedly made $100 million. U2 made twice as much as that, apparently—but there are four of them. There’s only one Elton John.1
Two hundred fifteen years ago, the answer to the same question would have been Mrs. Billington. Elizabeth Billington was, some say, the greatest English soprano who ever lived. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, painted Mrs. Billington in the early years of the nineteenth century. He depicted her standing with a book of music in her hands and her curls partly pinned up and partly floating free, listening to a choir of angels singing. The composer Joseph Haydn thought the portrait was an injustice: the angels, said Haydn, should have been listening to Mrs. Billington singing.2
Elizabeth Billington was also something of a sensation off the stage. A scurrilous biography of her sold out in less than a day. The book contained what were purportedly copies of intimate letters about her famous lovers—including, they say, the Prince of Wales, the future King George IV. In a more dignified celebration of her fame, after she recovered from a six-week-long illness on her Italian tour, the opera house in Venice was illuminated for three days.3
Such was Elizabeth Billington’s fame—some would say notoriety—that she was the subject of a bidding war for her performances. The managers of what were then London’s two leading opera houses, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, scrambled so desperately to secure her that she ended up singing at both venues, alternating between the two, and pulling in at least £10,000 in the 1801 season. It was a remarkable sum, even for her, and much noted at the time. But in today’s terms, it’s a mere £690,000, less than a million dollars—one percent of what Elton John earned in 2015.
What explains the difference? Why is Elton John worth a hundred Elizabeth Billingtons?
In the 1870s, some sixty years after Elizabeth Billington’s death, the great economist Alfred Marshall analyzed the impact of the electric telegraph. The telegraph had by then connected America, Britain, India, even 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.”4 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. Looking for a contrast, he chose the performing arts. The “number of persons who can be reached by a human voice,” he observed, “is strictly limited”—and so, in consequence, was the earning power of the vocalists.
Two years after Alfred Marshall wrote those words—in 1877, on Christmas Eve—Thomas Edison applied for a patent for the phonograph. It was the first machine to be able to both record and reproduce the sound of a human voice.
Nobody quite seemed to know what to do with the technology at first. A French publisher, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, had already developed something called 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 does not seem to have occurred to Monsieur Scott de Martinville that one might try to convert the recording back into sound.5
Soon enough, the application of the new technology became clear: one could record the best singers in the world, copy the recordings, and sell them. 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 African American singer George W. Johnson; to meet that demand he reportedly spent day after day singing the same song until his voice gave out—singing the song fifty times a day would produce only two hundred records.6 When Emile Berliner introduced recordings on a disc, rather than Edison’s on cylinder, this 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 whom Alfred Marshall had described.7
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 live in music halls. Mrs. Billington, after all, couldn’t be everywhere. But when you can listen at home to the best performers in the world, why pay to hear a merely competent tribute act in person?
Thomas Edison’s phonograph led the way toward a winner-take-all dynamic in the performing industry. The very best performers went from earning like Mrs. Billington to earning like Elton John. Meanwhile, 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 money, because nobody was interested in paying for a copy of the second-best when you could have a copy of the best.
In 1981, the economist Sherwin Rosen called this phenomenon “the Superstar economy.” Imagine, he said, the fortune that Mrs. Billington might have made if there’d been phonographs in 1801.8 Even Elton John might be envious.
Technological innovations have created superstar economics in other sectors, too. Satellite television, for example, has been to athletes what the gramophone was to musicians, or the telegraph to nineteenth-century industrialists. If you were the world’s best soccer player a few decades ago, no more than a stadium full of fans could see you play every week. Now your every move is watched—and rewatched—by hundreds of millions on every continent. Part of the story is that sports—from soccer to basketball to stock car racing to the Olympics—can be broadcast at all. But just as important is the growth in the number of television channels. Once there were more TV channels than there were sports teams, the bidding war for the rights to broadcast games became frenetic.
And as the market size for soccer expanded, so has the gap in pay between the very best and the merely very good. As recently as the 1980s, players in English football’s top tier used to earn twice as much as those in the third tier, playing for, say, the fiftieth-best team in the country. Now average wages in the Premier League are twenty-five times those earned by the players two divisions down.9
Technological shifts can dramatically change who makes money, and they are wrenching because they can be so sudden—and because the people concerned have the same skills as ever, but suddenly have very different earning power. Nor is it easy to know how to respond: when inequality is caused by a change in the tax code, by corporate collusion, or by governments favoring special interests, at least you have an enemy. But we can hardly ban Google and Facebook just to protect the livelihoods of newspaper reporters.
Throughout the twentieth century, new innovations—the cassette, the CD, the DVD—maintained the economic model created by the gramophone. But at the end of the century came the MP3 format and fast Internet connections. Suddenly, you didn’t have to spend twenty bucks on a plastic disc to hear your favorite music—you could find it online, often for free. In 2002, David Bowie warned his fellow musicians that they were facing a very different future. “Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he said. “You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left.”10
Bowie seems to have been right. Artists have stopped using concert tickets as a way to sell albums and started using albums as a way to sell concert tickets. But we haven’t returned to the days of Mrs. Billington: amplification, stadium rock, global tours, and endorsement deals mean that the most admired musicians can still profit from a vast audience. Inequality remains alive and well—the top 1 percent of musical artists take more than five times more money from concerts than the bottom 95 percent put together.11 The gramophone may be passé, but the ability of technological shifts to change who wins and who loses is always with us.