Everyone else pretty much covered it with record sales, shows, sponsorships but there’s also syncs (having your music in an ad, show or film) and merchandising (the return on merch is massive).
Keep in mind that many artists are potentially flashing advances which is money loaned to the artist against any future royalties. A lot of artists wind up in debt because they get $100,000 or something and end up blowing it before they actually earn it, pay it back at a small percentage, and make a profit. So a lot of what you may see could, in reality, be them basically flaunting a really, really shitty loan.
Ya shows, album sales, promos, streams and stuff like that…
But if you’re wondering why it seems every single soundcloud rapper type dude with the slightest clout has all jewlery disproportionate to their commercial success, I heard a funny thing (not sure how consistently true it is but makes sense) about how a lot of new rappers just blow their first signing bonus of say 20-30 Gs or whatever on bling and drugs and whatnot to keep the image, then dont make anymore money and fall off, and thats what contributes to the kind of significant turnover rate of like, small time rappers with nice chains.
Rappers/Singers in general get most of their money from live shows. Each person paying $100 for a ticket at a venue that holds 65k people amounts to around 6million. After you’ve paid the venue, crew, travel and taxes, you can walk away with like 2million. Multiply that by however many shows are in the tour (typically around 100) then you’ve walked away with like 200million, but that still has other fees that the artist hasn’t paid out yet (publisher, mangers, lawyers, agents, stylists, day to day stuff etc) so I like to cut that down to 100million to be safe. But they also have poor money management typically and either overspend or just throw it away on stupid stuff, so cut that in half again..
Note: artists make more money from live shows than sales btw
Source: interned for a record label
Edit: added the note
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