2024-09-24 19:40:04
This weekend brought the offical end of brat summer, and Charli XCX is now a week into her 21-city North America arena tour with Troye Sivan. So how much was brat summer worth?
While it’s impossible to know how much Charli made in total from the groundswell around brat, a colorful concept built on spontaneity and living life to its fullest, we crunched the numbers around a few brat summer deals. According to our rough estimate, these deals — specifically her cut of the ticket sales revenue from her co-headlined Sweat tour and other shows, earnings from the revenue generated by her catalog and songwriter share royalties this year, and the H&M ad campaign deal — netted Charli around $9.62 million so far this year.
Brat, Charli XCX’s sixth album, which debuted at No. 3 on the June 7-dated Billboard 200, is the long-time London rave singer’s most commercially successful album by far. Its lime green album art, Charli’s candid, sometimes vulnerable lyrics, and the open-ended conversation about what it means to be “brat” resonated with audiences, putting Charli at the center of the cultural conversation with everyone from Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign for U.S. president to a vegan sausage company embracing “brat” culture.
“She has got the attention of anybody that she wants right now,” says Jenna Adler, Charli’s agent at CAA. The album’s 23 tracks (including remixes) passed the more-than 1 billion streams mark on Spotify in late August, and, according to Luminate, her catalog has racked up around 2 billion on-demand streams globally. Charli announced brand partnerships with H&M and Skims, and her first North America arena tour with Sivan sold out shows in Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco immediately.
Touring
The momentum that built over brat summer helped the pair of Charli XCX and Sivan sell more than 97%, or 261,694 of 269,733, of the total tickets available for their Sweat tour, Adler says.
With an average ticket price of around $90, Billboard estimates the tour has grossed roughly $23.5 million. After touring’s various costs, including the artist manager’s fee, touring artists usually take home around 34% of ticket sales, or in this case about $8 million. If it is a co-headline tour, that would likely be split 50/50, with Charli earning $4 million.
To build excitement ahead of the arena tour, Charli headlined a handful of sold-out shows branded Charli XCX Presents: PARTYGIRL shows, that were intentionally small to allow fans to feel part of a Charli XCX-DJ’d dance party, Adler says.
Three of those shows — held in London, Los Angeles and Sao Paulo in June — grossed $377,300 from a combined total of 7,413 tickets sold, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. Billboard does not have data on two additional shows Charli headlined in Brooklyn and Chicago, and our calculations do not include Charli XCX’s many festival performances this year or revenue from merch sold at concerts — an area of touring that can be quite lucrative.
The Sweat tour marks the first time either Charli or Sivan will headline arenas in the world’s biggest music market, and tickets went on sale to the public on April 26. Roughly 70% were sold by the end of May, rising to 80% by mid-June and over 90% by the end of July, Billboard reported.
Total estimated touring income (for 3 party girl shows and Sweat tour): $4.1 million
Streaming
Kamala Harris’s campaign for president leaned into brat summer on July 21, the day President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Harris. Charli XCX posted on X (formerly Twitter) “kamala IS brat,” Harris’s campaign briefly adopted brat’s lime-green hue on social platforms, and the week of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, from Aug. 19 through Aug. 25, it was the sole sponsor of Spotify’s official “This is Charli XCX” playlist.
While Charli did not directly benefit from the sponsorship—the Harris/Walz campaign paid Spotify an undisclosed amount—the popular playlist with 2 ½ hours of her most popular songs got a boost in listeners and followers.
Roughly 127,000 Spotify users follow — or have saved — the Spotify playlist, which gained 12,400 new followers between Aug. 10 and Sept. 10, with around 5,000 users piling on during the Harris campaign’s sponsorship, according to Chartmetric.
Spotify monthly listeners of the playlist rose by 8.6 million, or 23.4%, to 45.5 million between Aug. 12 and Aug. 27. Listenership declined slightly during the three days that led up to Aug. 19, the first day of the DNC convention, but that trend reversed with the biggest single day boost occurring on Aug. 20. By Aug. 28, brat’s 23 official tracks, remixes and bonus tracks had nearly 1.08 billion streams on Spotify, Chartmetric says.
Globally, Charli XCX’s catalog has accumulated nearly 2 billion on-demand streams, according to Luminate. So far this year, her recorded music catalog has generated 722,000 album consumption units in the United States, as of Sept. 9, compared to an average of 216,000 album consumption units from 2021-2024, according to Luminate. Her songs have generated 781.13 million on-demand streams in the U.S. this year, primarily from audio on-demand streams. Programmed streams topped 10.73 million or double her three-year average.
That translates to nearly $6 million in revenue for her U.S. label and $13.4 million globally so far this year, based on Billboard estimates which were calculated by using RIAA U.S. data to determine wholesale rates, and per-stream rates provided by financial sources at major and indie labels. If Charli XCX gets traditional superstar royalties of 22% for “sale” formats like CDs, vinyl and downloads; and a 37% rate for on-demand streaming, Billboard estimates her take-home pay so far this year, minus the traditional 4% producer’s fee, would be nearly $4.1 million.
Charli’s master recordings have produced $1.52 million in royalty revenues for the publishers of the songwriters she has used and nearly $3.5 million in publishing royalties when extrapolating for global publishing revenue, according to Billboard’s estimates.
Billboard estimates Charli XCX has a 30% songwriter share for the songs on her album, which means her publisher would realize roughly $1.05 million for her catalog’s global activity so far this year. If Charli has a traditional 50/50 publishing revenue split deal, she would receive $525,000; if she signed a co-publishing 75/25 deal, she would net about $788,000; and if she owns her publishing royalties and has signed an administration deal, which can run from 85/15 to 94/6 with as much as 94% of the publishing revenue going to the songwriter and 6% going to the administrator, she could net as much as $922,000. (Calculations are based on a typical 88% administration rate.)
Total estimated streaming, catalog and publishing income: max $5.02 million.
Brand Deals
In the past month, Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS and H&M have both launched campaigns featuring Charli XCX. The SKIMS campaign, launched Aug. 21, has Charli modeling its new cotton collection of boxers, bralettes and fleece pants. For H&M, Charli stars alongside other culture shifters Arca, Lila Moss, Ajus Samuel, Loli Bahia, Wali Deutsch and others in the global retailer’s A/W 2024 campaign. Financial details of these deals are not public, but sources estimate Charli was paid a sum in the mid-six-figures for her deal with H&M.
Billboard has reported in the past that branding deals contribute $2.6 billion in revenue annually to the music industry, with sponsorship spending on music tours, venues and festivals comprising more than 60% of that amount. The remainder comes from fees paid for the use of music in ads, films, games and TV shows, with endorsement payments, such as clothing brand partnerships, contributing the smallest portion of revenue.
Marcie Allen, the MAC (Marcie Allen Consulting) president known for orchestrating some of the highest-profile brand partnerships in the music industry, says these kinds of deals, and what it takes to land them, are rarely about the money.
To attract attention from top companies serving the Gen Z market, “it isn’t just about awareness, recognition or buzz. It is about puncturing through culture to create an entire subculture, a new vernacular, and ultimately becoming embedded into identity.”
“The concept of ‘going viral’ is fundamentally changing and Charli XCX’s ‘brat summer’ is a perfect example.”
Additional reporting by Ed Christman and Eric Frankenberg
This is the first of a new column Billboard is launching in which we will unpack one financial issue a week for an artist in the news. Thanks for reading, and if you have suggestions or tips, email me at [email protected].
