Stone Cold Cash: The business-savvy move that set up The Rolling Stones for life

At this point, it’s something of a cliché to point out that your favourite musicians might not be as rich as they seem. From the indie star who can’t do an encore because they have an early shift at Currys in the morning, to the megastar whose coke habit cleans them out when the hits stop coming. In an industry as precarious as music, the next paycheck is never guaranteed. It’s not just today either, where streaming has funnelled all profits up to billionaire CEOs. In fact, the act that paved the way for musicians to get something resembling their fair share was none other than The Rolling Stones.

It’s true. The platonic ideal of the rebellious rock and roll icons also showed their generation of musicians how to be fiscally sensible. The closer you look though, the more one realizes that it couldn’t have been anyone else. As mentioned earlier, it’s currently impossible to make money out of music for anyone but an immensely lucky few. In the 1960s, it wasn’t much better. The first wave of record deals for pop artists making their own music was still cut from the cloth the industry built in the 1950s.

Things are really, really bad today, make no mistake. At the very least though, it’s theoretically possible for musicians to earn a steady income from music today, which it wasn’t in the 1950s. Musicians were performing monkeys who got a pittance for touring and promoting music they never, ever wrote. Even in the heyday of the 1960s, the music scene was full of artists making a huge splash on the charts and on tour that were flat broke off the road. None of The Who were rich until the 1970s, for example. That may have been due to a truly psychotic guitar budget, though.

The Rolling Stones were also perfect examples of this. In fact the band, who were more or less a covers band initially, only started writing songs as a way of getting a new source of income when they weren’t gigging. Even when they were arguably the biggest non-Fab band in the world by the end of the 1960s, the taxman came calling as is his wont and the band hot-footed it across the channel, in effect becoming tax exiles. So far, so rock ‘n’ roll. However, there are two things to bear in mind about The Stones.

First is that if there’s one thing they can do, it’s survive. How else do you explain Keith Richards’ continuing time among the (sort-of) living? The other is that they have always been a savvier band than people give them credit for. This is still the band that turned its hand to psychedelia and disco to keep up with the times, and Mick Jagger studied business at the London School of Economics. Their first act came in 1970, when they ditched their longtime manager/unabashed crook Allen Klein for the merchant banker Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein.

Loewenstein’s loyalty to the band was as unwavering as his business sense, and thus began the first part of the band’s transformation. The second came at the end of 1980 with the Steel Wheels Tour. Now, while touring is pretty much the only way that a band can make any money nowadays, touring at a stadium level continued at a universal loss that would be made up for by the massive boost in record sails that would follow.

In 1989, Mick Jagger started wondering how one could make money from both. In response, Loewenstein would bring concert promoter Michael Cole into the fold, who told Fortune how they planned to make their stadium shows profitable. “When you look at what a stadium show was pre-Steel Wheels, it was a bit of a scrim, and a big, wide, flat piece of lumber, and that was it. The band turned a stadium into a theatre. It was complicated to the third power and expensive to the fifth. But it worked.”

Worked undersells it totally. The stadium megatour is now the standard way that the world’s biggest acts make their money with the likes of U2, Taylor Swift and BTS making the GDP of small countries off the back of work put in by The Rolling Stones nearly four decades ago. Truly, the world of marketing has as much to thank Mick ‘n’ Keef for as the world of rock and roll and that, truly, is saying a whole lot.

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