Top 10 highest-paid celebrities in 2015: Cristiano Ronaldo, Taylor Swift, and...Garth Brooks?

Forbes released its annual 'Celebrity 100' list on Monday, a ranking of the richest celebrities across the globe according to their earnings over the past year. Who's number one?

9. Taylor Swift

Eric Jamison/Invision/AP/File
Taylor Swift arrives at the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas.

The singer-songwriter took in $80 million this past year, thanks to the commercial success of her ‘1989’ album. Ms. Swift starting to see positive results shortly after her album was released: it sold its 4 millionth copy in mid-January, just 12 weeks after she released it, according to Hollywood Reporter. Then seven weeks later, 1989 outsold her last two albums, ‘Red’ and ‘Speak Now’, totalling her sales to 4.5 million, Billboard reported.  

More recently, Swift has become known for advocating independent musicians’ rights. Shortly after Apple announced it would offer a three-month trial of its streaming service Apple Music, Swift published an open letter to the company, The Monitor previously reported. Swift said she would withhold ‘1989’  from Apple Music because Apple decided to not pay artists during the service’s three-month trial phase. The company later reversed its decision.

2 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.