FROM phenomenal record breaking tours to scooping more Brit Awards in a single year than anyone before them, 2024 has certainly been an incredible 12 months for women in music.
Pop’s leading ladies have smashed the glass ceiling, giving male stars including Harry Styles and Lewis Capaldi a serious run for their mega millions.
Zig-zagging across the globe for her 21-month-long Eras Tour, Taylor Swift broke records selling an eye-watering 5.2 million tickets and giving the UK economy a £1 BILLION boost.
Charli XCX’s ‘brat summer’ – a movement that encouraged young women to live their best (and messiest) lives in the hotter months – drew to a close in September after totting up one BILLION mentions on TikTok
Similarly, Adele’s residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas exploded in popularity and saw her take home a staggering £100 million, before it wrapped in November.
They were all momentous achievements for women in the industry who are raising the bar higher than ever before.
As 2024 comes to a close, Fabulous takes a look at the female megastars who took the year by storm.
Swifties who managed to land a ticket to Taylor’s Eras Tour were treated to a stellar three-hour performance divided into separate acts, each showcasing one of the American superstar’s first ten studio albums.
As well as the 46-song setlist, Taylor also included a live acoustic section which she changed for every show to make each concert unique.
The tour, which sold 5.2 million tickets, has pegged her net worth at an eye-watering £1.3 BILLION, according to Forbes.
The 35-year-old is the first musician to make the billionaire ranking primarily based on her songs and performances.
Reports also reveal that her colossal fortune includes £480 million amassed from royalties and touring, as well as a music catalogue worth an estimated £480 million.
This is partly thanks to Taylor releasing re-records of her first six albums – known affectionately as Taylor’s Versions – from 2021 up until now so she could regain the ownership rights to them.
Economists estimate the Eras Tour UK leg, which comprised 15 shows in London, Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh, gave the country a £1 billion cash injection.
The average UK Swiftie (the name for the pop sensation’s loyal fans) is estimated to have spent an astonishing £848 just to see her perform in the flesh.
Teenage Dream singer Katy Perry announced in The Sun in November that she will play five huge arena shows across the country next October as part of her hotly-anticipated Lifetimes Tour.
Similar to Taylor’s Eras Tour, it is set to be a celebration of her biggest hits.
Katy, 40, will take on London, Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, and Glasgow, as well as a slew of international stages.
And she plans to make a £1 donation to charity, Music Venue Trust, for every ticket sold for the upcoming UK arena roadshow.
I called this tour the Lifetimes Tour because I feel like I’ve grown up with my fans. I’m so blessed to have already had a lifetime of familiar songs that fans have adopted as the soundtracks to their lives
Katy Perry
Katy is already on Forbes’ list of ‘Richest self-made women in America’ after selling her music rights to Carlyle-backed Litmus Music for a reported £180 million.
She burst onto the mainstream with her 2008 album One of the Boys, which contained her debut single I Kissed a Girl.
This was followed by her 2010 album Teenage Dream, which produced the mega hit of the same name, as well as California Gurls, Firework, E.T. and Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.).
Katy, who is married to English actor Orlando Bloom, plans to bring their four-year-old daughter, Daisy, on the road for her 2025 tour.
British superstar Adele wept when the two-year Las Vegas residency which banked her an eye-watering £100 million came to an end in November.
It’s not all doom and gloom though, as the stint is said to have shot her net worth to a whopping £170 million, according to The Sunday Times Rich List 2024.
The 36-year-old had the most lucrative string of live shows of her career with her 100 Weekends With Adele performances at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
The residency sits her among the likes of legends Celine Dion and Cher, who were tipped to have made £314.5 million and £116.6 million from theirs respectively.
I will not see [my fans] for an incredibly long time and I will hold you dear in my heart
Adele
London-born Adele, who was raised by her single mum Penny Adkin in Tottenham, Brixton and then had a humble flat above a shop in West Norwood, started singing as a child.
She got into the prestigious BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology after auditioning with ‘Free’ by Stevie Wonder and playing James Rae’s ‘Tumbledown Blues’ on the clarinet.
While there, she was scouted by XL Recordings after a friend posted a three-track demo for a class project on MySpace, which amassed over 10,000 plays.
Fast forward to today, she’s one of the UK’s most recognisable faces and is reportedly so wealthy that she was able to turn down £200 million to keep performing after announcing she will be going away “for a long time” after her Vegas residency.
In less than 10 years, Dua Lipa went from working as a waitress in London’s Soho to one of the hottest stars on the planet, clocking up three Grammys and seven Brit awards along the way.
And her years of graft have paid off because her estimated fortune reportedly sits at £104 million, as of October 2024.
It comes after the 28-year-old headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 2024 in June.
Dua received around £200,000 for her headline slot alone, according to The Mirror.
I feel the most confident at this point in my life
Dua Lipa
The daughter of Kosovan immigrants, she started her career posting videos of herself singing cover versions on YouTube from her bedroom in West Hampstead, London.
Her talent was soon spotted and she signed a record deal, with hits like One Kiss and Training Season shooting her to the top of the charts.
Dua’s 2025 tour was named O2 Priority’s best-selling of the year, with the telecoms company revealing it sold 1.54 million tickets through its Priority Tickets platform, which allows users to snap up tickets before they go on sale to the wider public.
The Radical Optimism Tour kicked off in Singapore last month and is coming to England in June next year with performances at London’s Wembley Stadium and Liverpool’s Anfield.
She might only be 25-years-old, but Sabrina Carpenter’s supersonic rise onto the mainstream in 2024 has upped her net worth to a whopping £9.6 million.
She particularly took Britain’s Gen Z by storm with her album, Short n’ Sweet.
It included chart-topping hits like Taste, which made her the first artist in 71 years to spend 20 weeks atop the UK singles chart in a calendar year.
Taste was also the longest-running UK number one of 2024, beating global artists like Billie Eilish and Noah Kahan.
SABRINA Carpenter's first role was as the lead in the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World. Between 2014 and 2017, she appeared in over 70 episodes.
She also signed with the Disney-owned Hollywood Records and released her debut single, Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying, in 2014.
After four albums, she moved to Island Records in 2021.
Her fifth album, Emails I Can’t Send (2022), had her hit singles Nonsense and Feather.
Around that time, Sabrina started to gain notoriety in the UK.
She opened for Taylor Swift at the Eras Tour in 2023, and then achieved wider commercial success with her sixth album Short n’ Sweet, which was released earlier this year.
Number one singles from the album include Espresso and Please Please Please.
Her tune Espresso from the album garnered the most streams globally on Spotify during 2024, hitting 1.6 billion listens.
Sabrina, a former Disney star, kicked off her Short n’ Sweet tour in September and will be playing arenas in Manchester, London, Birmingham and Glasgow throughout March 2025.
Her stardom gained attention from Kim Kardashian, who paid her an unknown sum to endorse and model new pieces for Skims’ Fits Everybody and Stretch Lace collections in April.
It didn’t stop there: Sabrina also raked in lucrative sponsorships from the likes of coffee giant Blank Street, beauty brands SuperGoop and Redken, and American fashion house Marc Jacobs throughout 2024.
Chart topper Becky Hill has bagged 19 UK Top 40 hits and two Brit Awards since competing on The Voice UK way back in 2012, aged just 18.
Now 30-years-old, she’s eyeing up “world domination” after selling out her debut 2024 arena tour.
She has amassed an impressive £6.6 million in her music career earnings alone thanks to the shows, pegging her overall net worth at a cool £8.5 million.
Becky’s primary business, EKO Music, reported profits of £4.1 million, complemented by £437,224 from her latest venture, EKO Entertainment LLP, according to Companies House documents.
It’s one thing to put on an arena tour but it’s another to sell it out. I definitely think world domination is still in my sights for sure
Becky Hill
Together, her companies have generated a remarkable £1,915 in daily profits over the past year, underscoring her commercial success in the industry.
Established in 2014, EKO Music initially posted a modest profit of £34,028, steadily growing to surpass the £1 million mark in 2021.
Becky’s Believe Me Now? Tour sold out arenas across the UK, in cities London, Cardiff, Manchester, Birmingham, Exeter, Leeds and Nottingham.
“I am so humbled,” she told The Sun at homecoming gig in Birmingham in October. “It’s one thing to put on an arena tour but it’s another to sell it out. I definitely think world domination is still in my sights for sure.”
Charli XCX, real name Charlotte Emma Aitchison, has been making music and growing her net worth steadily since 2008.
But 2024 was her most lucrative year yet, thanks to her pioneering of the pop culture phenomenon, ‘brat summer’.
Soon after her album Brat was released in June, women across the world began living a life defined by party animal antics and rocking cool-girl style inspired by the 32-year-old pop star.
While the word “brat” might suggest a spoiled child, its new meaning among Gen Z is all about accepting imperfections and embracing chaos – particularly when hitting the town for a night out with your pals.
Charli XCX reportedly doubled her net worth in 2024 thanks to the movement.
She is also tipped to have received nearly £4 million from her fashion endorsements, totting up deals with Skims and Acne Studios throughout the year.
Raye, real name Rachel Agatha Keen, started releasing music in 2014 but took a break due the trauma of a record producer sexually assaulting her earlier in her career, which is something she bravely shared in 2023.
When her first ever studio album, My 21st Century Blues, was released independently in 2023, it received critical acclaim and achieved mammoth success.
It saw the songstress make history when she scooped more Brit Awards in a single year than anyone else ever has at the ceremony in March.
The 27-year-old, from London, won six out of seven nominations including Artist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year, Song of the Year, British Album of the Year, Best R&B Act and Best New Artist.
She performed a medley of a few of her hits at the BRIT Awards, and opened for Taylor Swift on the last leg of the Eras Tour’s UK stint at Wembley Stadium.
Before becoming an independent artist, Raye had been signed to a record label that told her she was not “good enough to release an album”.
In one of the biggest career U-turns in music history, she made award ceremony history while and has 1.9 million DAILY listeners on Spotify.
Her net worth is estimated at £5.2 million thanks to her bumper year in 2024.
