Tones & I’s Eye-watering Fortune Revealed

Tones & I’s fortune has been revealed as the Aussie superstar, real name Toni Watson, scores a place on the Australian Financial Review’s Young Rich List.

The hitmaker is worth an estimated $35 million, according to the publication, which attributes her placement on the list to Dance Monkey, an “enduring hit”.

It’s reported that the track, which has broken numerous ARIA chart and streaming records since its release in 2019, has earned the singer $12 million.

As News.com.au notes, Watson also has a healthy property portfolio, including a $7.08m Mornington Peninsula pad she acquired last year.

Another artist with an eye-watering sum is Vance Joy, aka James Keogh, whose unrelenting Riptide with its 2.5 billion streams was also praised as “enduring” as the singer’s estimated $40 million worth is revealed.

AFR attributes both Joy and Watson’s placement on the list to the fact they have “written most of their biggest songs either themselves or with just one other person”, whereas an artist like The Kid LAROI is forced to split his earnings with others (eight songwriters in the case of Stay).

APRA AMCOS’s Clive Hodson told AFR, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Tones has retained ownership of her master recordings and is leasing them to her labels [Sony in Australia, Warner internationally] on a 50:50 revenue deal where she gets them back after 10 years.

“It actually works for the labels, too. They were forced to invest far less in artist development during the lean years of the last decade anyway. They used to rely on one in every five of their artists hitting it to make a profit. Now they can just lease in masters and narrow those odds.”

Keogh’s manager Jaddan Comerford of Unified Music Group, who books Tones & I, also debuts on the list with an estimated worth of $35 million.

Comerford told the publication it’s likely we’ll see more Aussie artists on the list in future years, noting, “When I first started going to America 15 years ago, Wolfmother was breaking and people wanted to talk about Jet, maybe The Vines. Now the list is as long as your arm – Tame Impala, Tones & I, 5 Seconds Of Summer, Courtney Barnett, Vance Joy, Flume, I could go on.”

You can read all about Dance Monkey’s path to success here.