Singer Bruce Springsteen just finished his first commercially successful tour. With his fifth studio album, ‘The River’—he had a lot of money in his bank account.
As a matter of fact, the success story of the legend is satisfying to the ears. Bruce Springsteen, who was 32 years old at the time, decided to furnish his rented Colts Neck ranch house with salvaged street furniture.
This made him one of a kind in his little area,” as he reviews this in his ‘Deliver Me From No Where, Warren Zanes’ 2023 book about his milestone follow-up album, back in 1982’s in Nebraska.
Regardless of his distress with the features of riches, the vocalist and extraodinary guitar player has amassed a significant fortune of over sixty years — which Forbes moderately estimates to be worth at $1.1 billion — singing about his common roots.
Even though he is 74 years old, he continues to tour and perform three-hour shows. He is a “working machine” who continues to put in the effort for his worldwide fans.
A desire to improve was the impetus behind Springsteen’s legendary work ethic. From his first major label LP, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, Springsteen’s brand of rock ‘n roll spun tales of manual labor, finding love, and getting out of the town that “rips the bones from your back.”
He would know, having been born in a Jersey Shore town to working-class parents, and living with his paternal grandparents in what he described in his memoir as their “noticeably decrepit” home.
Before signing with Columbia Records, Springsteen spent the 1960s figuring out who he was as an artist by playing in a variety of local bands. Springsteen was supported on his debut album by members of the now-famous E Street Band: drummer Max Weinberg, guitarist Stevie Van Zandt, and the late saxophonist Clarence Clemons are among others.
The Stone Pony, also known as “The House That Bruce Built,” was founded in the 1970s by the group of men who met while playing at local Jersey Shore clubs.
Does Springsteen’s success have a secret?
In ‘Deliver Me From Nowhere’, he says,
“I was into crafting an identity that was very, very personal to me as a man,” he explains in Deliver Me From Nowhere. “I wanted to connect that identity with the very big picture of the country at large…So I needed people who were going to be willing to go in as deep as I needed and was willing to go myself.”
Springsteen hired former rock journalist Jon Landau as his manager and record producer once he had the band. It was Landau who, in the wake of listening the Manager’s music without precedent for 1974, broadly wrote in Boston’s Real Paper:
“I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” What Landau couldn’t have predicted at the time is that in 2020, Springsteen inducted him into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
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Over the course of his career, Springsteen has sold more than 140 million albums worldwide, including 21 studio albums, seven live albums, and five EPs.
Additionally, he has told his tales in a No. Along the way, he won 20 Grammys, an Oscar, two Golden Globes, a special Tony Award, and was inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He also wrote a memoir that was a best-seller in the New York Times and performed to 236 sold-out shows on Broadway.
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In addition, Springsteen has been honored with the highest accolades in the U.S, receiving the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
Then in 2021, not long after his second run of Springsteen on Broadway ended, he sold his music catalog to Sony, earning a lump sum of $500 million for his life’s work. At the time, Landau said the deal was deserved for the half-century Springsteen spent making music. “Everybody is getting what is in their interest,” Landau told Forbes in 2022.
In 2023, Springsteen’s world tour sold more than 1.6 million tickets, generating $380 million in revenue, per Pollstar.
The heart of heartland rock remains, in his words, a gun for hire, with concerts scheduled through mid-2025 and no apparent plans to slow down (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White is scheduled to play Springsteen in a forthcoming biopic).
