The Weeknd ended up spending $7m (£5.1m) of his own money on his high-octane Super Bowl halftime show.
While the halftime show marks one of the biggest gigs in the world for an artist, the event itself doesn’t exactly pay – but there's a reason this won't matter much to the Canadian pop star.
Performers don’t get a fee from the NFL for doing the halftime show – instead they’re given a budget to cover production costs, which can easily top $10m (£7.3m).
The Weeknd, real name Abel Tesfaye, apparently felt this wouldn’t match his vision for the show, so ended up pouring his own money into the performance.
However, this doesn’t mean he will be out of pocket after the event.
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The Super Bowl halftime show can reach as many as 100 million people; after Justin Timberlake headlined in 2018, his music sales rocketed by 534 per cent.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Lopez, who co-headlined with Shakira last year, apparently gained more than two million new followers across social media in the week after her performance.
Therefore, it’s highly likely Tesfaye will earn back what he spent on the performance, and then some.
“The Super Bowl is an opportunity on the most massive level,” Wassim ‘SAL’ Slaiby, The Weeknd’s manager, told Forbes.
The Weeknd seems intent on making the most of his Super Bowl hype, having just announced a full year’s worth of rescheduled dates for his After Hours tour, in 2022.
Forbes reports that Maroon 5’s per-city average gross jumped from $200,000 (£145,000) to $1.7m (£1.2m) after the pop band’s Super Bowl show in 2019.
It adds that, pre-Super Bowl, The Weeknd has earnt more than $205 million (£150m) over the past five years, pre-tax, including $92 million (£67m) in 2017, the year of his Starboy tour.
Read our review of The Weeknd’s halftime show here.
