@jayz @Forbes #Forbes400
Forbes Magazine had an interesting article about the expected wealth of and given his prospective income over the next few years could actually make their Forbes 400 list which would mean he’d be one of the richest Americans.  Yeah you might think Jay is already that given his stature as Hip Hop’s Cash King and his perennial status as one of entertainments top earners.  However, the truth is this country has very wealthy folks like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates that reside in a echelon several teirs above Hov’s current pay grade.  So despite being on the decline of his music career its been clear for a while that although washed up, his other business ventures are far more lucrative than any CD might make him.

I apologize in advance if any of this post gets too mathmatical or technical but to understand what type of residual situation Jay-Z has set up here we’ve gotta dive into the numbers a bit. While landing a spot as one of the country’s wealthiest citizens by 2015 would require him to double his current estimated net worth of $450 million in just half a decade, it is possible.  You see when Jay-Z left Def Jam in 2007 he negotiated the return of his masters to him in 2014.  Additionally he got EMI to hand over his publishing rights to all songs in commercials, sampling, etc. in 2013.  When these transition this will be an unprecedented cash cow for hov which he can either keep or sell at a higher rate.

But exactly what is Jay-Z’s music worth at this point?   Well hov is quoted as saying that his first album, Reasonable Doubt, collects an estimated $100,000 per year in royalties.  His best album perhaps but certainly given his eventual notoriety, certainly not his most popular or highest demanded.  So we’ll have to assume he bankrolls more from projects like the Black Album.  But if you used this as a baseline, you can estimate annual residual revenues from an album to be roughly ten cents per year per album copy sold.

If you multipy that by his entire catalog of 50 million albums worldwide that’s a figure of $5 million per year, which is what he’ll begin collecting on once his master and publishing are returned to him in the next few years. According to Ryan Schinman, boss over at Platinum Rye, the world’s largest buyer of music and talent for corporations, catalogs tend to sell for a 6x-10x multiple of annual revenues. So given that math, Jay-Z should be worth about $50 million if you add that to his Def Jam buyout and the songs he’ll record over the next few years (however weak they may be) plus the expected appreciation value of his musical portfolio and his musical assets could approach $100 million within the next five years butting him at a $150 Million net worth thus placing in him as one of the Richest American, an unfathomable feat for a low level drug dealer from Marcy Project.  DARE TO DREAM!