Country superstar Toby Keith has some of the most loyal fans in music. And he owns enough product extensions to make sure they’re also some of the most lucrative. Personal earnings so far: $500 million
With 70,000 fans awaiting him at the Houston Rodeo, the world’s largest, Toby Keith sits in his tour bus, as relaxed as the denim on his legs. He’s holding court with his usual crew—business partners, not groupies—and he’s mischievously daring me to eat the worm.
Half the size of a golf tee, the caterpillar-like creature floats beneath an inch of mezcal, tequila’s smokier cousin. “It might give you visions the first time,” he chuckles as I choke down the insect. “Goes down like protein, comes out like fibre.”
And with that, it’s showtime. After a buxom blonde rides a horse around Reliant Stadium, shooting fireworks from a bedazzled American flag, Keith leaves his rolling sanctuary. He wades through a scrum of screaming fans, pauses for a backstage chat with pal Roger Clemens, then swings up into a beefy silver Ford, which he drives over the mud and up to the stage. The opening song is choreographed perfectly: ‘American Ride’.
There’s little about Keith, in fact, that isn’t calibrated for maximum synergy. The mezcal—and the worm—were from the 52-year-old’s own liquor label, Wild Shot. His road trip to the stage is part of a multimillion-dollar endorsement deal with Ford, whose executives had filled his pre-show tour bus, and once he’s up there, he makes sure to play ‘I Love This Bar’, a song after which he’s named his restaurant chain. The teens down in front with the Taylor Swift shirts? Keith owns a piece of her, too. The $1 million or so he’ll earn for the 90-minute concert itself feels almost incidental.
Keith’s commercial chops, overlaying a wide patriotic appeal, have created the most vertically integrated performer in the music business—and a one-man cash machine. Forbes estimates that Keith pulled in $65 million over the last 12 months—more than any musician not named Madonna, Lady Gaga or Bon Jovi, and easily outpacing masters of product extension like Jay-Z ($42 million), Beyoncé ($53 million) and Jennifer Lopez ($45 million).
The long-term figures are even more impressive. Over the past five years, Forbes estimates, Keith has never earned less than $48 million in a year. His cumulative take over that period: $270 million. Over his entire career—Keith has written a No. 1 country hit every year for the past two decades—his total earnings surpass $500 million. “He’s built this little empire, and he did it kind of quietly,” says concert promoter Louis Messina. “Not many people have been able to pull it off as long as he has.”
So why don’t most Americans know much about Keith? Ask him, and he’ll frame it as something of a conspiracy: “Years ago politics branded me as a cat that was an extreme right-wing guy. Media doesn’t want to cover that.” The truth lies in more basic demographics. Country music has only 14 percent of the national radio audience, with a heavy regional tilt. Keith’s brilliance lies in recognising that rather than try to appeal to everyone, he should leverage a base that is unusually loyal and milk it for all it’s worth. “A big rock station might play a hit 100-plus times per week,” says Keith’s manager, TK Kimbrell, who joined the singer’s team in 1995. “A country station might play it 50 times. But they’ll play it forever.”
Keith’s airplane, a Lear 60, is painted in crimson and cream, the colours of his beloved Oklahoma Sooners, and fitted out with saddle leather. Unfortunately, it’s also in the shop. He’s renting a smaller Lear 45, which barely contains his 6-foot-4, 240-pound frame (he played defensive end in a semi-pro football league in his 20s). Luckily, it’s just a short hop from Houston to Norman, Oklahoma, where he lives with Tricia, his wife of 29 years, and their teenage son (they also have two grown daughters; the younger one, Krystal, just released her first album on her dad’s label).
Keith’s success stems from the oil derricks around Norman. He’s a native of nearby Moore, the Oklahoma town recently levelled by a tornado—which narrowly missed his house and hit his sister’s (he’ll host a benefit concert for the town in July with Garth Brooks and Willie Nelson, among others). He planned to go to college and study petroleum engineering. But when crude soared past $100 per barrel in the late 1970s, he grabbed the fast money out of high school, earning $50,000 a year climbing rigs. The inevitable bust followed, and Keith scrambled for part-time work as a bricklayer. For extra cash he made $35 a night playing covers at local bars with the Easy Money Band, which he’d formed with four friends. They found more gigs in Texas and started making regular road trips. To cut costs, they slept two to a room in seedy motels.
One by one, his friends dropped out, and Keith made a fateful business decision: He replaced them with musicians who’d play for a salary instead of a share in the take. By 1990 he owned the whole act and was banking $60,000. Getting a record deal was a different story, as rejections piled up, most notably from one flunky who told Keith his songs needed to “go back to the woodshed”. Redemption came in the form of a stewardess, a Keith fan who gave Mercury Records chief Harold Shedd a demo tape on a flight to Nashville. “It was mainly the quality of what he was writing,” Shedd remembers. “It was unlike anything on the radio at the time, and it was still really good country music.”
Keith’s evolution from music act to entertainment mogul deepened when casino executive Don Marrandino came to him with a proposal. He wanted to put a Toby Keith-themed bar inside Harrah’s in Las Vegas. They’d call it I Love This Bar and Grill, tacking ‘and Grill’ to the end of one of Keith’s latest hits.
(This story appears in the 26 July, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)