These Rock Stars Sold Millions Of Records And Died Broke

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00][music] [singing] >> 12 rock stars, millions of records sold, hundreds of millions in revenue generated.

[00:00:11]>> [music] >> And every single one of them, every single one, died with less money in their account than you probably have right now. Not because they failed. They didn't fail. The music sold, the concerts packed.

[00:00:28]>> [music] [singing] >> The riffs became the soundtrack of your life.

[00:00:34]But the money, it went somewhere else.

[00:00:36]This is what really happens when the industry gets its hands on you. Number 12, [music] Rodriguez, Sixto Rodriguez.

[00:00:46]>> [singing] >> Here's something that should not be possible. A man records two albums in Detroit, 1970-1971.

[00:00:54]Critics love them. The label drops him.

[00:00:57]>> [music] >> He disappears from music, goes back to demolition work, tearing down walls, working construction, raising his daughters in a crumbling house in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Detroit.

[00:01:13]Zero royalties, zero recognition, near zero dollars.

[00:01:17]>> [music] >> Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a bootleg tape makes it to South Africa, and something happens that no one can explain. Rodriguez's music takes off, not a little, not cult level.

[00:01:35]>> [music] >> The man becomes bigger than Elvis, bigger than the Rolling Stones. His albums go platinum, his name is everywhere. And for 20 years, the South African fans assume he's dead, because surely, surely, a man this famous can't be alive and silent. He is alive. He is just breaking down walls.

[00:01:56]>> [music] >> Here's the part that gets me. Rodriguez finds out in 1997. He Googles himself, or rather his daughter does, and they discover that back home, this man is a legend. He eventually tours South Africa. Five nights in Johannesburg.

[00:02:14]>> [music] >> $700,000 for those five nights alone.

[00:02:21]And you know what he does with the money? Gives most of it away, to friends, to family. He goes back to the same house in Detroit. Rodriguez died in 2023 at 81. He never changed his lifestyle.

[00:02:39]But for the first 25 years after those albums dropped, he was invisible, uncompensated, living on nothing while his music sold millions on a continent he couldn't afford to fly to. That's not a fall from grace. That's an industry that never even let him through the door.

[00:02:56]>> [music] >> Number 11, Noel Redding, The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

[00:03:06]>> [music] >> You've heard the riff. You know it.

[00:03:10]Purple Haze, All Along the Watchtower, Voodoo Child. Three of the most recognizable records in the history of rock music.

[00:03:18]>> [music] >> Noel Redding played bass on every single one of them. In 1966, Redding was a 19-year-old guitarist from Kent, England, who answered an audition call.

[00:03:32]He never played bass. He learned on the job.

[00:03:36]>> [music] >> What followed was three years of some of the most explosive, culturally seismic music ever put to tape. Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, Electric Ladyland, records that still sell today. Records that stream billions of times.

[00:03:55]>> [music] >> And here's the thing about the contract they signed in 1966.

[00:04:03]The rights didn't go to the band. They went to the producers. A clause buried in a recording agreement, the kind a 19-year-old kid with no lawyer doesn't read carefully because you're just excited someone wants you.

[00:04:16]>> [music] >> Signed away Redding's ownership before the first track was ever mixed. After Hendrix died in 1970, Redding was paid $100,000 for his contributions and told to sign a release.

[00:04:33]>> [music] >> That's it.

[00:04:38]$100,000 for three of the most important albums in rock history. [music] He signed because what else do you do at 23 with no legal leverage?

[00:04:48]>> [music] >> Noel Redding spent the next three decades fighting, filing claims, chasing contracts, trying to untangle what his estate would later call a labyrinth of signed agreements, verbal deals, dodgy investment schemes, and companies that didn't actually exist. He died in 2003 aged 57.

[00:05:11]>> [music] >> A court years later confirmed in testimony what anyone who knew him already suspected that Noel Redding and his bandmate Mitch Mitchell had both died in quote relative poverty.

[00:05:25]The experience is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The catalog is worth hundreds of millions.

[00:05:31]Noel Redding got $100,000 and a signature page.

[00:05:35]>> [music] >> Let's look at the numbers. Only 9% of you are actually subscribed.

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[00:06:18]>> Number 10, Mitch Mitchell, the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

[00:06:26]Same band, same contract, same clause.

[00:06:29]Mitch Mitchell was 18 years old when he auditioned for Jimi Hendrix in 1966.

[00:06:35]They flipped a coin to see if he or another drummer would get the slot.

[00:06:38]Mitchell won.

[00:06:45]And what he brought to those sessions, that loose, almost jazz-inflected attack, the way he played with Hendrix rather than underneath him, helped define what rock drumming could be.

[00:06:57]>> [music] >> He was paid $247,500 in the early 1970s for his share of the rights and asked to sign the same release. More than ready.

[00:07:09]Still a fraction of what those records generated.

[00:07:12]>> [music] >> If you've ever done the math on what you sold versus what you saw, if you've ever done good work and watched someone else collect the check, you know what that arithmetic feels like. And you know it doesn't get easier over time. It festers.

[00:07:35]Mitchell died in 2008 at 62 in Oregon.

[00:07:39]His daughter Aisha inherited an estate that had to fight the Hendrix family and Sony in court just to establish that her father existed as a contributor to those records.

[00:07:49]>> [music] >> The court ruled against them in 2025.

[00:07:56]Two of the three musicians who created the Jimi Hendrix Experience ended their lives with almost nothing to show for it financially. The third member had $20,000 in his account when he died at 27.

[00:08:10]Stay with me.

[00:08:13]>> [music] >> Number nine, Jimi Hendrix.

[00:08:19]>> [music] >> $20,000.

[00:08:24]That's what Jimi Hendrix had in his bank account when he died on September 18th, 1970 at 27 years old. Plus debts, back taxes he owed, obligations he hadn't cleared.

[00:08:36]>> [music] >> And I know what you're thinking. He was 27. He'd only been recording for 4 years. Maybe he just hadn't had time to accumulate. But listen.

[00:08:51]>> [music] >> By 1970, Jimi Hendrix had sold millions of albums. He had headlined Woodstock.

[00:08:59]He had built Electric Lady Studios in New York.

[00:09:06]>> [music] >> Built it his name on the door, a studio that cost $2 million to construct. He was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most commercially successful musicians on the planet.

[00:09:18]>> [music] >> The studio's financing came out of his touring advances, label money, record company obligations that pulled from the front of his earnings before he ever saw them. His manager, Michael Jeffery, who died in a plane crash in 1973, a story unto itself, controlled the contracts, the royalties, [music] the publishing.

[00:09:45]>> [music] >> And the money that flowed from those sources flowed in directions Hendrix often couldn't track. He died without a will. No will, no estate plan. He was 27. He probably thought he didn't need one. He was wrong.

[00:10:01]>> [music] >> And the decades of litigation that followed his death, family suing the estate managers, estate managers suing family, brother suing sister, everyone suing Sony, would have made him physically ill. His estate is now worth an estimated $175 million.

[00:10:18]His music streams billions of times every year.

[00:10:26]And Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, who played on every track of that catalog's most important era, died with almost nothing. $20,000. That's what was left.

[00:10:36]And that should sit with you.

[00:10:38]>> [music] >> Number eight, Big Mama Thornton.

[00:10:48]>> [music] >> Let me tell you about the woman who invented a song you know. Willie Mae Thornton, Big Mama Thornton, walks into a recording studio in Los Angeles. 350 lb of pure authority. Voice like a freight train.

[00:11:04]>> [music] >> She records a song written for her by two 19-year-old songwriters named Leiber and Stoller. A 12-bar blues number called Hound Dog.

[00:11:17]>> [music] >> The record comes out in February of 1953 and spends 7 [music] weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart. Sales over half a million copies. At At time, that's a phenomenon. Then Elvis covers it in 1956 and sells 10 million copies.

[00:11:35][music] Here's what Big Mama Thornton made from that. From her original recording, the one that started everything, she received a flat fee from Peacock Records under a contract that gave her zero royalties. Nothing, not a point, not a residual. Just a one-time payment that Don Robey, her label owner, decided was sufficient.

[00:12:01]>> [music and singing] >> And because the writing credit went to Leiber and Stoller, not Thornton, who brought the blues phrasing and the vocal arrangement that made the song what it was.

[00:12:13]When Elvis covered it, the songwriting royalties went to two other men.

[00:12:20]>> [music] >> Thornton also wrote Ball and Chain. She recorded it in 1960. Her label sat on the master, didn't release it until 1968, by which point Janis Joplin had already recorded her own version and made it famous using a tape of Thornton's unreleased original as the template. The copyright stayed with the label. She toured until the end, playing small clubs, opening for younger artists who owed their sound to her, getting sicker, drinking heavily, losing weight.

[00:12:52]>> [music] >> This woman who had once commanded a stage at 350 lb shrank under 100 lb toward the end. Under 100. Big Mama Thornton died July 25, 1984. She didn't leave any money behind. Her friends arranged the funeral. She was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, sharing a small headstone with two strangers.

[00:13:17]>> [music] >> She died the same year the Blues Foundation inducted her into their Hall of Fame. In 2024, 40 years after her death, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally inducted her. If you're nodding at this one, you already know why that timing hurts.

[00:13:38]>> [music] >> Number seven, Paul Di'Anno, Iron Maiden.

[00:13:44]>> [music] >> Here's what Paul Di'Anno's career looked like on paper. He joins Iron Maiden at 20 years old. They release their debut album in 1980.

[00:13:58]>> [music] >> A record so raw, so electric, so fundamentally different from anything else happening at the time that it creates its own gravitational field.

[00:14:11]Then Killers in 1981, two albums.

[00:14:16]>> [music] >> The foundation of one of the biggest heavy metal bands in the history of music, and then he's gone. Fired at 23, too much partying, too much chaos.

[00:14:29]>> [music] >> The band decides to move towards something more theatrical and brings in Bruce Dickinson. The machine continues, stadium tours, tens of millions of albums, Hall of Fame legacy.

[00:14:47]Here's what Paul Di'Anno gets from all of that, a buyout, a one-time payment, [music] no ongoing royalties from the Maiden catalog after his departure.

[00:14:56]Those first two albums, albums that Iron Maiden still play songs from tonight in arenas, generate exactly zero income for the man who sang them into existence.

[00:15:05][music] >> [music] >> He spent the next four decades in a slow deterioration, legal problems, health problems that eventually left him in a in a wheelchair, performing in a chair because that was the only way he could still perform, which tells you something about what music meant to him.

[00:15:27]>> [music] >> In his final years, he sold his royalty rights, not to the Maiden catalog, to whatever post-Maiden rights he still held, for 50,000 lb, $62,000.

[00:15:41]That's the transaction.

[00:15:43]>> [music] >> Paul Di'Anno died October 21, 2024 66 at his home in Salisbury, England. The same Maiden songs playing in arenas that night. His name on the liner notes. His voice on the record. And about $62,000 between him and everything.

[00:16:06]>> [music] >> Number six, Tom Evans, Badfinger.

[00:16:12]>> [music] >> You need to know the Badfinger story because it is, without argument, the most purely in the history of rock music.

[00:16:25]>> [music] >> And it happened twice to the same band eight years apart. Badfinger was signed to Apple Records in 1968, the Beatles label, the first band to sign to Apple.

[00:16:38]>> [music] [music] >> They were supposed to be the next Beatles.

[00:16:46]People said that, not as hype, as genuine assessment.

[00:16:53]>> [music] >> They wrote and recorded Without You, a ballad so perfectly constructed that when Harry Nilsson covered it in 1972, it hit number one in America, the UK, Australia, Canada, and Ireland.

[00:17:10]>> [music] >> When Mariah Carey covered it in 1994, it hit number one again. Pete Ham wrote that song. In 1975, [music] Pete Ham was 27 years old, 3 days away from his 28th birthday, living in a house in Surrey that was being repossessed.

[00:17:28]>> [music] >> Their manager, Stan Polley, had taken the band's money, all of it, and routed it through a series of shell companies and fraudulent accounts. Badfinger had sold millions of records. Polley had the money.

[00:17:43]>> [music] >> Pete Ham had nothing but debt and a lawsuit he couldn't win, and a pregnant girlfriend he couldn't provide for.

[00:17:58]On April 24th, 1975, Pete Ham wrote a note. It described what had been done to him, and then he walked into his garage, 3 days short of 28.

[00:18:13]8 years later, 1983, Tom Evans, who co-wrote Without You with Ham, and was still fighting the financial wreckage, who still carried the guilt of his friend's death, who had spent years watching the music industry profit from the work Polley had stolen, called his family on the phone to say he was tired.

[00:18:36]And then Tom Evans walked into his garden. Two songwriters, one song that made two separate artists number one, 23 years apart. Zero dollars from any of it. The money went to Stan Polley, who died in 2000 in California, comfortable.

[00:18:52]>> [music] >> If you've ever built something with people you trusted and watched it get taken from you, not even from you, from all of you together, you know that's not just a financial loss. It breaks a different part of you, and it doesn't come back the same way.

[00:19:14]>> [music] >> Number five, Pete Ham, Badfinger.

[00:19:20]>> [music] >> I know we just heard it, but Pete Ham deserves his own 60 sec because Paul McCartney called Without You, the song Pete Ham co-wrote at age 24, the killer song of all time.

[00:19:34]>> [music] >> The killer song of all time. Those exact words from Paul McCartney. And Pete Ham died three days before his 28th birthday with nothing.

[00:19:47]His girlfriend, Anne, was 7 months pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter, Petera, 2 months after his death.

[00:19:54]>> [music] >> Petera Ham grew up without her father and without the royalties from the song her father wrote because the contracts had been strangled by a fraudulent manager and a label dispute that would take decades to partially resolve.

[00:20:15]>> [music] >> In 1997, the Ivor Novello Awards, one of the most prestigious songwriting honors in the UK, posthumously gave Pete Ham a lifetime achievement award. He wrote the killer song of all time.

[00:20:33]He died broke. He never met his daughter. And whether we're doing enough to keep his name where it belongs, I'll leave that one in the comments.

[00:20:46]Number four, Harry Nilsson.

[00:20:49]>> [music and singing] >> Harry Nilsson wrote One, the song Three Dog Night turned into One Is the Loneliest Number.

[00:20:58]>> [music] >> Harry Nilsson had a number one hit with Without You, yes, the Pete Ham song. He had a hit with Coconut, Jump into the Fire, Everybody's Talking from Midnight Cowboy. He was also the artist who received, at the height of his career in the late 1960s, a $5 million record deal, which, adjusted for inflation, is roughly $36 million today.

[00:21:27]>> [music] >> At the time, it was the largest recording contract in history. And Harry Nilsson died in 1994 with a net worth of negative $1 million.

[00:21:41]>> [music and singing] >> Here's how that happens. Nilsson had a business manager named Cindy Sims. And for years, she appeared to be doing her job. The money was going where it was supposed to go. He thought he was worth $5 million.

[00:21:56]He said so in court documents.

[00:21:58]>> [music] >> I want you to hear this because [music] it still gets me. He wrote in a letter to the bankruptcy court, a letter, "I thought I was worth $5 million. I never believed this could happen. I'm scared."

[00:22:18]In 1991, Sims was arrested. She had been systematically stealing from multiple clients, including Nilsson, pocketing millions across years of apparently normal-looking financial management.

[00:22:31]>> [music] >> She pled guilty to three counts of grand theft. She served 2 years. In those same months, Nilsson was hit from multiple sides: creditors, >> [music] >> the IRS, foreclosure notices, 75 creditors in total. He was trying to finish a comeback album while simultaneously filing for bankruptcy and fielding warnings from people he owed money to. He died of heart failure on January 15, 1994. [music] He was 52 years old.

[00:23:05]>> [music] >> His biggest fear in life, he wrote in that letter, was ending up broke. He was born with a heart condition. And I don't know, I genuinely don't know how much of those final years of fear and stress contributed to [music] what killed him.

[00:23:19]But some of y'all reading that know exactly how I feel about that question.

[00:23:24]>> [music] >> Number three, Marvin Gaye before.

[00:23:33]>> [music] >> For you asked, yes, Marvin Gaye belongs here.

[00:23:38]Because the rock train does not run without What's Going On. It does not run without Let's Get It On or I Heard It Through the Grapevine or Mercy Mercy Me.

[00:23:47]>> [music] >> Marvin Gaye is foundational. And his financial story is one of the darkest in popular music. By the time of his death in April 1984, shot by his own father the day before his 45th birthday.

[00:24:05]>> [music] >> Marvin Gaye's estate was insolvent.

[00:24:11]That's [music] the legal word, insolvent.

[00:24:18]>> [music] >> The family lawyer stood before a judge in late April 1984 and testified that there were no assets. None. He wasn't even sure how deep the debt went.

[00:24:28]>> [music] >> Here's the path to zero. His first marriage to Anna Gordy, sister of Motown founder Berry Gordy, ended in divorce in 1977.

[00:24:40]The settlement was unprecedented.

[00:24:41][music] >> [singing] >> Gaye agreed to give Anna the royalties from his next album. The album he recorded for that settlement was Here, My Dear. He recorded it reluctantly, painfully, and in it you can hear a man laying his marriage out like evidence in a trial.

[00:25:03]>> [music] >> It was one of the most emotionally raw albums ever made. It also sold poorly on release, which meant the settlement payments weren't what they needed to be.

[00:25:18]>> [music] >> The IRS came next, years of tax obligations unpaid. He owed millions. He moved to Belgium to escape the pressure, lived in a motor home, came back only for Sexual Healing. 1982, number one, Grammy for best R&B song. People thought he was back.

[00:25:34]>> [music] >> He was not back.

[00:25:36]>> [singing] >> The money from Sexual Healing went toward debt that had been accumulating for years. By 1983, he was living in his parents' house in Los Angeles.

[00:25:50]>> [music] >> By April 1, 1984, Easter he was dead.

[00:25:58]His estate was insolvent. His son received a letter from the court granting him the power to liquidate non-existent assets. All that Marvin Gaye left to his 18-year-old son, Marvin III, was a letter from a judge.

[00:26:11]>> [music] >> Number two, Roky Erickson, 13th Floor Elevators.

[00:26:20]>> [music] >> Here's a name most people can't place, and that's exactly the problem. Austin, Texas. An 18-year-old kid named Roger Kynard Erickson, Roky, co-founds a band called the 13th Floor Elevators.

[00:26:36]>> [music] >> They record a song he wrote in high school called You're Gonna Miss Me. It becomes the first rock song to ever use the word psychedelic to describe itself.

[00:26:49]And what comes out of those sessions?

[00:26:51]that howling, unhinged, entirely original sound, doesn't just start a band. It starts a genre.

[00:26:58]>> [music] >> Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top said Roky Erickson created his own musical galaxy.

[00:27:06]R.E.M., Primal Scream, The Jesus and Mary Chain, they all showed up on a tribute album in 1990 just to say thank you.

[00:27:18]Janis Joplin, before she became Janis Joplin, almost joined the Elevators.

[00:27:23]Think about that for a second. The woman who became one of the most iconic voices in rock history almost joined Roky Erickson's band and decided it was too good to walk into. That's the level we're talking about.

[00:27:41]Now, here's what the 13th Floor Elevators' contract with International Artists Records actually [music] said.

[00:27:47]Zero royalty payments from record sales.

[00:27:49]Zero. The band earned money only from live performances.

[00:27:53]Everything the records generated, every copy sold, every dollar the label collected, stayed with the label.

[00:28:02]>> [music] >> That clause alone would have been enough to break most people.

[00:28:08]But the industry wasn't done with Roky Erickson. In 1969, he was arrested for possession of a single marijuana cigarette, one joint. To avoid prison, he pleaded insanity.

[00:28:24]And what followed was 3 and 1/2 years inside Rusk State Hospital for the criminally insane, where he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy and Thorazine treatments until the man who walked in was barely recognizable in the man who walked out.

[00:28:43]He was never the same. That's not an exaggeration or a tabloid line. That is the clinical documented heartbreaking truth. The schizophrenia that was already emerging got worse. The stability he needed to function as a working musician, to chase contracts, to fight for royalties, to advocate for himself, was gone.

[00:29:03]>> [music] >> And without that stability, the industry had no obligation to find him. He spent decades in near total poverty, living in squalor in Austin, hoarding mail, barely functioning. His own mother at one point took legal guardianship over him, not to help him, but to control the small trickle of royalties and benefits that came in, using them to pay her own bills.

[00:29:29]>> [music] >> His brother Sumner eventually won that guardianship back in 2001 after a legal fight. And for the last 18 years of his life, Roky had people around him who actually cared. He made a comeback, played shows. People who loved what he'd built showed up for him.

[00:29:50]>> [music] >> And I don't want to strip that from his story, because he deserved every one of those rooms. But here's what I keep coming back to. Roky Erickson invented a sound that built careers for dozens of bands over six decades. He did it at 18.

[00:30:10]>> [music] >> And the system's response was to take the royalties, lock him in a hospital, and leave him to figure out the rest on his own. He died May 31, 2019 in Austin, 71 years old, the city he put on the map for rock music.

[00:30:28]You're going to miss him. You already do. Most people just don't know his name well enough to realize it yet. Number one is next, and you already know it's Badfinger.

[00:30:40]>> [screaming] >> Number one, the Badfinger story complete.

[00:30:45]>> [music] >> Wait, I already told you Badfinger, but I didn't tell you the full version because the full version includes what Stan Polley actually did and what he got away with. Polley became Badfinger's manager in 1972 after they moved from Apple Records to Warner Brothers.

[00:31:08]>> [music] >> He was charming, confident.

[00:31:13]He told the band he had connections, knew how the business worked, would protect their interests.

[00:31:19]They believed him. What he actually did was route their money through a trust account that only he controlled. Touring revenues, merchandise, record advances, all of it flowed in. None of it flowed out to the band.

[00:31:32]>> [music] >> When Badfinger played for promoters, promoters sent checks to Polley. Polley deposited them.

[00:31:43]Polley kept them.

[00:31:48]>> [music] >> The band would ask about money and Polley would explain with complete calm, complete authority, that it was tied up in accounts.

[00:31:57]>> [music] >> Incoming soon, the business was complex.

[00:32:04]Meanwhile, the band's bills piled up.

[00:32:06]Warner Brothers eventually froze Badfinger's accounts [music] due to a contractual dispute, not with the band, with Polley, which effectively killed the band's ability to tour, record, or function.

[00:32:19]>> [music] >> They couldn't even access their own money to hire a lawyer to fight Polley because Polley had the money.

[00:32:31]>> [music] >> Pete Ham died in April 1975. The band eventually reformed, fractured, reformed again. Tom Evans kept fighting, kept trying to get some accounting of where the money had gone.

[00:32:44]Kept carrying the weight of Pete's death. Kept telling people that what had happened to Badfinger could not be allowed to be forgotten. He was right that it shouldn't be forgotten.

[00:32:55]>> [music] >> In 1983, Tom Evans died. Stan Polley was never criminally charged for what he did to Badfinger. He died in Thousand Oaks, California in 2000.

[00:33:11]>> [music] >> The song Without You has been recorded by over 200 artists.

[00:33:18]>> [music] >> It generates royalties every year. The two men who wrote it, who needed those royalties most, never saw them. And that is, without question, the number one spot on this list. Not because it's the most famous story, [music] because it happened twice. To good people who trusted the wrong man, >> [music] >> and the industry let it happen and let the man walk and moved on. We don't get to move on.

[00:33:42]>> [music]