How Much Did The Weeknd Make For Performing At The Super Bowl?

The Weeknd gave a face-melting performance at the 2021 Super Bowl halftime show, running through hits like "Starboy," "The Hills," and "Can't Feel My Face" before hitting the crowd with the new stuff off his 2020 album "After Hours." It was a tremendous success that had the internet buzzing.

Here's the thing, though: he wasn't paid a dime for it. In fact, he had to foot the bill himself!

It seems crazy, especially given how extravagant the production was. As The Hollywood Reporter noted, throughout the performance he was backed by a choir and violinists and joined by dancers dressed like him with their faces bandaged similarly to how he attended the American Music Awards in November. And unlike recent Super Bowl Halftime performances, which featured surprise appearances by musical guests like Shakira and Missy Elliott, The Weeknd kept the show a solo act, as he had previously promised.

But that wasn't because he was trying to keep all the money for himself, as it turns out there is no money!

With such an entertaining show, you'd think that The Weeknd would make a killing, but you'd actually be wrong. He and all other Super Bowl halftime performers actually make no money for their quick medley of greatest hits in the middle of the game. Not from the NFL, at least.

So why do performers do it? Well, it's because the Super Bowl gives them one of the biggest platforms in the world to showcase their music, meaning that halftime performers often see a big boost in all their other revenue streams. With literally hundreds of millions of people watching a pop star going through a medley of their greatest hits, the halftime show tends to strike a chord of nostalgia in listeners, many of whom take to the internet to give the performers a flood of new business just after the game.

Usually, the NFL at least foots the bill for the cost of the performance itself, which can be astronomical, running as high as a million dollars per minute. However, this year, The Weeknd reportedly had a bone to pick with the music industry. According to Billboard, he was pretty irked that he got completely snubbed by the Grammys, despite "After Hours" being on the top of many people's lists of the best albums of 2020.

As a result, Yahoo! reports that The Weeknd ponied up $7 million of his own money to make sure his performance came off exactly as he wanted. And it wasn't just any performance — he apparently had planned to perform at the Grammys, so after he was snubbed, he took his ideas for that show and turned it into his Super Bowl halftime spectacular.

The Weeknd, whose real name is Abel Tesfaye, said,

"We've been really focusing on dialing in on the fans at home and making performances a cinematic experience, and we want to do that with the Super Bowl."

As he said in a pre-game press conference,

"We wanted to, kind of, do something that's never been done before."

Just how much of a boost can The Weeknd expect from his performance? Well, we have some idea thanks to previous halftime shows. According to Market Watch, the songs that Jennifer Lopez and Shakira sang during their 2020 halftime show saw a 1,013 percent boost in sales that Super Bowl Sunday. And other recent performers who have seen big bumps in sales post-halftime show were Lady Gaga, whose hits were up 1,980 percent, and Maroon 5, who saw a 434 percent boost in sales.

But perhaps one of the biggest halftime show winners in recent years was Justin Timberlake's 2018 performance, just after his latest album "Man of the Woods" had been released to pretty tepid reviews. Those reviews didn't matter once Timberlake hit the Super Bowl stage: according to Reuters, the album shot straight to the top of the U.S. Billboard 200 album chart after his halftime show.

That performance had as many as 103 million pairs of eyes on it in the United States alone, which shows just how big a fan base is out there, hungry for great musical performances.

Unfortunately, fans who were wowed by The Weeknd's halftime show will have to wait awhile to see another performance like this one, as the coronavirus pandemic forced him to postpone his "After Hours World Tour" until 2022.

Until then, though, we'll always have memories of Super Bowl 56 to carry us through.

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