Jagger, “I think of him as coming from the English tradition of the actor-manager. If you
watch him get ready to put on a show, you’ll see that there is nothing that he is not aware
of, that he is not intimately involved with, from lighting and design to how the curtain is
going to hit the floor. There are very few people whose production skills impress me, but
he’s one of them. He’s as good a showman and a producer as there is.”
Jagger’s watchful eye helped make the Rolling Stones one of the richest bands in thehistory of rock ‘n roll. In her New York Times Style Magazine article, Mick Without Moss,
Zoe Heller wrote, “When he is on the road, he has been known to keep a map in his
dressing room, indicating the city at which the tour will go into profit.”
Zoe added, “The rise of illegal file sharing and the correspondingly steep worldwide
decline in CD sales have made these tough times for record companies and recording
artists alike. But the Rolling Stones continue to do very nicely, thank you. This is partly
because what remains of the market for CDs is dominated by baby boomers—the Stones’
demographic—and partly because Jagger, together with his recently retired financial ad-
viser, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, has been exceptionally wily about exploiting other rev-
enue streams. ‘There was a window in the 120 years of the record business where per-
formers made loads and loads of money out of records,’ Jagger says. ‘But it was a very
small window—say, 15 years between 1975 and 1990.’ Touring is now the most lucrative
part of the band’s business. (The Bigger Bang tour, from 2005 to 2007, raked in $558
million, making it the highest-grossing tour of all time.) The band has also been ahead of
the curve in recruiting sponsors, selling song rights and flogging merchandise. ‘The
Stones carry no Woodstockesque, antibusiness baggage,’ Andy Serwer noted approvingly