It’s an age-old question that gets asked every year before the Super Bowl: How much are these artists getting paid to perform during the halftime show? The answer now, and for the foreseeable future will be nothing.
That’s right: Kendrick Lamar, Usher, Rihanna and dozens of other artists over the past few decades didn’t get paid a single cent for their performances: The NFL covers all the costs associated with the show, but it doesn’t pay each performer an appearance fee. They are only paid the minimum union scale, which normally amounts to about $1,000 per day for the performance itself and other days they are rehearsing.
But that doesn’t mean that Kendrick won’t see any financial benefits from his buzzy performance from Sunday — quite the opposite, in fact.
Like the companies paying for a Super Bowl commercial spot, performing at halftime is an opportunity for artists to advertise themselves to an audience they may never get again. For example, this year, Lamar broke the record for the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show ever, with 133.5 million viewers.
That’s a huge viewership to showcase your music to, and in many cases, it pays dividends in the future.
In the days that have followed his performance, Lamar has seen a significant increase in streams. Overall, his music has seen a 175% increase in streams.
The songs he performed during the show have also seen an increase in streams, including “Not Like Us” (430%), “HUMBLE” (300%), “man at the garden” (260%) and “euphoria” (260%), according to Forbes.
This resulted in Lamar breaking the all-time record for the most monthly listeners for a rapper in the history of Spotify.
On Apple Music, the streams for “Not Like Us” increased by 905%, and is once again the top song on the Global and US Daily Top 100. The streams for “luther” increased by 757% and streams for Lamar’s entire catalog increased by 328%.
Mind you, in most cases, streaming services pay artists just a few thousandths of a penny per stream. But with “Not Like Us” racking up more than 11 million Spotify streams on the Monday after the Super Bowl, figure Lamar pocketed more than $30,000 from that one song, that one day, on that one streaming service alone. Start adding up the numbers of the rest of his catalog across multiple DSPs, and that number swells quickly.
This is why it’s a no-brainer for Lamar and other artists to perform at the Super Bowl, even though the NFL is not paying them anything, the money they make on the backend will more than makeup for it.
Especially for Lamar since his Grammy-winning diss track was the biggest earner in the beef he had with Drake. According to a report from Forbes, that track generated $7.6 million in 2024 alone (it was released in May). Just imagine how much it will generate this year after winning big at the Grammys and performing at live at the Super Bowl.