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The reigning queen of country raked in nearly $40 million in 2013

Taylor Swift owned the top spot of Billboard's highest-paid musicians of 2013, raking in $39,699,576.60, which was plenty to best second and third place finishers Kenny Chesney and Justin Timberlake who earned $32,956,240.70 and $31,463,297.03.

Using data from Nielsen SoundScan and Broadcast Data Systems – which track sales and spins on TV, radio and internet, respectively – and their own Boxscore stats, Billboard calculated artists' total U.S. earnings from touring, recorded-music sales, publishing royalties and revenue from digital music and video streaming (money earned from sponsorships, merch and syncs weren't included due to a lack of data).

Swift dominated other artists in every area. Her recent Red Tour took in an estimated $30 million, while the singer notched nearly 10 million downloads and ranked fifth in streaming royalties. Meanwhile, Chesney bolstered his album earnings with $90 million from his recent No Shoes Nation tour, topping 1 million in attendance for his 10th tour in a row.

Find out how Taylor Swift is leading the rebounding concert business

Timberlake stormed back in a big way in 2013 with his two-part album The 20/20 Experience, which generated more than $5 million in royalties from digital downloads and streaming. The album's first single "Suit & Tie," which featured Jay Z, scored the highest first-week plays in the Mainstream Top 40 chart's history, while the rapper and pop star's joint summer tour earned $60 million from just 12 shows (Timberlake grossed $43 million on his own over 39 shows).

Bon Jovi and the Rolling Stones rounded out the top five, earning approximately $29 million and $26 million and generating most of their money from touring. Bon Jovi still raked it in on the digital download front, though, and their 1986 anthem "Livin' on a Prayer" even returned to the Hot 100 this year thanks to a viral video. The Stones in particular scored big with their 50th anniversary tour, selling out every show on the trek, which AEG Live reportedly earned the rights to promote for a price tag around $80 million.

Ahead of the surprise release of her chart-topping last album, Beyoncé grossed $19.9 million from her 132-date Mrs. Carter Show World Tour to help put her at number six with $24 million, while Maroon 5 followed with $22,284,754.07 thanks to a headlining slot on the Honda Civic Tour and continued chart domination with "Payphone," "One More Night" and "Daylight," which comprised for 7.6 million track sales worth $1.4 million.

Country star Luke Bryan pushed 2.7 million albums and 7.6 million digital tracks, and earned $15.4 million from touring to put him at number eight with $22,142,235.98; and Pink garnered $15.1 million from the U.S. dates of her latest tour to place her at number nine with $20 million. Fleetwood Mac capped off the top 10, earning $19,123,101.98, $17.4 million of that coming from their 2013 world tour behind the 35th anniversary reissue of their seminal album Rumours.

You can check out Billboard's complete list of music's top earners and see how it stacks up to Forbes' own list of the top earners in music, which Madonna topped back in November.

Can you ever go back to the past after you've closed the book on it, and would you want to? Will you like what you find there?

These are not just the central questions in the movie "Veronica Mars," which premiered yesterday at SXSW, but questions that filmmaker Rob Thomas, his cast, and the audience who enjoyed the three-season TV series have addressed. After seven years, can you successfully return to the setting and characters of a TV show to make a low-budget feature film?

The answer is yes. Thomas and his co-writer Diane Ruggiero have penned a self-avowed love letter to the fans of the series, but grounded it in a solid thriller with compelling characters and bright comic moments.

After a short recap of Veronica's (Kristen Bell) high school private investigator days, the movie leaps ahead nine years after the last episode of the TV series to show us where the title character ended up. She left the bizarrely corrupt town of Neptune, CA and has closed the door very firmly on her past, as she prepares to take the bar exam and work as a high-powered corporate New York attorney. But it’s her past that's getting her in the door for job interviews, like it or not.

READ MORE: Jason Dohring on Stepping Back Into The Role of Bad Boy Logan Echolls For The 'Veronica Mars' Movie

After her old teen flame Logan (Jason Dohring) is accused of murdering one of their fellow high-school classmates, Veronica ventures back to Neptune, trying not to get sucked into a growing mystery. She's also hoping to avoid her 10-year high school reunion, but there's no way this film would miss the opportunity to show us such a quantity of characters from the TV series in a single setting.


Sequences like the reunion are part of the many ways Thomas caters to the "Veronica Mars" fanbase that funded the film in a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. Fortunately, the film winks at the fans without patronizing them, and without making other audiences members feel left out. Minor but beloved characters appear briefly, and the theme song pops up unexpectedly (performed by Alejandro Escovedo). Thomas might have underestimated fans' enthusiasm, however, and doesn't allow enough time for audience reactions to happen without stepping on the next lines. (He needed maracas, a la "Some Like It Hot.")

A well-paced, well-structured mystery keeps the film exciting for all audience members, with shades of Hitchcock and "Charade" lurking around several scenes and characters. The dark silhouettes and sinister framing in several shots provide reminders that these mysteries are grim situations Nancy Drew never had to deal with.

It's the characters and their relationships that anchor "Veronica Mars," working in tandem with suspenseful aspects of the movie to keep it engaging. Veronica's relationship with her dad (Enrico Colantoni) has always been my favorite part of the series, and it's just as sweet and funny here. The scene where Veronica returns to her father's office for the first time to surprise him hits all the right notes... and economically shows the futility of her desire to shut out the past.

Veronica is far more interesting in Neptune than in New York. She has a smart mouth on her. She's absolutely fearless. She hates injustice and wants to get to the bottom of anything that smells fishy. This is a character I want to have a beer with (and not at a bad karaoke dive), as opposed to the corporate-lawyer-to-be in the prim suit with the boyfriend who works for "This American Life." It's easy to see that Veronica can't escape what's bred in the bone, to paraphrase Robertson Davies.

The supporting characters drawn with the broadest strokes work best in the film. Ryan Hansen as Dick Casablancas gives the film its goofiest comic moments... apart from a couple of cameos by familiar faces in a nightclub scene. Venal Sheriff Don Lamb (Jerry O’Connell), loopy groupie Ruby Jetson (Gaby Hoffman) and Krysten Ritter's party girl Chloe -- I mean Gia -- are over the top but entertaining. Unfortunately, Jason Dohring as Logan is a character whose passionate personality traits are talked about more than shown -- if you haven't watched the show, he seems little more than the Wronged Woman stereotype with a gender reversal.

Because the movie Veronica Mars is set nearly a decade after the TV show, it lacks the high school stratification setting many fans believed was integral to the series. (For those of us who prefer mysteries over mean girls, this is a boon.) And at times, the voiceover narration, a stock feature of the show,  feels excessive and unnecessary here -- too much telling, not enough showing. On the other hand, the snappy dialogue, another carryover from the series, gives "Veronica Mars" a sassy edge, balancing suspense and smartassery quite successfully for all viewers.

Criticwire Grade:

Rating: B

News Source: www.indiewire.com

OS ANGELES (AP) — Dish Network and Disney have reached a landmark deal that envisions the day when Dish will offer a Netflix-like TV service to people who'd rather stream TV over the Internet than put a satellite receiver on their roof.

The deal announced late Monday paves the way for Dish to offer live local broadcasts from ABC TV stations and programming from ABC Family, Disney Channel, ESPN and ESPN2 over mobile devices, set-top boxes and other means, similar to how Netflix's video streams are delivered today.

No start date for such a service was announced. It is likely that Dish will have to cut similar deals with other programmers to make such a service attractive. A Dish spokesman refused to speculate on what the offering would cost.

As part of the new rights deal, Dish Network Corp. agreed to disable — for three days after the initial broadcast — a function on its Hopper digital video recorders that allows people to automatically record and strip out commercials from prime-time weeknight programming. But that's only for programs on ABC, which is owned by The Walt Disney Co.

Dish CEO Joseph Clayton said in a statement the deal was "about predicting the future of television."

Anne Sweeney, co-chairman of Disney Media Networks, said in a statement that both Disney CEO Bob Iger and Dish's majority shareholder, Charlie Ergen, were directly involved in carving out "one of the most complex and comprehensive" deals ever.

"We planned for the evolution of our industry," she said.

With the deal, both sides are dropping a legal battle between them over the so-called AutoHop function, which had threatened to cut into the revenue of media companies like Disney by stripping out ads. Dish hasn't made public how many of its 14 million subscribers use the Hopper.

Dish customers will also gain access for the first time to Disney's WatchESPN, Watch Disney, Watch ABC Family and Watch ABC apps, which allow for live and on-demand program viewing on mobile devices in or out of the home.

Dish is also picking up a slew of new channels including Disney Junior, Fusion, ESPN Goal Line, Longhorn Network and the upcoming SEC ESPN Network when it launches sometime this fall. It also gains more access to more on-demand Disney programming.

The companies said they would work together on new advertising models. Last month, Dish announced a technology partnership with rival satellite TV company DirecTV to launch a system that helps target political ads to viewers based on where they live.

Dish and Disney said they are looking at dynamically inserting ads into programming based on viewer data, developing new ways of advertising on mobile devices, and measuring viewing for longer than the current industry standard that includes the live broadcast plus three days of DVR viewing.

The two sides have been quietly negotiating a new deal since before the last one expired at the end of September, deftly avoiding a signal blackout like the one between CBS Corp. andTime Warner Cable Inc. last August that caused massive subscriber defections.

News Source: www.sfgate.com