At the 2023 Super Bowl, 118 million people watched Rihanna float above the stage — and pause mid-set to touch up her foundation. It was either the most natural thing in the world or the most calculated product placement in television history.
Probably both.
What almost nobody in the audience understood was that the music she was performing, some of the best-selling pop songs of the past two decades, was earning her almost nothing. The powder compact, however, was making her a billionaire.
The music math doesn’t work the way you think
Rihanna has sold more than 250 million records in an impressive career spanning two decades. The pop star’s catalogue speaks for itself: fourteen number-one singles, eight studio albums released between 2005 and 2016, and era-defining songs like “Umbrella,” “We Found Love,” and “Diamonds.” Her final album, Anti, remains one of the most critically admired pop records of its era.
And yet, according to Forbes and industry estimates, her entire music career — recording contracts, touring revenue, streaming royalties accumulated across two decades — amounts to somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in total earnings.
Her ongoing streaming income today is estimated at $5 to $10 million per year. The 2023 Super Bowl halftime show, which generated a 640% spike in streaming of her catalogue and was watched by over 118 million viewers, produced approximately $97,000 in royalties in the immediate aftermath. She was not paid to perform.
Music made Rihanna famous. But fame, it turns out, has a ceiling and ownership does not.
What most celebrity beauty deals look like
When a celebrity launches a beauty brand, the standard arrangement is a licensing deal. The celebrity provides their name, their image, and their audience. A manufacturer — typically a contract cosmetics company — handles formulation, production, packaging, and logistics. A distributor handles retail. The celebrity collects a royalty: usually somewhere between five and ten percent of net sales.
This sounds like good money, and it is. A brand doing $300 million in annual revenue at a 7% royalty rate generates $21 million per year for the celebrity. That’s a substantial income stream.
But it is income, not wealth. The royalty flows as long as sales flow. The brand itself — the accumulated value of the trademark, the consumer loyalty, the distribution infrastructure — belongs to someone else. When the brand is eventually sold or taken public, the celebrity receives nothing beyond whatever royalties they have already been paid.
Brand strategist Camille Moore, writing on her Substack Art of the Brand, identifies the deeper structural flaw: “Borrowed cultural relevance can ignite a brand, but it cannot keep it burning.” A royalty deal doesn’t just cap the upside — it ties the value of a celebrity’s name entirely to an asset they don’t control, one that can decline the moment their cultural moment does.
For most celebrities, this is the deal on offer. For Rihanna, it was not acceptable.
The structure she negotiated instead
In 2016, Rihanna signed an agreement with LVMH — the French luxury conglomerate behind Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Moët & Chandon, and approximately 75 other brands — to launch Fenty Beauty through LVMH’s Kendo division.
Kendo is an in-house beauty incubator that had previously built Marc Jacobs Beauty and Kat Von D Beauty, creating brands with startup-style agility and then distributing them through Sephora, which LVMH also owns.
The structure of that agreement was not a licensing deal but a 50/50 joint venture. Rihanna controls her stake through Roraj Trade LLC, her personal holding company. LVMH’s Kendo division holds the other half. Women’s Wear Daily reported that LVMH may have paid approximately $10 million for its stake in the partnership, though it is worth noting that neither party has confirmed these numbers.
What this meant, practically: Rihanna did not simply lend her name to Fenty Beauty, instead she owns half of it. Every dollar of brand value that has accumulated since 2017 flows 50% to her.
When Forbes valued Fenty Beauty at approximately $2.8 billion in 2021, her stake was worth roughly $1.4 billion. A 7% royalty on the same revenue over the same period would have generated perhaps $75 million. The gap between those two numbers — $75 million versus $1.4 billion — is the gap between being paid and owning.
Why LVMH said yes
The question worth asking is why LVMH agreed to this arrangement. Kendo’s prior celebrity partnerships had not typically involved equity splits of this magnitude. The answer is partly about Rihanna’s negotiating leverage — she was, by 2016, one of the most influential cultural figures in the world — and partly about what LVMH recognized it needed.
Kendo understood prestige positioning and global distribution. What it could not manufacture was cultural conversation at scale. Rihanna’s audience was not just large; it was loyal, diverse, and engaged in exactly the demographic where beauty spending was growing fastest.
LVMH brought to the table: manufacturing expertise, supply chain infrastructure, Sephora’s global retail network, and the credibility of a luxury portfolio that includes Dior and Givenchy. Rihanna brought creative direction, final approval on all products, and something harder to quantify — the ability to make a product launch feel like a cultural event.
That creative control was, by her own account, non-negotiable. “I have 100% involvement in this process, which is what makes this so special and very fun,” she told Time magazine when Fenty Beauty was named one of its 25 Best Inventions of 2017. “I have so much creative freedom from products to packaging.”
When LVMH’s chairman Bernard Arnault reflected on the partnership two years later, he was equally direct: “Everybody knows Rihanna as a wonderful singer, but through our partnership at Fenty Beauty, I discovered a true entrepreneur, a real CEO and a terrific leader.”
The arrangement worked because both parties contributed something the other genuinely could not replicate.
The launch, and what it proved
Fenty Beauty launched in September 2017 in 1,600 stores across 17 countries. Its signature product was the Pro Filt’r Soft Matte Longwear Foundation, available in 40 shades — at a time when most prestige foundation ranges offered 12 to 15.
The brief Rihanna had set herself was unambiguous. “In every product I was like, ‘There needs to be something for a dark-skinned girl; there needs to be something for a really pale girl; there needs to be something in-between,'” she told Refinery29 at launch.
Or, as she put it in a statement to LVMH: “I wanted everyone to feel included. That’s the real reason I made this line.” The message was direct: this brand was for everyone, including the women the beauty industry had spent decades ignoring.
The response was immediate. Fenty Beauty generated an estimated $100 million in revenue in its first 40 days. By the end of its first year, LVMH confirmed the brand had surpassed $570 million in annual revenue. Darker foundation shades consistently sold out first, proving the existence of a massive underserved market that the industry had simply chosen not to see.
The ripple effects were swift enough to acquire their own name: the “Fenty Effect.” Within two years, Maybelline had expanded its Fit Me foundation from 16 to 40 shades. CoverGirl launched a 40-shade range. Dior reformulated with 40 options. The brand had not just succeeded commercially; it had rewritten the industry’s baseline expectations.
The empire’s honest limits
The Fenty Beauty cash flow funded expansion. Fenty Skin launched in 2020 then Fenty Fragrance followed in 2021. The hair care range arrived in 2024. The lingerie brand Savage X Fenty, launched in 2018 with a separate investor base and a roughly 30% ownership stake for Rihanna, extended the Fenty identity into a new category.
But not everything worked. Fenty Maison — a luxury fashion house launched with LVMH in May 2019, the first new LVMH fashion house since Christian Lacroix in 1987 — closed after less than two years.
It turned out that Rihanna’s audience would buy a $42 foundation without hesitation but they would not buy $1,000 ready-to-wear with the same enthusiasm. Savage X Fenty hit headwinds more recently, with its CEO departing for Victoria’s Secret in 2024 and sales flattening, contributing to a reported $400 million decline in Rihanna’s estimated net worth from its peak.
The exit that changes the equation
The latest chapter adds a new dimension to Fenty’s story. In October 2025, Reuters reported that LVMH is now exploring a sale of its 50% stake in Fenty Beauty, working with investment bank Evercore to find a buyer.
The brand’s current valuation is estimated somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion — lower than the 2021 peak, reflecting both slower recent growth and a broader cooling in the celebrity beauty market. LVMH’s motivation appears to be strategic: with revenues down across its perfumes and cosmetics division in 2025, the group is refocusing on its core luxury houses.
For Rihanna, an LVMH exit could represent either a complication or an opportunity. If she has right-of-first-refusal provisions in the joint venture agreement — standard in structures of this type — she could acquire LVMH’s stake directly, becoming majority or sole owner of a brand her name built. Even if a third-party buyer enters, the 50/50 structure she negotiated in 2016 means she retains full parity regardless of who sits across the table.
The lesson
Rihanna has not released a studio album since 2016. Nearly a decade of silence from one of the most commercially successful musicians alive — and it has not materially affected her financial standing, because the business income dwarfs the music royalties by an order of magnitude.
That is the actual story. Not that Rihanna was lucky, or that Fenty happened to catch a wave. It is that in 2016, when LVMH came to her with a deal, she understood the difference between being paid for her name and owning what her name could build. She structured accordingly. Everything else followed from that.
Disclaimer: Revenue figures for Fenty Beauty are reported estimates based on LVMH disclosures and industry sources. Net worth figures are Forbes estimates. Sources: Reuters, Forbes, CNBC, BBC News, Women’s Wear Daily.