Zing Tsjeng

speaker

5,900 appearances 22 recordings 9 series first heard May 2026 last heard yesterday

Zing Tsjeng’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 22 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 11.

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Good Bad Billionaire · Sir Paul McCartney: The rich one - Live at Crossed Wires · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

For every million singles sold, he got £663.

Now, having said that, that was similar to the average annual UK salary at the time, but it meant they would have to sell over 1.5 billion singles to make a million each.

Plus, they had an even worse deal on their sales outside the UK.

So from record sales, the Beatles were paid only about 400,000, that's between four of them, in total from 1962 to 1966.

And given how famous they were, that seems incredible.

So it didn't make Paul a millionaire, but he and the other Beatles did have some other sources of income.

Really important part of the story.

Another income stream was Beatles merchandise, merch.

Brian had struck a disastrous US merch deal, giving away 90% of the profits.

Yeah.

But one of the biggest factors holding the Beatles back in terms of getting rich, which is what we're here to talk about,

was the tax, was the UK tax system.

George famously wrote a song called The Taxman, Don't Hum it, complaining about all the tax they paid in the 1960s.

It was like 19 for you and one for me, I seem to remember.

Yeah, I mean, it's got a super tax.

Quite a lot of people who were rich left the UK at that time because they've just, you know, they complained about the tax system.

The thing is, the Beatles were making an incredible amount of money in the 1960s.

All of this activity would have comfortably made Paul a millionaire by the mid-60s.

In fact, as early as 1964, Time magazine reported that each Beatle had become, in fact, a pound millionaire.

The Daily Mail estimated the Beatles had earned $56 million in that same year.

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