When you were a kid, how much money did you imagine the NSYNC guys were making? Lance Bass says that in the group’s early years under Lou Pearlman, they lived on a $35-a-day per diem while their albums topped the charts.
Bass revisited the money on his October 8 Zach Sang Show appearance. “Our first check was a $10,000 check after years of number one albums, sell out tours,” he said. “We’ve been working for free for two, three years now.”
He’s previously described a late-1998 dinner in Los Angeles where Pearlman presented the members with checks, each for $10,000. “I ripped up the check,” Bass said, recalling that he knew something was wrong. The amount has varied in his retellings: his 2007 memoir, Out of Sync, put that first check at $25,000.
Bass had joined the group at 16. The members called their manager Papa Lou, and he paid for their house and dinners. Bass later said that even with the band’s success, he couldn’t afford his Orlando apartment or a car.
Pearlman collected money through several roles: manager, label, producer and a contractual sixth member of NSYNC. That sixth-member arrangement entitled him to one-sixth of the profits, with management fees on top. In 1999, Pearlman’s lawyer said he’d made at least $7 million from the group.
Bass has said JC Chasez’s uncle, a lawyer, reviewed their paperwork and called it “the worst contract I’ve ever read in my entire life.” When NSYNC moved to Jive in 1999, Pearlman and BMG sued for $150 million, and the band countersued. A December settlement cleared the way for No Strings Attached to come out in March 2000; it sold 2.42 million copies in its first week.
The $35 per diem belongs to the Pearlman period. Bass’s broader account of his own earnings extends beyond it: “People say it’s so weird how people think I’m so filthy rich from NSYNC,” he said. “No, not at all. I did well after NSYNC and I’m very proud of everything I did after that, but I didn’t make money with NSYNC like hardly at all.”
Public, unaudited estimates now put Bass’s net worth at about $20 million, built mostly through TV hosting, producing, reality shows, his podcast and real estate. JC Chasez is estimated at $16 million, Chris Kirkpatrick at $10 million and Joey Fatone at $7 million, bringing the 4 members’ combined estimate to about $53 million. Across those careers, later income has included songwriting and production, voice work, Broadway, TV hosting, nostalgia tours and businesses.
Justin Timberlake’s estimate is about $250 million, though some listings combine his wealth with Jessica Biel’s. His wealth is attributed largely to solo albums and tours, acting, endorsements and businesses, with little from the Pearlman years. His 2022 song-catalog sale alone was reported at just over $100 million.
Pearlman’s eventual criminal conviction concerned an investor Ponzi scheme that took hundreds of millions of dollars. He pleaded guilty in 2008 and died in federal prison in 2016.
The resentment has faded, Bass said, but it was real at the time. “Who was there to protect us?” he said. “I was kind of mad at the adults in the room.”
Everyone kept telling him he was young, Bass said, as if that meant the money and the future didn’t matter. “No one set us up for life after that,” he said. “We had to start over and fight for that with the stigma of being in a boy band, which was not at the time a good thing to be in this industry.”
Bass says he now gets streaming residuals from NSYNC’s music.
