It's wild that Rihanna won't get paid for her Super Bowl halftime show

We’re just two days away from Super Bowl Sunday at this point, as anticipation continues to build nationwide for every aspect of The Big Game that does not, of course, involve the actual playing or viewing of the sport of football. Trailers, puppies, various calorie-intensive dips: The hype is building, and none of it more intensely than for the halftime show by Rihanna, finally taking the stage she declined to occupy back in 2020, and marking not just her ascendance into the Superb Owl stratosphere—and possibly some new music, although she’s keeping her Fenty-clad lips pretty firmly closed on that point—but also her first live performance in fully five years.

Which is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of one of the weirdest quirks of the whole halftime show rigmarole, a whirlwind of branding, sponsorships, and millions of dollars flying around: Rihanna’s not getting paid for any of it, except in that most dreaded of online currencies—exposure.

Now, admittedly: “Exposure” means a whole hell of a lot more when it involves 100 million (or maybe even 200 million, as projections are suggesting) people watching you bring the house down than it does when a Twitch streamer with a dozen subscribers goes begging an artist for a free piece of art. Even so, it remains very strange to be reminded—as a recent Forbes piece did—that the NFL doesn’t pay Rihanna to come over and put on a several-minute musical spectacular on their behalf. The League does foot the bill, with help from sponsors like this year’s Apple Music, for the costs of the performance, although not always completely; The Weeknd and Dr. Dre both reportedly dropped an additional $7 million in personal cash for their shows in 2021 and 2022 respectively. (Forbes didn’t get a comment back from Rihanna’s people about whether she was making a similar outlay for her own show this year.)

All that being said, while Rihanna won’t be getting paid for her time, it’s not like she won’t be getting paid: Forbes also runs some statistics on how much clout recent Super Bowl performers have picked up in the immediate wake of their halved time performances, and they’re considerable. Lady Gaga picked up a brief but potent 1000 percent bump in streams and album sales immediately after her 2017 show; Mary J. Blige, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar all saw smaller, but still very extant, increases in sales after last year’s show. (To say nothing of lucrative expansions to their social media brands, as millions of new followers dutifully filed in.) Even without a new album to announce—or an actual, take-the-check-to-the-bank payday—this Sunday is already gearing up to be a very successful day for Rihanna and all her associated brands.