Garth Brooks is one of the bestselling musicians that the world has ever seen.
While his heyday may have been in the 1990s and early 2000s, Brooks still works on things that bring him the most joy.
Garth has tasted the peak of success and has seen some less-than-successful album releases.
Through it all, he has stayed true to what he believes is the best way to live and enjoy the life he has managed to create.
What Is Garth Brooks’s Net Worth?
Garth Brooks has a net worth of $400 million with a salary of about $90 million each year.
From the beginning, Brooks was surrounded by music.
His mother was country singer Colleen McElroy Carroll, who appeared on Ozark Jubilee, and his father was a draftsman for one of the nearby oil companies.
Brooks was the youngest of six and was the child of both of his parents’ second marriage.
He and his siblings would frequently hold talent shows for Garth and his older siblings to sing or put on skits for their parents.
Although music was a massive part of his entire life, Brooks chose to focus on sports in high school such as track, baseball, and football.
Thanks to his athletic abilities, Brooks was able to earn a scholarship to Oklahoma State University.
After graduating from the school with a Bachelor’s in marketing, Garth Brooks began singing and playing the guitar at local bars.
Having heard rumors of Brooks’s music, an entertainment attorney drove from Texas to Oklahoma just to hear Brooks sing.
After his performance, the attorney told Brooks that he’d help him record a demo so he could go around Nashville and look for a record contract.
Brooks recorded the demo and went to Nashville for the day, but he returned empty-handed.
The attorney scolded him for giving up so quickly and told him to try again and try harder.
This prompted Brooks to move himself and his wife to Nashville in 1989.
He was first married to Sandy Mahl, with whom he had three daughters.
His daughters Taylor, August, and Allie were born in 1992, 1994, and 1996.
However, Mahl and Brooks ended up finalizing their divorce in 2001.
Four years later, he married his current wife, fellow country star, Trisha Yearwood.
His Early Music Career
Garth Brooks’s first album was named after him and released in April of 1989.
Since its release, this album has sold more than 10 million copies.
This album contains his first two number-one hits, If Tomorrow Never Comes and The Dance.
His second album, No Fences, really brought Garth Brooks to the front of everyone’s attention, whether they were country fans or not.
His hit songs, all of which consecutively took the number one position on the charts, which are on this album include The Thunder Rolls, Friends in Low Places, Unanswered Prayers, and Two of Kind, Workin’ on a Full House.
Ropin’ the Wind was released in 1991 and sold more than 14 million copies, earning him another diamond album and a Grammy Award for best male country performance.
Shameless and The River were the two best-performing songs from this album.
The following year, Brooks released The Chase, which included the touching song We Shall Be Free.
The song was so dear to Garth’s heart that they premiered the music video for the song at the 1993 Super Bowl.
In the same year, In Pieces was released and had the music video for Red Strokes receive an ACM Video of the Year award in 1995.
Other popular songs from the top album included Ain’t Goin’ Down (‘Til the Sun Comes Up), American Honky-Tonk Bar Association, and Standing Outside the Fire.
The next album for Garth Brooks was Fresh Horses, but this album didn’t sell as well as the other albums and didn’t get the same level of praise.
However, She’s Every Woman and The Beaches of Cheyenne did achieve the number one spot on Billboard’s singles charts.
Sevens was met with the same level of praise as Brooks was used to with his previous albums.
Brooks got plenty of awards for this album, including a Grammy Award for best country collaboration with Trisha Yearwood for In Your Eyes.
Later In His Music Career
With the country-loving 1990s over and a new decade on the horizon, Garth Brooks’s popularity was starting to decline among the general public.
However, he remained a prevalent icon in the country music scene.
Garth Brooks’s Scarecrow was a two-disc set that sold 465,523 copies within the first week of its release.
This was his seventh album to debut on the Top 200 chart, earning him the title of having more Top-200 debuts than any other artist.
Scarecrow was released as a result of a 2005 deal to “open the vault” of Garth Brooks’s older, unpublished music.
However, the re-release of Scarecrow that would add any additional songs wouldn’t come out until 2016.
This was the last album recorded before Garth Brooks took a 13-year break from creating music.
The next Garth Brooks album wouldn’t come out until 2014, but the sales were not up to what Garth Brooks or the recording label were expecting.
Man Against Machine has 14 different tracks and displays a large array of the feelings that Brooks has.
Mom, the fifth song on the track list, debuted on Good Morning America, and Brooks first played All-American Kid at the 50th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards.
Although Man Against Machine didn’t do well even with the high amount of marketing involved with the album, Brooks’s next album Gunslinger did much better.
Gunslinger was released in November of 2016 and included the hit country single Ask Me How I Know.
This song allowed Garth Brooks to have a hit song in four different decades.
Garth Brooks’s most recent album is Fun, which was released on November 20th of 2020.
This album includes songs such as The Courage of Love and Dive Bar featuring Blake Shelton.
There is also a cover of Shallow featuring his wife, Trisha Yearwood.
Establishing Pearl Records
Having found himself more than satisfied with his musical career by the time 2000 came around, Garth Brooks announced that he was retiring.
By this point, he had made more than enough money to retire whenever he pleased.
By the time that Brooks had returned to the music industry, the market had completely changed.
Rather than attempting to sell copies of their music for individual consumption, artists have been forced to team up with different streaming services in hopes that the company will be merciful in its pay percentage.
Garth Brooks didn’t appreciate the way he was watching so many artists being forced to change the way they created music to fit the needs of streaming services, so he created Pearl Records in hope that he could return things to the way they were.
When Sony approached Pearl Records about working with them, they quickly found that it was difficult to work with the traditional Pearl Records because they didn’t own their masters, didn’t stream, and had no part in doing digital music.
After the first falling out with a media company, many other companies tried to convince Brooks of turning to their way of selling music.
Garth Brooks was not willing to compromise what he believed to be the better option for musicians.
The conversation between Pearl Records and iTunes was described by Brooks as “honest”, and left the country star realizing just how little Apple was willing to budge on their rules or expectations for recording artists and labels.
Spotify also tried to convince Brooks and his recording label to join their streaming platform, but the parties couldn’t agree on any terms.
When Amazon offered to give Pearl Records a place to sell their music with minor compromise, Garth Brooks knew that it was the right decision.
Creating GhostTunes
Although Garth Brooks was not a fan of having to sell digital copies of his song, he knew he needed to do it to reach the same audiences as other country stars and musicians.
Instead of giving in to another company’s rules and regulations, Brooks created GhostTunes.
Similar to other digital music stores, GhostTunes gave artists more freedom with the way that their music was sold.
Artists could choose to sell individual songs or lock songs behind their entire album, which was a major complaint about iTunes from Brooks.
The platform was mostly used for selling Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood’s music due to the small number of consumers.
The website was also extremely antiquated compared to websites like iTunes or Spotify.
While Garth Brooks was away from the music industry, he missed the many rapid innovations that very quickly changed the expectations of music consumers.
Brooks’s intentions were in the right place, but his execution was simply behind what consumers had.
When Amazon offered to work with Pearl Records, they also offered to integrate some parts of GhostTunes into their music platform, Amazon Music Unlimited.
This gave Amazon a major advantage because it ensured Garth Brooks’s exclusivity to their brand.
Users of the website were concerned that they would lose their music when this merger happened, but Amazon offered to allow the concerned users to transfer all of their music on GhostTunes onto Amazon Music Unlimited for free, as long as they moved their music by March 3rd of 2017.
Part of the reason that Brooks was willing to work with Amazon was that he got to help form their new streaming service.
Although Garth Brooks once told Billboard that the partnership with Amazon isn’t forever, the partnership is still going strong four years later.
Trisha Yearwood And Garth Brooks: The Power Couple
The bond between Trisha Yearwood and Garth Brooks is undeniable, but they were both still in their first marriages when they met for the first time.
It was 1987 when they were told to meet at Kent Blazy’s attic studio to record a demo together.
At the time, Brooks had been married to Sandy Mahl for a year and Yearwood was married to the music producer Chris Latham.
Yearwood’s first marriage ended in 1994, and she remarried Robert Reynolds.
When Brooks first met Yearwood, he was taken aback by her and began to question his marriage in his head.
However, he knew that he had made the promise to his wife to be loyal to her in front of all of their family and friends.
Yearwood felt a special connection with Brooks but was a married woman and had respect for Brooks’s wife.
Although they knew that romance was off the table for them at the time, they decided to redirect those feelings into a friendship that lasted decades.
Garth Brooks and his wife separated in 1999, two years before their divorce would be finalized.
At the time, Yearwood was single.
It wasn’t until after the divorce that the couple began seeing each other romantically.
Brooks decided to propose when the statue of him was revealed at Buck Owens’s Crystal Palace, in front of 7,000 people.
The country stars had walked on stage to get a clearer look at the statue when Brooks pointed out the wedding ring on his finger on the statue, got down on one knee, and asked Trisha Yearwood to marry him.
Yearwood was elated about the proposal and took a minute to compose herself.
The couple had a private wedding with loved ones in front of their Oklahoma home in 2005.
His Charitable Efforts
Garth Brooks has his own organization that he started in 1999 called Teammates for Kids.
The organization teams up with professional athletes to fund different projects, such as sports camps, to help inner-city children and support children’s health causes.
Since the creation of the foundation, more than 4,700 athletes have joined the organization and are regular donors.
Many professional baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and soccer players are committed to the organization, alongside professional rodeo riders and racers.
Because the organization is privately funded, every penny donated goes directly towards helping children all over the United States.
During the rise of COVID-19, the foundation’s goal was to provide meals to the children who were missing meals because their families didn’t have enough money to keep food stocked at home.
The initiative was taken over by 50 different Major League Baseball players and they were able to provide four million meals to hungry children.
The way the foundation earns money is by giving athletes who like to donate money based on their performance a place to funnel all of the money and turn it into something positive for less fortunate children.
Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood are also frequent volunteers and donors for Habitat for Humanity.
The power couple has been working with Habitat for Humanity for more than a decade.
This earned the couple the title of inaugural Habitat Humanitarians, alongside former President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
Their countless hours of servitude and all the money that was given to the organization in passing was something that couldn’t be ignored.
When Garth Brooks was announced to be the 2019 honoree for the Inaugural Award for Caring and Compassion, he hoped that he could live up to the expectations.
Learning From Brooks’s Example
Garth Brooks is one of the most influential singers and songwriters of the 1990s and 2000s, although his music career has been revived through partnering with his country star wife, Trisha Yearwood.
Brooks is an excellent example of how to not let fame and success get in the way of you loving and caring for people, even when caring for them may be difficult.
This country star knows how to stay true to himself, even when it means he’s a little behind the technological curve.
However, there have been times when Garth Brooks was ahead of the curve.
His song We Shall Be Free that aired during the Super Bowl was a song begging people to see that we won’t be free until everyone can be free.
The song was inspired by Brooks’s older half-sister, Betsy Smittle, who was homosexual and beloved friend and bandmate to Brooks.
In 2013, Smittle passed away after battling cancer for two years.
Garth Brooks learned a lot from his older sister, and his love for people despite who they love is refreshing to see in the country music industry, especially from a legend like him.
NEXT: What Is Chris Brown’s Net Worth? (Updated 2023)