Canadian recording artist and record producer The Weeknd, has a net worth of $55 million dollars. This grossed from $50 million from June 2016 to June 2017. This was from record sales, merchandise, touring and more.
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye was born on February 16th 1990 in Toronto, Ontario. He is an only child to Makkonen and Samara Tesfaye, who were Ethiopian immigrants to Canada in the late 1980s.
In his youth, his mother would work many jobs in order to support their family, often taking on roles as nurse and caterer. She would also attend night school to learn English. His father abandoned the family, leaving Abel in the care of his grandmother. This allowed him to become fluent in Amharic, with Semitic as his first acting language.
The Weeknd began smoking marijuana once he turned 11, and even move on to harder drugs and shoplifting. This prompted his use of drugs such as ecstasy, cocaine and oxycodone. He attended both the West Hill Colligate institution and Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute in the district, but dropped out of both schools in 2007. His stage name was inspired by his high school dropout status after he left one weekend and never came home. The spelling was altered to avoid trade mark problems with the Canadian band The Weekend.
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He has previously stated that his drug use is what inspires some of his songs. In some we sings frequently about ‘heavy drug use’. In 2010 he uploaded three songs to YouTube under his anonymous name ‘The Weeknd’, these were What You Need”, “Loft Music”, and “The Morning. The songs gained attention thanks to rapper Drake. In 2011 his mixtape ‘House of Balloons’ was released on his website for free. This was followed by the mixtapes Thursday and Echoes of Silence. He released a complication album called Trilogy under Republic Records and his label XO. His debut studio album ‘Kiss Land’ was released in 2013. Unexpectedly, Kiss land and Trilogy both hit #1 on the US R&B chart. His next studio album, named “Beauty Behind the Madness” was released in 2015 and was a huge success. From this he received many rewards, including a MTVU Music Award and a Sirius XM Award.
The Weeknd released his third studio album named “Starboy” in 2016, which reached no.1 in the US, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Sweden. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Earned it”. In 2017 he made it in the Guinness World records for most Streamed Album on Spotify. He has only been in the industry for 7 years, and yet he as carried out 5 of his own tours, which includes ‘The Weeknd International Tour 2012’, ‘King of the Fall 2014’ and ‘The Madness Fall Tour 2015’, all of which were sold out shows. Not including his album sales and views on social media and online downloads, he makes enough money through his concerts alone to live the life of luxury. His annual salary is estimated to be $92 million dollars as of 2017.
By Rebecca Cameron
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