On the off chance that we'd posed that question 215 years back, the appropriate response would have been Mrs Elizabeth Billington, to some the best English soprano who at any point lived.
Sir Joshua Reynolds once painted Mrs Billington holding a book of music, tuning in to a choir of blessed messengers. The arranger Joseph Haydn thought the representation an unfairness: the blessed messengers, said Haydn, ought to have been tuning in to her.A disgusting history of her sold out in under a day.
It contained what were purportedly duplicates of personal letters about her renowned significant others - including, they say, the Prince of Wales.
Such was her notoriety, she pulled in an offering war for her exhibitions.
The supervisors of London's driving musical show houses at the time - Covent Garden and Drury Lane - battled so frantically for her that she wound up singing at both scenes, substituting between the two, pulling in at any rate £10,000 in the 1801 season.
It was a noteworthy entirety.
Be that as it may, according to modern standards, it's a simple £687,000, or about $1m - only 1% of Elton John's income.
So why is Elton John worth 100 Elizabeth Billingtons?
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy highlights the developments, thoughts and advancements that made the monetary world.
It is communicate on the BBC World Service. You can discover more data about the program's sources and listen on the web or subscribe to the program podcast.
Just about 60 years after Elizabeth Billington's demise, the considerable financial specialist Alfred Marshall investigated the effect of the electric transmit, which then associated America, Britain, India, and Australia.
On account of such present day correspondences, he stated: "Men who have once accomplished a directing position are empowered to apply their productive or theoretical virtuoso to endeavors vaster, and reaching out over a wide territory, than any time in recent memory."
The world's top industrialists were getting wealthier, speedier.
The crevice amongst themselves and less exceptional business visionaries was developing.
In any case, not each calling's ideal and brightest could pick up similarly, Marshall said.
Take the performing expressions. "[The] number of people who can be come to by a human voice," he expressed, "is entirely restricted." And in this way, in result, was vocalists' gaining power.
Yet, only two years after the fact, in 1877, Thomas Edison connected for a patent for his phonograph, the primary machine that could both record and replicate the human voice.Nobody appeared to be very certain what to do with the innovation at first.
The French distributer Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville had officially built up the phonoautograph, a gadget proposed to give a visual record of the sound of a human voice - similar to a seismograph records a tremor.
However, it doesn't appear to have jumped out at Martinville that one may attempt to change over the recording once more into sound once more.
Before sufficiently long, the use of the new innovation turned out to be clear: you could record the best artists on the planet, and offer the recordings.
At to begin with, making a recording was somewhat similar to making duplicates on a : a solitary execution could be caught on just three or four phonographs without a moment's delay.
In the 1890s, there was incredible request to hear a melody by the American vocalist George W Johnson.
He allegedly invested for a long time singing a similar melody till his voice gave out - however notwithstanding singing it 50 times each day produced a unimportant 200 records.
"Genius" financial matters
At the point when Emile Berliner presented recordings on a plate, as opposed to Edison's chamber, it opened the best approach to large scale manufacturing.
At that point came radio and film.
Entertainers, for example, Charlie Chaplin could achieve a worldwide market simply as the men of industry portrayed by Alfred Marshall.
For the Charlie Chaplins and Elton Johns of the world, new advancements implied more extensive popularity and more cash.
In any case, for the understudies artists, it was a fiasco.
In Elizabeth Billington's day, some half-OK artists brought home the bacon performing in music corridors.
All things considered, Billington herself could sing in just a single corridor at any given moment.
Be that as it may, when you can tune in to the best entertainers on the planet at home, why pay to hear a just able act face to face?
Thomas Edison's phonograph driven the path towards a victor take-all powerful in the performing business.
The top entertainers went from acquiring like Mrs Billington to winning like Elton John.
Yet, the main somewhat less great went from bringing home the bacon to attempting to pay their bills: little holes in quality ended up noticeably unfathomable crevices in salary.
In 1981, a financial analyst called Sherwin Rosen called this wonder "the whiz economy".
Envision, he stated, the fortune that Mrs Billington may have made if there had been phonographs in 1801.Technological developments have made whiz financial matters in different areas, as well.
Satellite TV has been to footballers what the gramophone was to artists, or the transmit to nineteenth Century industrialists.
On the off chance that you were the world's best footballer a couple of decades prior, close to a stadium-brimming with fans could have seen you play each week.
Presently, your each move can be viewed by many millions on each mainland.
Furthermore, as the market for football extended, so has the hole in pay between the absolute best and the simply great.
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As of late in the 1980s, footballers in English football's top level used to gain twice as much as those in the third level, playing for - say - the 50th best group in the nation.
Presently, normal wages in the Premier League are 25 times those earned by the players two divisions down.
Mechanical movements can drastically change who gets what, and they are twisting since they can be so unexpected - and in light of the fact that the general population concerned have an indistinguishable abilities from some time recently, yet abruptly have altogether different gaining power.
'Exceptional circumstance'
All through the twentieth Century, new advancements - the tape, the CD, the DVD - kept up the financial model made by the gramophone.
Be that as it may, toward the finish of the century came the MP3 organization, and quick web associations.
All of a sudden, you didn't need to burn through £10 on a plastic circle to hear your most loved music - you could think that its on the web, free.In 2002, David Bowie cautioned his kindred artists that they were confronting an altogether different future.
"Music itself will end up plainly like running water or power," he said.
"You would do well to be set up for doing a considerable measure of visiting since that is truly the main extraordinary circumstance that will be cleared out."
Bowie appears to have been correct.
Craftsmen have quit utilizing show tickets as an approach to offer collections, and began utilizing collections as an approach to offer show tickets.
Be that as it may, we haven't came back to the times of Mrs Billington.
Enhancement, stadium shake, worldwide visits and underwriting bargains imply that the most appreciated artists can even now benefit from a boundless group of onlookers.
Disparity stays fit as a fiddle - the main 1% of craftsmen take more than five times more cash from shows than the last 95% set up together.
The gramophone might be old fashioned, yet the capacity of innovative advance to change who wins - and who loses - endures.
Tim Harford composes the Financial Times' Undercover Economist segment. 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy is communicate on the BBC World Service. You can discover more data about the program's sources and listen on the web or subscribe to the program podcast.
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