John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool on 9 October 1940 and was raised largely by his aunt Mimi Smith in the suburb of Woolton. His mother, Julia, encouraged his interest in music and taught him banjo chords before he took up the guitar. He was educated at Quarry Bank High School and briefly at Liverpool College of Art. Lennon was shot and killed outside his New York home in December 1980, at the age of 40.

In 1957 Lennon formed a skiffle group, the Quarrymen, and that July met Paul McCartney at a church fete in Woolton; George Harrison joined the following year. After residencies in Hamburg and at the Cavern Club, and with Ringo Starr replacing Pete Best in 1962, the group became the Beatles and signed with Parlophone under George Martin. The Lennon-McCartney partnership, which the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame credits with some of music’s greatest songs, began almost at once.

“Please Please Me” topped British charts in early 1963, and by February 1964 the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show had opened the American market. Over the next six years the band released a run of albums including Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road that changed the scale and ambition of popular music. Forbes noted that the Beatles had sold some 65 million albums in the United States alone in the decades since, a catalogue in which Lennon’s estate continues to share.

What the music paid him in his lifetime: our estimate is $20 million to $40 million gross between 1963 and 1980, which is something like $80 million to $160 million in today’s money. Three streams make it up. Records first: the Beatles sold on the order of 200 million units during the band’s working life, on a royalty that began below a penny a single, split four ways, and reached roughly 10 per cent of wholesale after the 1967 renegotiation with EMI – average that across the catalogue at 25 to 40 cents a unit to the group and the band earned $50 million to $80 million, a quarter of it his. Songwriting second, and it was the bigger earner: he and McCartney wrote about 180 published songs together, and Lennon held roughly 15 per cent of Northern Songs, the company that owned the copyrights, until the pair sold their stakes to ATV in 1969. Solo work third: five studio albums between 1970 and 1975, then Double Fantasy. Against all of it ran Brian Epstein’s management commission, which took a quarter of the group’s gross at its peak, and British income and surtax that reached 95 per cent on the top slice before he left for New York – the reason “Taxman” exists. The assumption doing the most work is that average royalty rate, which moved several times inside the period.

After the Beatles split in 1970, Lennon’s solo career produced Plastic Ono Band, Imagine and Double Fantasy, the last released weeks before his death and later awarded the Grammy for Album of the Year. He entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a Beatle in 1988 and as a solo performer in 1994, inducted by McCartney. “Imagine”, “Working Class Hero” and “Instant Karma!” remain among the most recorded songs of the era.

Lennon was appointed MBE with the other Beatles in 1965 and returned the insignia in 1969 in protest at British involvement in Nigeria and Vietnam. In 2017 the National Music Publishers’ Association gave “Imagine” its Centennial Song Award (Billboard). Liverpool’s airport has carried his name since 2001.

Lennon did no commercial endorsements in his lifetime. Since his death, licensing of his name, image, songs and artwork, managed by Yoko Ono, has produced merchandise, reissues and occasional advertising placements, and Forbes has repeatedly ranked him among the highest-earning dead celebrities – an estimated $14 million from the 2019 Abbey Road reissue alone (Newsweek, citing Forbes).

Lennon was a founding partner in Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company set up in 1968, which still manages the band’s catalogue and brand. The publishing rights slipped out of the songwriters’ control, though: the ATV catalogue holding most of their songs was bought by Michael Jackson for $47.5 million in 1985 (Forbes). Lennon’s estate retained its songwriter royalty share and his solo catalogue.

In 2017 the NMPA added Yoko Ono as co-writer of “Imagine”, following Lennon’s own statement in an old BBC interview that the song should be credited to both of them, according to Variety. The change shares future writer royalties from one of the most valuable songs in his catalogue.

Lennon lived with Yoko Ono at the Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side from 1973, and the couple built up further property in New York and elsewhere. In England he had owned Kenwood in Weybridge and then Tittenhurst Park in Ascot, where Imagine was recorded, before selling it to Ringo Starr in 1973.

His most famous possession was his psychedelically painted 1965 Rolls-Royce Phantom V, sold at Sotheby’s in 1985 for $2.29 million (Rolling Stone) – a measure of how the market values an object he simply owned.