Artist Side Hustles You Haven’t Heard About Yet

Image via Complex Original

You know the old line—“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” Jay Z is one-half of a billion-dollar power couple and has perhaps music’s most valuable portfolio of various partnerships and investments, including labels, restaurants, and even an athlete management firm. But he invariably has a few ventures that aren’t as famous as Roc Nation or 40/40, even in sectors that you might not expect to see his name pop up in. For instance, beauty: He co-owns Carol’s Daughter, a Brooklyn-based line of beauty products and fragrances that he invested $10 million in alongside Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith in 2005.

As the hard-partying, globetrotting superstar rapper known as “Mr. Worldwide” in his countless club hits, Pitbull endorses some of the kinds of products that you’d probably expect, including the vodka brand Voli. But he’s also a proud Cuban-American who cares deeply about his community, and he’s become one of pop music’s most unlikely champions of the charter school movement. He opened Sports Leadership and Management (SLAM) in the Little Havana neighborhood of his native Miami to help underprivileged kids reach for the kinds of ambitious accomplishments that he rose up to over the course of his career.

Timberlake scored his most famous role in The Social Network as one of the entrepreneurs behind Napster and Facebook. And perhaps that experience inspired him to invest some of his riches into the tech world, most famously with an attempted reboot of Myspace. His Silicon Valley ventures include seed funding for Stipple, an image tagging platform, which he used to unveil the cover art for his 2013 album, The 20/20 Experience.

The Irish rock quartet U2 have become, over their 30-year career, rock’s benevolent cash kings. From some of the most profitable tours of all time to their many multi-platinum albums, they’ve built an empire. But they’ve also tried to make the world a better place with frontman Bono’s (RED) campaign to help end HIV and AIDS in Africa. Given U2’s famous ties to Apple and iTunes, it’s surprising that half of the band has also invested heavily in a different kind of website that’s often used to transfer music files: Dropbox. Both Bono and guitarist the Edge were named as investors in Dropbox in 2012, the first time Bono has been publicly named as an individual investor in a company outside of his Elevation Partners organization.

Whether or not you’re hearing one of his tracks on the radio at any given moment, Swizz Beatz is out there getting his hands in new business ventures and making millions. He made headlines for his unconfirmed business relationship with the controversial file-sharing site Megaupload. But he also has several lesser-known connections outside of the worlds of art and music. In 2011, he partnered with the auto company Lotus, helping to design a special edition of their Evora GTE.

You may already be familiar with one of Mary J. Blige’s less successful endorsement deals, a 2012 Burger King commercial that was pulled amid controversy. But she’s had better luck with Melodies by MJB, a line of sunglasses that she launched in 2010 with the help of Jimmy Iovine and eyewear company Orange 21. You’ve seen her rocking her iconic shades in countless photos and performances, but you probably didn’t realize that you could buy the same style with an MJB logo on it.

Since rising to fame with Nirvana, and then fronting the Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl has become one of rock’s biggest renaissance men. When he’s not writing new FF songs, he’s probably playing drums on another band’s album, or working on documentary projects like Sound City or the HBO series Sonic Highways. But he’s always retained his roots in the Washington, D.C., punk scene that he grew up in, and for years he has been one of the investors in the beloved hometown venue Black Cat. And in October, when Sonic Highways aired a Washington-themed episode, the Foo Fighters played a special surprise gig at the Black Cat, a much, much smaller room than the band plays under normal circumstances.

50 Cent has gotten platinum certifications for the many millions of albums that he’s sold. But he has also gotten into investing in platinum, the metal itself, partnering with billionaire Patrice Motsepe to brand his own line. That may not make headlines like G-Unit Books, his Cheetah Vision films, or his very lucrative Vitaminwater deal, but all of those ventures combined have helped 50 Cent remain one of rap’s wealthiest stars—even if his albums aren’t going platinum anymore.