Lance Bass says he scraped by on $35 a day and waited years for a $10,000 check while *NSYNC sold out arenas, and while manager Lou Pearlman and the label made a fortune.
The former boy-band star, now 47, laid out the numbers on a recent episode of The Zach Sang Show, and they are as thin as the per diem he described.
Bass said *NSYNC members lived on $35 a day at the height of the group’s rise. After years of No. 1 albums and packed tours, he said, their first real check was $10,000.
That is the bill for being young, famous, and easy to underpay.
Bass did not dress it up. He said the band worked for free for two or three years before that first check arrived, even as the machine around them kept spinning.
"Our first check was $10,000."
He said people around the group told them to be grateful.
"You should be grateful for that. You’ve been working for free for two, three years now."
Bass’s answer was blunt. Youth does not pay rent, and a pop career does not last forever.
“Everyone kept saying, ‘You’re young, you’re young,’” he recalled. Then he pushed back: who cares if you’re young? You still need to make a living and set yourself up, because most of these windows close fast, and no one set the band up for life after the lights dimmed.
Bass said the public still assumes *NSYNC made him filthy rich. He says that is wrong.
"People think I’m so filthy rich from *NSYNC, but no."
“I didn’t make money with *NSYNC, like, hardly at all,” he said. Residuals? “It’s not much.” Merchandise was “insane,” he added, but he still does not know how many millions he actually saw from it.
Who did clean up, in his telling? “The label” and their late manager, Lou Pearlman, “made a f*** ton.”
Pearlman was no garden-variety tough negotiator. He was convicted of money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, and conspiracy, went to prison in 2008, and died there in 2016. The man who steered the boy-band boom ended as a convicted fraudster.
*NSYNC formed in 1995 and went on hiatus in 2002. Bass has said he felt cheated for a long time. He says that resentment is gone now, “not anymore”, and that he made far more money after the band than during it.
This is not a one-off complaint. In 2023 on SiriusXM’s “The Jess Cagle Show,” Bass made the same core point: the five of them were famous, not rich, and his real earnings came later.
He still gives the band credit for keeping him grounded. “We had a great support system,” he said. “I’m glad I was in a band, because I had four of my brothers that kept you down to earth.” Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Chris Kirkpatrick, and Joey Fatone were in the same boat on that early money.
The pattern is familiar far beyond pop: adults with the contracts tell kids the exposure is the payment, skim the upside, and leave the talent to figure out life after the peak. Pearlman’s prison term showed where that kind of racket can end. The $35 per diem and the late $10,000 check show what it looked like on the ground for the singers who made the noise.
Fame without a fair cut is not a fairy tale. It is a warning label young performers still need to read before they sign.