Balding Rockers...

HE universal fantasy about being a rock star, at least the G-rated part, goes something like this: you make wildly popular new music, see your likeness splashed across magazine covers and MTV, and worry occasionally about becoming over the hill. You have great hair.

But according to a new list of the 50 top-earning pop stars published in Rolling Stone, over the hill is the new golden pasture. Half the top 10 headliners are older than 50, and two are over 60. Only one act, Linkin Park, has members under 30.

The annual list, which entails some guesswork, reverses the common perception of pop music. Not only is it not the province of youth; it's also not the province of CD sales, hit songs and smutty videos.

While sexy young stars take their turn strutting on the Billboard charts or MTV - or on the cover of Rolling Stone - the real pop pantheon, it seems, is an older group, no longer producing new hits, but re-enacting songs that are older than many of today's pop idols.

In other words, pop music may seem to be about Gwen Stefani, Ashlee Simpson and Ashanti, but its bottom line is about Celine Dion (No. 21 on the list), Bette Midler (No. 24) and Cher (No. 43).

Consider the singer Usher, 26. He sold the most albums, flashed the hottest abs and caused the most swoons in 2004. But Usher ranked only No. 16 - well below the rumpled Phil Collins, 54, who ranked No. 8, or Jimmy Buffett, 59, who keeps his abs comfortable and safe behind Hawaiian shirts, and who ranked No. 5.

Mr. Collins and Mr. Buffett, like fellow rock plutocrats Elton John, No. 4, Simon and Garfunkel, No. 10, and Sting, No. 15, are all of an age when hair is no longer a statement. It is a losing battle.

This is not the revolution the industry was built to promote.

Even at the top of the list, Prince and Madonna, two 46 year olds, each of whom earned over $50 million in 2004, have long since stopped driving fans into music stores.

"This always comes as a shock to fans," said Joe Levy, a deputy managing editor at Rolling Stone. "The biggest-selling artists aren't the ones who make the most money. The artists learn the hard way that money comes from concert tickets and T-shirts, not selling records. That's the lesson - you build a brand over time, and you can sell the brand even if you can't sell the albums."

This means that, while it is good to be the next big thing, it is better to be a-couple-of-big-things-ago. Though pop music glorifies the young and the new, it actually sells these qualities at a discount.

For the record companies, which rarely share in concert grosses, this formula conveys a simple lesson, said Fred Goodman, author of "The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen,Springsteen and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce."

"It tells you that the record business stinks," Mr. Goodman said. Though record companies still create hit acts, often at great expense, "the consumer money is not in the record marketplace," he said.

If old songs create more profits than new ones, in a business that claims to sell newness as hipness, then the business is at odds with itself.

That may be true for the record companies, but Tom Calderone, executive vice president of music and talent programming for MTV and MTV2, suggested that musicians aren't just creating new songs. They're creating future old songs. That flamboyant mane of today is really a down payment on a profitable bald pate tomorrow. And obsolescence, after all, is in the ear of the ticket buyer.

"In five or six years you're going to see Echo and the Bunnymen and New Order and the Cure getting the high ticket prices," Mr. Calderone said, referring to a generation of bands that is not yet content to rest on its oldies. "So maybe Jimmy Buffett is replaced by the Bauhaus reunion, at $250 a ticket."

He added: "I'll be there for that one."