Helene Fischer | The richest singer you’ve never heard of

Helene Fischer , Well, a tight-lipped German-Russian superstar evidently keen to retain her everywoman appeal, for one thing. Reading extensive interviews reveals only that she loves artisanal butter and was surprised when her boyfriend, a German TV personality, had her face tattooed on his arm.

Fans of low-grade pop beef may be titillated by the potential implications of Katy Perry pipping Taylor Swift to be named Forbes’s highest-paid woman in music for 2018. But the real intrigue – and a potential challenger to their status – lies further down Forbes’s top 10. At No 8, just below Rihanna and ahead of both Celine Dion and Britney Spears, sits Helene Fischer. Who?

In bland biographical terms, Fischer, 34, is a superstar of Germany’s schlager scene, a sound that tends to two directions. The first is a kind of bierhalle bop that oompahs through matters concerning booze, babes and the Bundesrepublik. Fischer embodies its foil: the faithful woman whose heart skips and breath stops when she thinks of her devoted man, playing up her feminine feebleness to inspire his protective instincts.

Fischer’s whopping pop success will spur Swift and Perry to bury the hatchet for good and join forces against this powerful European challenger before she rises any further up the rich list. Or maybe not. “I have no ambition to conquer the English market,” she told the tabloid TZ last year.

Schlager came to its traditional themes as the antidote to the licentious western pop that infiltrated Germany after the war. It endures thanks to its popularity with baby boomers and beyond, who are well served by infinite schlager TV specials – Fischer presents one every Christmas, a cloying all-star revue that makes Jools’ Annual Hootenanny look like Channel 4’s Club X.

In its down-home sensibilities, schlager is country music’s spiritual twin, and Fischer has given it an aggressive synth-pop update, as if she were the German Taylor Swift. But where Swift’s pop evolution made her cool, it is hard to overstate how little critical love there is for Fischer’s frankly awful music.