Robbie's a fat cat

Robbie Williams paid himself £50,000 a day last year, it has emerged.

The pop star's huge salary - the equivalent of £350,000 a week and nearly £2,000 an hour - is one of the most extravagant in music. It is based on the £17.5 million the singer was paid by his own company in the first year of a deal with EMI.

Accounts show the singer's firm, The Good Company Co Ltd, had a £34,949,632 turnover last year. Robbie took half of that in the 12-month period up to last March.

When the star signed a recordbreaking £80million deal with EMI in October 2002, he announced: "I'm rich beyond my wildest dreams." And yet last year he admitted the cash made little difference to his well-being. He said: "Money's nothing to do with happiness. Sometimes I feel like cashing everything in and giving it all away.

"In my darkest moments I'm convinced my life would be easier if I didn't have as much as £100. Then I could walk the streets as a free man, meet a girl - and live the quiet life that I long for."

The accounts reveal that Williams received £22,605,000 from EMI record sales. Most of the earnings came from Escapology, which went straight to No1 when it was released in 2002 and became the top-selling album of the year. The 30-year-old's tickets for his 2003 European tour sold out in seven hours. The 450,000 tickets to his three Knebworth shows sold out in half an hour.

The figures do not include any income outside record sales and tour tickets. Williams is likely to have made millions more from merchandise, image rights, sponsorship deals and private investments such as property.

But he still only comes 12th equal in a list of pop's richest stars. The Rolling Stones came top, grossing £45 million after their Forty Licks world tour.