To sustain his success, Cee Lo has become one of the hardest-working stars in pop. In the days around the tree-lighting schedule he logged about 20,000 miles taping television shows, recording an album and making personal appearances across the United States and in Britain. One day last spring he managed a promotional trifecta, performing in New York in the morning, Alabama in the afternoon and Las Vegas at night.

“I’m still just a working-class artist, basically,” Cee Lo said of his schedule, as he waited backstage at Rockefeller Center for some hot tea to soothe his well-traveled vocal cords.

Cee Lo — a cannonball-shaped man devoted to the Liberace and Elton John school of showmanship — will earn about $20 million this year. Record sales represent the smallest slice of the revenue pie, according to Larry Mestel, the chief executive of Cee Lo’s management company, Primary Wave Music. The collapse in record sales over the last decade has decimated the bottom line, and a hit song alone is no longer enough to bring in superstar wealth.

So even musicians with multiplatinum success have started looking elsewhere for income, especially to increased touring and the kind of commercial deals that result in Miracle Whip product placement in Lady Gaga videos and Taylor Swift’s performing at a JetBlue airport terminal.