98 Degrees: Success Comes Lately

With more than 6.5 million CDs sold, four years of solid touring and a truckload of magazine covers bearing their images, the members of pop vocal group 98 Degrees must have been swimming in money for the last four years.

At least, that's the way it seems to anyone outside the music business.

In reality, the four members of the group - Nick and Drew Lachey, Jeff Timmons and Justin Jeffre - never saw a penny from their work until 18 months ago.

"The big misconception is people think if they're hearing a song on the radio or seeing a video on MTV, those people must be millionaires. That's not the way it works in the music business, unfortunately," says Jeffre, 28.

When the band first was signed to Motown Records, the company put up money to record its first album, promote and market it and to finance the group's touring. Before the group could make any money itself, Motown had to earn back its initial investment.

As many other unsuspecting bands have learned, fame does not come cheap.

"The record company takes a huge percentage of all the profits. They pay for a lot of things up front, and you have to recoup that. So you sort of incur a big debt just trying to make it," Jeffre continues. "That's not to mention lawyers, management, people you need to travel with you on the road. So there's really a lot of expenses and that's why it's so tough to make it in the music business."

Jeffre is quick to add that money was not the ultimate goal of 98 Degrees, and that the group was aware going in that getting any notice in the music business would be an arduous task.

The group's 1998 album "98 Degrees and Rising" solidified its standing as a pop music powerhouse. Last year's album "Revelation" contained one of the year's most popular singles, the Latin- inflected "Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche)."