Blink-182’s Reunion Tour Earned More Than $85 Million in North America
Written by djfrosty on July 19, 2023
Blink-182 is back together and bigger than ever. The band’s iconic lineup of Travis Barker, Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus reunited for their first shows in nine years, yielding the biggest results of their three-decade career. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the North American leg of the group’s World Tour 2023/2024 grossed $85.3 million and sold 564,000 tickets.
This isn’t Blink’s first reunion tour. The trio went on hiatus in 2005, returning in 2009 with the similarly simply titled blink-182 in Concert tour. At the time, that tour became the band’s biggest on every measurable metric. It was the highest-grossing ($22.5 million) and best-selling (660,000 tickets) tour of its career and set new highs on a per-show level, with $522,000 and 15,345 tickets on average.
Fourteen years later, Blink is pacing $2.4 million each night, multiplying its one-time-peak comeback numbers by four and a half.
These North American shows also set a new high for Blink in terms of attendance, but just barely. The tour averaged 15,664 per show, up 2% from the 2009-10 mark. The band found space to maximize its earnings by playing with pricing. Between 2009 and now, Blink’s ticket prices have exploded, from $34.03 to $151.33.
That quadrupled-and-then-some price is due to several factors. For one, touring simply costs more in 2023 than it did in 2009. The price of concert tickets has also exploded due to resale, dynamic pricing and increasingly creative platinum and VIP models.
Aside from environmental causes, Blink is in a unique position. The band’s 2009 comeback was highly anticipated, but it was still catering to a relatively young audience who had limits to their disposable income. And while that four-year break created heightened demand, 2009 was past the peak of the mid-’00s emo/pop-punk boom that Blink helped inspire. As bands like Fall Out Boy, Paramore and My Chemical Romance geared up for their own extended hiatuses, the new era of Blink’s career flirted with passé, even as the initial comeback was an unqualified success.
Blink’s touring in the 2010s was frequent but littered with asterisks. The 10th Annual Honda Civic Tour paired the band with pop-punk successors My Chemical Romance. Blink’s 20th Anniversary Tour stretched from 2012 to 2014 but stuck to small clubs and theaters in North America. Shows continued in 2016 and 2017, but without DeLonge, the band’s defining guitarist. In 2019, there was another co-headline tour, this time with Lil Wayne. Ticket prices pushed closer to $60 on that run, but attendance dipped below the 15,000-plus high, closer to 10,000 tickets per show on average.
That makes Blink’s recent North American leg the first proper-proper tour for the main lineup since that original 2009 reunion. Not only is its target demo older (and hopefully wiser and richer), but the band is returning in a more welcoming environment. The group’s 2022 single, “Edging,” was its biggest hit on the Billboard Hot 100 since 2004’s “I Miss You.” Further, on the Alternative Airplay chart, the track spent 13 weeks at No. 1, becoming Blink’s longest-running chart-topper ever on the tally, surpassing the eight-week reign of 1999’s “All The Small Things.”
On the live front, My Chemical Romance and Paramore have staged the biggest tours of their own careers by far — 10-plus years removed from their self-imposed breaks around Blink’s first return shows. With its biggest radio success ever on the Alternative Airplay chart, the strength of the current pop-punk nostalgia boom and the added infrastructure of the industry’s bulked-up pricing, Blink was perfectly situated to double, triple and quadruple its previous bests on the road.
After 36 shows in the United States and Canada, Blink-182’s World Tour is halfway done. The band will play 24 dates in Europe this fall before heading to Australia for 17 dates, plus a sea of shows in Latin America (a mix of festival engagements and five headline shows). Those concerts mark the band’s first hard-ticket headlines in Oceania since 2004, and its first major Latin American run ever. While there is no direct precedent for Blink’s international success, its North American total suggests a big nine months ahead. With another 36 shows before wrapping in April, earnings will quickly hit nine figures, ultimately heading toward $150 million.