Olivia Rodrigo Closes Guts World Tour With Nearly $185 Million
Written by djfrosty on October 30, 2024
A little over eight months ago, Olivia Rodrigo had only headlined theaters. Flash forward to today, and she has sold out arenas on four continents and staged one of the year’s biggest tours. The pop phenom wrapped the Guts World Tour last week, bringing in $184.6 million from over 1.4 million tickets sold, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore.
The Guts cycle began in June 2023, when Rodrigo unleashed “Vampire,” the Grammy Award-nominated single that topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks. The album followed, debuting atop the Billboard 200, landing its entire track list on the Hot 100, and earning two Grammy nominations of its own. After hedging bets with a theater tour following 2021’s gargantuan debut with Sour, the stage was set for an upgrade to arenas now that the sophomore slump had been avoided.
Rodrigo kicked off the Guts World Tour on Feb. 23 at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, Calif. That show sold 9,998 tickets, marking the smallest attendance for any stop on the tour. Things picked up quickly, ending her first North American leg with four shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden, earning $10 million from 57,900 tickets between April 5-9.
Though the New York run stands as the highest-grossing engagement of the Guts World Tour, that was not the end of Rodrigo’s run. She played 29 shows across 19 cities in Europe before returning to the U.S. and Canada for another 20 dates. To cap things off, she hit six Asian markets, plus four-night runs in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia.
During Rodrigo’s stint in Asia, her Oct. 5 performance at Manila’s Philippine Arena grossed $1.2 million and sold 48,800 tickets. It’s the best-selling single show of the entire tour – and her entire career – eclipsed only by four-night engagements in major markets like New York, London and Los Angeles. But out of 62 stops throughout 2024, it’s her third-lowest earner. That’s because she purposely kept tickets cheap, averaging $25.04 USD, which stands as less than a fifth the tour’s average of $128.81. Rodrigo is Filipino-American, and the show was a special stop – she is one of just seven artists to report concerts in Philippines this year – where all net proceeds went to local charity Jhpiego through the Fund 4 Good.
In terms of venue capacity and global reach, the Guts World Tour was a major step up for Rodrigo. While reporting for the Sour Tour was incomplete, its 16 reported shows averaged $415,000 and sold 5,517 tickets per show. Two years later, her nightly attendance is up 173% to 15,084, and her average gross jumped by 369% to $1.9 million. In 2022, she played 33 shows in North America and 16 in Europe. In 2024, those numbers bloated to 48 and 29, respectively, plus the 18 combined shows in Australia and Asia.
Still, there might be more room to grow. Co-manager Zack Morgenroth told Billboard that, per tour promoter Live Nation, demand indicated that Rodrigo could’ve packed stadiums just as well. Even at a low price, Rodrigo moved nearly 50,000 tickets in Manila, giving proof of concept.
The numbers are huge, but the tour’s greater impact extends beyond the accolades. Rodrigo’s Fund 4 Good led the way, in collaboration with HeadCount, the National Network of Abortion Funds and more. And then, there’s the secondhand buzz that helped guide Chappell Roan from the first leg’s opening act to industry noisemaker, eventually returning as a special guest in August, rousing the crowd with a choreographed sing-along of her own “Hot To Go.”
At 21 years old, Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour is the highest-grossing tour for someone of her young age (or younger) in a decade, dating back to when One Direction ruled the year-end Top Tours chart in 2014 with the Where We Are Tour. But that’s not enough – Rodrigo herself laments “When am I gonna stop being great for my age and just start being good” on Guts deep cut “Teenage Dream.” Her 2024 trek is now one of the 10 biggest pop tours of the decade so far, ranking among treks by peers like Harry Styles and icons like Madonna.