How Rosalía Graduated From Clubs to Arenas Over the Pandemic
Written by djfrosty on December 6, 2022
With so much time between the tours of 2019 to early 2020 and late 2021-22, new arena stars were minted in the in-between, ready to play the biggest stages of their career despite a possibly limited tour history. Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa transferred the goodwill of chart-topping hits into juiced-up arena tours, now suddenly reliable for sell-outs due to the ghost of success during the pandemic.
Also transforming from a club-level up-and-comer to a global touring powerhouse is Rosalía. The Spanish singer-songwriter’s Motomami World Tour — named after her album released in March of this year — earned $28.1 million and sold 343,000 tickets across three continents, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. With more dates to come, she lands at No. 7 on the year-end Top Latin Tours chart.
Before Rosalía became an arena-conquering superstar, she was playing scattered headline shows in clubs in North America. Her April 2019 shows at New York’s Webster Hall, San Francisco’s Regency Center Grand Ballroom and L.A.’s The Mayan all sold less than 1,500 tickets while she built her base via festival sets around the world. She finished that year with theater shows in London and Paris, and a few arena shows in Barcelona and Madrid.
A sludge of one-off singles, award show performances, and ultimately, the release of 2022’s Motomami helped fill the gap between tours. Since then, she and her team scaled her live business.
Rosalía’s 2019 concerts in Barcelona and Madrid transformed into a 12-date tour in her native Spain. Those shows grossed $13.4 million and sold 154,000 tickets.
Performances at the ‘19 Argentina and Chile installments of Lollapalooza became 11 shows on the Motomami World Tour, adding $7.5 million and 114,000 tickets.
And her North American club shows ballooned into 13 shows in large theaters, earning $7.3 million from 75,000 tickets.
The Motomami World Tour has played 36 shows so far, already a fuller run than 2019’s El Mal Querer Tour. And with increased venue capacity and ticket prices, Rosalía’s pace is that of a completely different artist than her pre-pandemic touring. Her North American shows in ’19 averaged $52,000 and 1,369 tickets. Fast forward to her recent domestic leg, and she’s earning $558,445 and 5,781 tickets – more than 10 times her last tour.
The Motomami World Tour has a string of nine European arena dates left before the end of the year. Even without those grosses or attendance totals reported yet, the venues and routing is already outsized compared to the pair of major-market shows in Europe in 2019.
Rosalía joins the aforementioned club of acts that include Bad Bunny, Eilish, Lipa and more, who have leveled up to arenas between tours separated by the pandemic. But unlike those acts’ top 10 albums (on the Billboard 200) and songs (on the Billboard Hot 100), Rosalía’s crossover success remains relatively limited. She has spent one week in the top 40 of the Billboard 200 and has yet to crack the region on the Hot 100.
Elsewhere, Rosalía has received widespread critical acclaim for Motomami (as with her previous albums), engaged on TikTok, and built a name as one of the most exciting new live acts of the last decade. As the monogenre continues to fracture, it only makes sense that this pop-Latin-electro Spanish-singing hybrid artist is one of the most vital touring acts of the year.