Billboard Boxscore
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Concert industry experts generally thought 2024 would be a down year — or at least less busy than 2023, when Taylor Swift and Beyoncé catapulted the sector to new heights and challenged the personnel within it to keep pace amid its explosive growth.
But so far, 2024 hasn’t brought much rest for the weary. The touring business is entering the summer fueled by huge concert grosses that are unprecedented for the midyear mark, according to Billboard Boxscore.
At midyear, grosses for the top 10 entries on the Top Tours chart total a collective $1.5 billion, up a staggering 83% from last year’s figure of $814.9 million. That marks the first time the combined gross of the top 10 tours has crossed $1 billion by the halfway point. Last year, only two tours — Elton John and Harry Styles — had generated more than $100 million at midyear. This year, eight of them have.
Leading the chart period, which spanned from Oct. 1, 2023, to March 30, 2024, is U2, which opened the new Sphere venue in Las Vegas with a residency that grossed $231.6 million from 38 shows during that time. (U2’s full 40-date Sphere run grossed $244.5 million, though the first two shows, which took place Sept. 29 and Sept. 30, occurred just before the chart period began.)
On the strength of her fall North American tour along with February and March dates in Oceania, P!nk ranks second on the midyear tally with $196 million grossed from 42 shows. At No. 3, Madonna logged 67 of her Celebration Tour’s 80 dates during the period and grossed $190.6 million for a No. 3 rank (the trek wrapped in early May). Rounding out the chart’s top 10 are three Latin tours (Luis Miguel; RBD; and Enrique Iglesias, Pitbull and Ricky Martin), three pop and rock acts (Coldplay, Depeche Mode and the Eagles) and Travis Scott, the sole hip-hop artist in the ranking’s upper tier, who brought in $96 million from 44 North American arena shows on his Circus Maximus Tour — marking the rapper’s first outing since the deadly 2021 Astroworld festival.
The big revenue gain for the chart period’s top-earning tours, during what is normally the slower half of the year, is further evidence that — driven largely by international growth in Asia, South America and Australia — the concert business has become an increasingly year-round business.
Leading the Top Promoters midyear chart with $2.8 billion grossed is Live Nation, which has long advocated for steady, incremental international growth. Its main competitor, AEG — No. 2 on Top Promoters with $976.8 million grossed — produced Taylor Swift’s ongoing The Eras Tour through its partnership with Messina Touring Group and has also continued to expand its footprint globally. Swift did not report her The Eras Tour data to Billboard during the chart period, when she played 26 shows across South America, Australia and Asia.
SPHERE IS HERE
Individual music venues rarely change the entire touring landscape, but few facilities have captured the public’s imagination quite like Las Vegas’ Sphere. With its ground-breaking interior sound and video display — not to mention its light-up, skyline-dominating exterior — the venue has effectively created a new tier of high-end concert experience.
U2’s No. 1 ranking on Top Tours was driven solely by the 38 U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere shows from Oct. 1, 2023, through the residency’s conclusion on March 2, 2024. Those concerts grossed $231.6 million from 630,000 tickets sold, with U2 averaging a $6.1 million gross per show from an average ticket price of $368. While a few megastars have earned more from Vegas residencies, none have ever earned so much from so few shows.
While those in the industry largely view fans’ willingness to increasingly shell out for premium concert experiences as a net positive, some live executives predict that other parts of the sector — festivals, namely — may begin to feel a competitive pinch.
“It’s already getting difficult for festivals to find headliners,” says Wasserman Music agent Sam Hunt, who represents major acts such as Diplo, Run the Jewels and The xx, noting that artists used to make substantially more money headlining festivals than they did headlining arenas. But new ticket-pricing tools have significantly increased what artists can make playing the latter.
That shift in financial posture for the touring business comes amid increasingly frequent festival cancellations, and those woes have extended to the top of the market: This year, Coachella was slow to sell after its initial on-sale and ended up down about 20% in attendance compared with 2023.
Given the choice between festivals and headlining concerts at arenas and stadiums, fans are increasingly choosing the latter. “There is no more comfortable way to enjoy a show than an arena — especially the newer facilities,” says Mark Shulman, senior vp of programming at UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y., just outside of Queens, which opened in late 2021. “The modern arena is a concert palace, with incredible acoustics, comfortable seats and tons of bathrooms, plus all kinds of food and beverage options.”
DOJ LAWSUIT LOOMS
The sector’s momentum may be hindered by the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in late May seeking to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster 14 years after the government approved the merger of the two companies. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia joined the lawsuit, which alleges an illegal monopoly in the live entertainment industry. “It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement announcing the suit.
For the government to prove that Live Nation is a monopoly, it must demonstrate that the company has a dominant market share. Though Billboard’s midyear report only measures the top line of the concert market — during the slowest two quarters of the year — it does offer context about the mega-promoter’s clout.
Take the Top Promoters chart. Live Nation and AEG rank first and second, respectively, followed at No. 3 by OCESA — the Mexican promotion company Live Nation purchased in December 2021 — with $403 million in sales. Of the $5.4 billion spent globally on concert tickets to events promoted by the top 20 promoters during the midyear period, according to Boxscore, Live Nation and OCESA accounted for $3.2 billion in sales — about 60% of the total.
That tracks closely to the Top Tours chart, where 31 tours — nearly two-thirds of the overall list of 50 — were produced by Live Nation. Of the top 10 tours, only one, Luis Miguel, was produced by another company. (If Swift had reported data for her AEG-produced The Eras Tour, she undoubtedly would have swelled the number of non-Live Nation productions in the top 10 to two. However, Billboard’s analysis is based only on global data that is voluntarily reported to Billboard Boxscore by promoters, venues and artists.)
A large part of the DOJ’s inquiry into Live Nation will revolve around the company’s ownership of Ticketmaster, which it acquired in 2010, along with the platform’s current market share of the concert ticketing business. On that front, Billboard found that 69 of the top 100 venues across Boxscore’s five highest-capacity charts at midyear were Ticketmaster clients.
This story will appear in the June 1, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Bad Bunny is no stranger to the top of Boxscore charts. In 2022, he led four monthly rankings and then crowned the year-end list of the highest grossing tours worldwide. Naturally, he also topped that year’s Top Latin Tours tally, before Karol G took over in 2023, staging her own sold-out North American stadium tour. Now, as Billboard recaps the biggest tours of April 2024, Bad Bunny and Karol G team up at Nos. 1 and 2 on Top Tours and Top Boxscores.
According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, Bad Bunny grossed $63 million and sold 210,000 tickets in April, logging his second consecutive month at No. 1. The Most Wanted tour’s three-night run at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center contributed $17.8 million of that total, taking the lead on Top Boxscores. Five of his 14 shows in April marked all-time venue highs, among the 16 venue records he’s set since beginning the tour in February.
Including 14 shows in May, the Most Wanted Tour has grossed $207.8 million and sold 703,000 tickets since kicking off in Salt Lake City. Bad Bunny has three more shows to go at San Juan’s Coliseo de Puerto Rico on June 7-9.
Just beneath, Karol G’s Mañana Será Bonito Tour banked $45.1 million and sold 419,000 tickets from nine shows. It’s No. 2 on the gross-based Top Tours chart, but is the best-selling tour of the month, as the only trek to move more than 300,000 and 400,000 tickets. It’s April highlight was three shows at Estadio Nacional in Santiago, Chile, which is No. 2 on Top Boxscores with a gross of $15 million from 168,000 tickets sold.
It’s the first time that two Latin artists top both charts in succession. On Bad Bunny’s five previous No. 1s, stadium rock and country supported at No. 2, via Elton John, Def Leppard & Motley Crue, and Zach Bryan. When Los Bukis and RBD were on top, Dead & Company and Coldplay were runners-up, respectively.
Both artists have been major contributors to Latin’s growing prominence on the Boxscore charts in the post-pandemic era. Bad Bunny was the first artist to finish at No. 1 on the year-end Top Tours ranking who primarily performs in any language other than English, after BTS wound up at No. 3 in 2019. Karol G’s nine-figure gross in 2023 assured that Bad Bunny’s success was not a one-off or a fluke.
Before COVID-19 turned venues dark in 2020, no Latin artist had a tour that grossed more than $200 million. Now, there have been five, two of which are Bad Bunny and Karol G’s ongoing highlights atop the April recap. In addition to Most Wanted Tour’s $207.8 million, the Mañana Será Bonito Tour has earned $263.8 million and sold 1.8 million tickets since launching last August.
To add to the current noise, the Luis Miguel Tour 2023-24 (No. 6) is up to $258.5 million, current through May 19. Plus, RBD concluded its reunion tour in December, with a final gross of $227.1 million.
The other $200-million Latin tour is Bad Bunny’s own World’s Hottest Tour, which grossed $314.1 million in 2022. Both current tours by Bad Bunny and Karol G are ongoing, but it’s unlikely that either will break the all-time high mark among Latin artists set by World’s Hottest Tour. While the former has just three shows remaining, the latter will play 18 dates in Europe in June and July.
Karol G has averaged $6 million and 41,800 tickets per show across North and South America. That pace would guarantee her the Latin touring record, but her shows in Europe will be mostly in arenas, which cuts the potential per-show attendance in half, at least. To boot, ticket prices are lower in Europe than the U.S., across genres.
Europe is an uncommon territory for Latin artists to sell out arenas and stadiums, but the final leg of the Mañana Será Bonito Tour, especially its final four shows at Madrid’s Estadio Santiago Bernabeau, will likely push its overall haul very close to, or over the $300 million mark.
In addition to Latin’s dominance, country artists take another three of the top 10 spots on Top Tours. Luke Combs is No. 3 with $35.7 million, Kenny Chesney is No. 7 with $18 million, and last month’s runner-up, Zach Bryan, is No. 10 with $12.3 million. Beyond the top 10, Kane Brown and Tyler Childers follow at Nos. 11-12, with $11.5 million and $11.4 million, respectively.
Madonna (No. 4) and Nicki Minaj (No. 5) solidify a woman-dominated top five, while pacing the month’s tours among pop and rap artists, respectively. The former is No. 3 on Top Boxscores, with a five-night engagement at Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes. Rounding out the proper routing of her Celebration Tour, those shows grossed $14.8 million and sold 82,400 tickets on April 20-21, 23-24 and 26.
While New York is often represented atop the Top Venues (15,001+ capacity) chart via Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, Brooklyn’s Barclays Center takes the No. 1 spot for the first time in April, with $26.7 million and 99,200 tickets sold across seven shows. That’s an all-time high monthly rank and gross for the arena, having previously inched past the $20 million mark last July, when it sat at No. 2 behind MSG.
Madonna played the final shows of The Celebration Tour, closing her six-month trek with $225.4 million and 1.1 million tickets sold over 80 shows, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore.
The Celebration Tour is Madonna’s sixth trek to gross more than $100 million. The only other acts to achieve this are the Eagles, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and U2, making her the sole woman in this elite group.
The Queen of Pop first announced The Celebration Tour in January 2023, with a planned start date in July of last year. But a medical emergency delayed the North American leg by five months, instead starting in Europe in October. There, she played 27 shows in 10 countries, finishing with $77.5 million and 429,000 tickets.
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By year’s end, Madonna played three shows in Brooklyn and two in Washington, D.C., before resuming the North American leg with 42 more shows from January through April. In the U.S. and Canada, she earned $133.1 million and sold 616,000 tickets, sending the tour’s total figures beyond $200 million and 1 million tickets.
Finally, Madonna went to Latin America for the first time since 2016, as part of the Rebel Heart Tour. Five shows at Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes grossed $14.8 million and sold 82,400 tickets.
In all, The Celebration Tour’s $225 million finish marks Madonna’s highest-grossing tour in over a decade. While in Europe, it surpassed her theater experiment on the Madame X Tour ($51.5 million in 2019-20). And during her North American leg, she partied past the Rebel Heart Tour’s $169.8 million from 2015-16.
Madonna’s recent high dates back to 2012’s MDNA Tour, which grossed $305.2 million and sold 2.2 million tickets. That trek played many of the same American arenas as The Celebration Tour, but took her to Europe’s outsized outdoor stadiums, plus a lengthier stadium run throughout Latin America. Her biggest tour ever was the one before that, earning $407.7 million from 3.5 million tickets on the Sticky & Sweet Tour (2008-09).
The apples-to-apples improvement over the Rebel Heart Tour – Madonna’s most recent all-arena run – combines an uptick in ticket prices ($162.42 – > $199.93) with a 12% increase in average per-show attendance count (12,750 – > 14,274).
That average attendance is missing an obvious asterisk. After playing her final show in Mexico City, Madonna staged a free concert at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, marking her first stop in the city since a Dec. 2, 2012, performance on the MDNA Tour. The show’s gargantuan success does not factor into her official Boxscore results because it was a free event, but it’s plenty worth noting that she drew 1.6 million people – roughly 40% more than the combined attendance of her entire tour. According to concert promoter Live Nation, it’s the largest audience ever for a stand-alone concert by any artist in history.
The Celebration Tour pushes Madonna’s reported career total to $1.6 billion and – without accounting for the Brazil show – 12.8 million tickets.
Bad Bunny’s Most Wanted Tour crowns the Top Tours chart for the month of March. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, it earned $64.6 million and sold 207,000 tickets over 13 shows.
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Bad Bunny logs his fifth month at No. 1, after topping the chart four times in 2022 — twice as part of the El Ultimo Tour Del Mundo in March and April, and then in August and September during World’s Hottest Tour.
Combined, those treks nabbed him the No. 1 spot on 2022’s year-end ranking, making him the first artist to primarily perform in any language other than English to crown the annual survey. The only other primarily-Spanish-singing act to lead the monthly chart is RBD, which topped the November 2023 list.
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Bad Bunny pulls out of a tie with Beyoncé and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra to have the second-most monthly wins, trailing only Elton John with seven.
Bad Bunny’s biggest stops during March were in Los Angeles and Chicago. Three nights in each city score him Nos. 2-3 on Top Boxscores, with $20.2 million at the former’s Crypto.com Arena on March 13-15, and $13.4 million at the latter’s United Center on March 28-30. All of his shows earned more than $3 million.
The Most Wanted Tour began on Feb. 21 in Salt Lake City. The first handful of shows secured a No. 10 rank on February’s tally with $19.5 million in the bank. All told, the trek has earned $84.2 million and sold 282,000 tickets so far, with 30 dates left to report through two hometown shows on June 7-8 at San Juan’s Coliseo de Puerto Rico. At his current pace of more than $4 million per show, the tour is likely to sail across the $200 million threshold.
Zach Bryan follows closely behind at No. 2, with $62.3 million and 313,000 tickets, falling just 4% short of Bad Bunny’s winning gross.
Bryan is in the middle of The Quittin Time Tour, which launched on March 5 and managed 18 shows before the end of March. Its’ so-far total of $62 million is already far beyond the $43.9 million he earned on 2023’s 32-date Burn Burn Burn Tour. In fact, it only took 13 shows to pass that mark, representing a 150% increase in per-show earnings since just last year.
More specifically, last year Bryan played two shows in New York at Queens’ Forest Hills Stadium. For the Quittin Time Tour, he expanded to six, split between Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, Belmont Park’s UBS Arena and Newark, N.J.’s Prudential Center. He didn’t visit Chicago in 2022 or 2023 but kicked off this year’s run with three sold-out shows at the United Center, generating $12.6 million in ticket sales for No. 5 on Top Boxscores.
Bryan has nearly 50 more shows on the books in 2024, one-third of which bring him to football stadiums. Already 50% beyond his 2023 grosses, he’s likely to join Bad Bunny in the $200 million club by year’s end.
Women dominate much of March’s top 10, with P!nk and Madonna at Nos. 3 and 4. The former banked $55.1 million and sold 543,000 tickets from 11 shows, scoring the month’s highest attendance count. The latter added $37.9 million to The Celebration Tour, which crossed $200 million in early April. The queen of pop’s tour wrapped last week (April 26 – except for one free show on May 4 in Brazil) with final numbers expected to be reported soon.
Karol G and Nicki Minaj represent Latin and hip-hop at Nos. 5 and 6, respectively. For Karol G, it’s a continuation of a winning streak that began with the kick-off of the Manana Sera Bonito tour last August. For Minaj, it’s her first monthly Boxscore appearance, with the first batch of shows on the Pink Friday 2 World Tour bringing in $26.9 million.
Three festivals appear on Top Boxscores, topped off by Pa’l Norte in Monterrey, Mexico at No. 1. The weekend-long festival grossed $26.2 million on March 29-31, nearly tripling its 2022 revenue of $9.3 million. At No. 6 is Esterio Picnic with $11.8 million. Both events are promoted by OCESA, helping the Mexican juggernaut rank at No. 3 on Top Promoters.
Across the Pacific Ocean, Pitch Music & Arts Festival represents for Melbourne, Australia, at No. 16 with $8.4 million and 35,900 tickets sold between March 8-12. Otherwise, Oceania is bolstered by several appearances by P!nk, including top 10s for shows in Melbourne and Perth.
Asia sneaks onto the Boxscores ranking, with Ed Sheeran and SEVENTEEN rounding out the chart at Nos. 29 and 30. Both hover around $6 million, with Sheeran in Manilla, Philippines and SEVENTEEN in Incheon, South Korea.
Each year, an uncountable number of recording artists transform their discographies into live shows, going on tour to super-serve their biggest fans around the world. But a select few have the power to bring their fans to them, staging extravagant productions in one city as the masses travel to see a once-in-a-career performance. Here, we’re […]
On February’s Top Tours list, U2 is in the winner’s circle with monthly earnings of $56.5 million from 166,000 tickets sold.
February is U2’s first month at No. 1, after sitting at No. 2 in December of 2019 and 2023, both behind Trans-Siberian Orchestra. This marks the first Irish act to claim monthly honors.
Since launching in 2019, the monthly Boxscore recap has detailed touring breakthroughs, particularly in country and Latin music — highlighted by Morgan Wallen and Bad Bunny, respectively — as well as reporting quirks along the way, including Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s dual coastal ensembles during the holiday season. The latest oddity: U2’s recent domination makes the band the first act to lead Top Tours without actually going on tour.
The group’s haul north of $50 million comes from 10 shows, all at Las Vegas’ Sphere. The rock quartet christened the Sin City arena with the first show from its U2:UV Achtung Baby Live residency in September, and to date, is still the only act to play at the venue. Concert series by Dead & Company and Phish are scheduled for later on Sphere’s 2024 calendar.
Residencies at this scale – 40 arena shows in six months – are unprecedented. Prior to U2’s kickoff, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars were the only residency acts to crack the top 10 of Top Tours. The traditional Vegas model is for acts such as them to play sold-out theaters to roughly 5,000 fans each night, with the flexibility to charge extravagant prices for the opportunity to see an A-list artist in a more intimate setting.
U2 is playing by similar rules, with its $340 average ticket within 5% of Mars (No. 19), but expanded to an arena audience. Demonstrating the same intensity of demand as theater residencies but broadened to an audience three times as big, U2’s monthly victory, ahead of stadium tours at Nos. 2-3, is groundbreaking.
With all that activity from one arena, U2 also crown Top Boxscores, with Sphere reigning as the month’s top-grossing venue. Both victories were decisive, by a margin of more than 3:1.
U2’s recent run began on Jan. 26 and stretched through March 2, earning $84.7 million during that period. Dating back to opening night (Sept. 29, 2023, and through its close on March 2), the U2: UV Achtung Baby Live residency brought in $244.5 million and sold 663,000 tickets over 40 shows.
That is the lowest show count – by far – for any residency with a gross of $100 million or more. Mars and Billy Joel (Madison Square Garden) are the only others with a nine-digit gross and fewer than 100 shows.
Former chart-topper P!nk is No. 2 on Top Tours with a $48.3 million gross. Shows from the Australian leg of the Summer Carnival Tour sold 437,000 tickets in February, marking the highest attendance total of the month. This is P!nk’s third time at No. 2, following stints in April 2019 and August 2023, adding to her three months at No. 1 (March 2019, July 2019, October 2023).
Oceania brought in more revenue than North America or Europe on P!nk’s I’m Not Dead Tour (2006-07), the Funhouse Tour (2009) and The Truth About Love Tour (2013-14). Her recent leg, stretching through March 23, marks her first time in stadiums in Australia and New Zealand, having made the outdoor transition elsewhere on the Beautiful Trauma World Tour (2018-19).
Including her March dates, P!nk’s 20 continental shows grossed $104.3 million and sold 980,000 tickets, bringing the tour’s total to $361.8 million and 2.8 million tickets. With more dates scheduled in the U.S. and Canada, and Europe through November, the Summer Carnival will easily become P!nk’s first to cross $400 million. The Beautiful Trauma World Tour came agonizingly close when it wrapped in 2019 with $397.3 million.
Karol G follows at No. 3, leading a trifecta of Latin stars in the top 10. Luis Miguel sits just beneath at No. 4, and Bad Bunny rounds out the group at No. 10. Across shows in the U.S. (Bad Bunny), Mexico (Karol G) and South America (Luis Miguel).
Stars of the 21st century fill out most of the rest of the top 10, with Madonna, Depeche Mode, Blink-182 and the Eagles filling out Nos. 5 and 7-9, respectively. Ed Sheeran rounds out the top 10 at No. 6 as the last of six $30 million tours from February. Emerging from the slow winter months, the last time more acts crossed the $30 million threshold was August, when Beyoncé led P!nk, Metallica, Morgan Wallen, The Weeknd, Drake and the Jonas Brothers.
Behind Sphere as the month’s top venue, London’s O2 Arena and Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena bring the U.K. and Australia to the top of the heap at Nos. 2-3, respectively, peppered by Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena at No. 6 and Manchester’s AO Arena at No. 7.
A version of this story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
2023 was a banner year for live events, with grosses from the top 100 tours up 53% from 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. But beyond these record-breaking earnings, concerts also affect artists’ recorded music consumption, spurring local boosts as they tour the country.
Luminate and Billboard collaborated to dig deeper into touring’s effect on streaming totals. Examining a sample of nearly 1,000 shows from 50 of 2023’s top-grossing acts, the analysis found that the median concert yielded a 42% increase in local on-demand audio streams during the week of each event as compared to the eight weeks prior.
Of course, the size of the bump varies by artist. There’s a spectrum of effects, from Odesza doubling its local consumption after an average concert (+143%) to Blake Shelton‘s bump coming in slightly below the overall median (+32%).
But one of the defining factors in how big of a local streaming bump an artist receives is genre. Fan bases across pop, rock, country and beyond boast their own demographic and geographic characteristics, and as a result, their consumption habits vary widely.
Some of the biggest boosts in local consumption are reserved for the dance/electronic acts included in this analysis. The genre’s live footprint is often tied to festivals or nightclubs, meaning few of its marquee acts tour in the traditional sense. When they do play ticketed headline shows, in many cases those concerts amount to mini residencies in particular pockets of the country.
Pretty Lights exemplifies this phenomenon. When the producer played three shows in two Colorado markets — plus three each in Atlanta and Philadelphia — last year, his local streams averaged a 132% bump. And shows played by LCD Soundsystem during the group’s 20-date residency at New York City’s Brooklyn Steel translated to a 125% jump in its New York-area streams, which sustained throughout the residency’s duration.
K-pop acts function in a similar way. In the United States, K-pop is a relatively young genre that has firmly established itself in only a handful of markets. SUGA and TOMORROW X TOGETHER each played a small number of American cities on tour in 2023, with both hitting New York and Los Angeles as well as cities like Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Similar to dance acts, SUGA and TOMORROW X TOGETHER enjoyed local weekly streaming gains of 133% and 129%, respectively — roughly three times higher than the average touring artist.
In stark contrast, R&B/hip-hop acts see comparatively small upticks in their local streaming activity after concerts. For much of the last decade, R&B/hip-hop has been the most popular genre in America, and its rise coincided with the dawn of the streaming era. For these artists, sky-high streaming activity tends to be a baseline, so adding a concert to the mix doesn’t yield the same growth rates.
Still, tours by Drake, 50 Cent and J.I.D. & SMINO generated local weekly boosts of 28%-34% — far less than K-pop or dance/electronic artists and below the 42% average, but a material increase across lengthy national tours nonetheless.
Local streaming increases for the country genre also tend to be slightly below average, with the size of the increases often dependent upon how long the acts have been around. Little Big Town and Blake Shelton, both of which began their careers in the early 2000s, post typical post-show gains of 36% and 32%, respectively. Jelly Roll and Morgan Wallen, both of whom scored the biggest hits of their careers last year, sit lower at 18%.
Jelly Roll and Wallen have led a new class of crossover country stars who have enjoyed more success on the Billboard Hot 100 and Streaming Songs charts than the genre has seen in years. Much of that success is owed to a more focused digital footprint, with robust activity across social media and streaming platforms compared to acts like Shelton and Little Big Town, who rose to fame in the CD era. That positions them closer to hip-hop acts who boast higher consumption figures on streaming platforms than older artists, therefore giving them less room to grow.
Of course, many artists cross genre lines or operate within sub-genres or different sects of genres, blurring its effects. The Jonas Brothers, a pop band that blossomed in the 2000s and reunited five years ago, typically see massive local streaming increases, with the group averaging a 129% boost following last year’s shows. RBD, a Latin pop vocal group with a similar timeline as the JoBros, demonstrated even bigger local streaming gains, which were up an average of 285% following dates on the band’s reunion tour last year. This pattern continues with tours by Backstreet Boys and New Kids on the Block (172%), suggesting that classic pop acts are perhaps the biggest benefactors in terms of streaming numbers when they go on tour.
Speaking of reunions, last year also marked the 20th anniversary of landmark records by Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, both of which are the brainchildren of indie-rock stalwart Ben Gibbard. Both acts, fronted by Gibbard, returned to the stage in 2023 to co-headline the Give Up & Transatlanticism 20th Anniversary Tour. During that run, their local streams bloomed by 195% — a number outdone only by RBD among the 50 artists in the analysis.
Click here for more on the symbiotic relationship between touring and streaming.
It’s no secret that Taylor Swift and Beyoncé staged the two biggest tours of 2023, with Swift even continuing the Eras Era throughout 2024. But not only did both artists earn record-breaking grosses and affect local economies with their treks, the stage shows also juiced each artist’s recorded music consumption.
Luminate and Billboard partnered to dig deeper into the connection between touring and streaming, capping a colossal year of headline tours. Beyoncé and Swift proved perfect examples of artists’ abilities to capitalize on their concert calendar to not only score a local bump in each city but sustain long-term national interest throughout the duration of their tours and beyond.
Both Beyoncé and Swift saw expected bumps to their consumption totals upon their respective tour kick-offs. When The Eras Tour launched, Swift’s U.S. on-demand audio streaming count increased by 59% in the week ending March 23, according to Luminate. For Beyoncé, the effects were teased out, as the tour’s first leg in Europe allowed domestic streaming to build slowly before her North American arrival. By the end of their U.S. runs, streams were up – from the week before each tour began through the release of each artist’s concert film – by 106% and 34%, respectively.
Initially, these bumps could be explained by the analysis of touring’s local short-term impact on consumption. In each city that Beyoncé and Swift played, market-level streams immediately grew by 89% and 95%, respectively, on average. But as their tours continued, isolated regional bumps compounded on one another, with particular narratives and trends aggregating to a mountain of consumption at the national level.
The mere announcement (Feb. 1, 2023) of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour – coupled with the 65th Annual Grammy awards, where she did not perform but accepted two record-breaking trophies – spurred three weeks of gains, as the tour’s on-sale kept excitement alive. The beginning of Beyoncé’s domestic dates naturally fueled consumption in dramatic fashion with six consecutive weeks of increases (July 7 – Aug. 17).
Beyoncé stretched out her summer streaming bump with intention, focusing on individual moments of choreography and arrangements within the setlist. For “Energy,” a deep cut from Renaissance, she made a meal out of the lyric, “Look around, everybody on mute.” She took it literally, pausing the song and freezing alongside her dancers and band, teasing the audience before resuming, “Look around, it’s me and my crew/ Big energy.”
The Mute Challenge soon became an integral part of the show. By the time “Energy” hit its own streaming peak of 1.7 million clicks (week ending Sept. 7), it had nearly tripled its consumption from before the tour.
When Beyoncé performed “My Power,” a non-single from The Lion King: The Gift, she was joined by daughter Blue Ivy Carter on stage. Their much-memed and much-imitated dance routine entered the cannon of iconic Beyoncé choreography, with fans tracking Blue’s progress throughout the tour. The track posted explosive streaming gains over several months, ultimately up 449% by its peak (the week ending Aug. 17) from before the tour’s launch (the week ending May 4).
Spotlights for under-the-radar tracks like “Energy” and “My Power” yielded organic, drawn-out increases in consumption that snowballed alongside a parade of guest stars, controversy over the Queens Remix of “Break My Soul,” and a constant influx of social media content showcasing Beyoncé’s rotating wardrobe from local designers.
Swift’s catalog soared as soon as her tour began on March 17. Even before the July 7 release of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), which warped her streams beyond the impact of The Eras Tour, consumption had almost doubled, at 372.9 million clicks in the week ending June 1. After the new release receded, her catalog maintained, at 391.4 million by the U.S. leg’s end in the week ending Aug. 10.
Like Beyoncé, Swift found songs within her ever-expanding catalog to highlight, particularly those that weren’t already world-conquering hits. Even with a nightly setlist of more than 40 songs, she left room each night to perform two rotating “surprise songs.” On average, the surprise songs got a 27% bump the week of their performance. Removing performances of songs from Speak Now after the release of the Taylor’s Version set, more affected by new-release streaming patterns than the typical tour impact, the average gain bumps to 31%.
After the exposure and subsequent streaming increase, the typical next-week drop was just 5%, indicating that inclusion in the surprise-song section encouraged sustained streaming action.
Within the show’s routine set pieces, Swift turned a fan-favorite into a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit. Lover’s “Cruel Summer,” from 2019, was the first properly performed song each night at The Eras Tour, helping to reignite Swifties’ passion for the album cut. Without an official music video or announcement, even as Swift launched the 2022 Midnights track “Karma” as a single with its Ice Spice remix, “Cruel Summer” showed unstoppable growth from the tour’s launch. Steady between 1.9-2.1 million streams in the early months of 2023, the song ballooned to 16.7 million by the final U.S. show (in the week ending Aug. 10).
The prolonged championing of “Cruel Summer” and the one-after-another success of Swift’s surprise songs underlined The Eras Tour’s ability to transform her from superstar to stratosphere. Her relationships, philanthropy and seemingly every move during the tour continued to fuel her consumption, consistently more than double the streams she drew from earlier that year.
Both Beyoncé and Swift extended their good fortunes with the release of record-breaking concert films, each delivering profits for distributor AMC and more consumption boosts for their catalogs. The seeds they planted with “Energy, “Cruel Summer” and more took full bloom, even inside movie theaters, with audiences singing and dancing along — except when they had to be on mute.
Months after each tour wrapped in the U.S., Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé scored the pop-dance-R&B(-country) chameleon a streaming increase of 54% the week of its Dec. 1 release, while Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour earned its once-country-now-pop star a 20% boost upon its Oct. 13 release.
Beyoncé and Swift are, of course, enormous stars that were likely to attract some amount of attention for going on tour even if they didn’t plan and work for these kinds of long-term rewards. But this kind of long-term, national growth isn’t only reserved for top-of-the-line megastars, as Maluma, ODESZA and Weezer experienced similar touring impact last year.
Both five years removed from their last stadium tours, Beyoncé and Swift designed their shows for maximum impact and staged campaigns that turned each trek into an era of its own.
Click here for more on the symbiotic relationship between touring and streaming.
Kicking off the new year in style, Coldplay leads Billboard’s Top Tours chart for January. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, Chris Martin and company grossed $58.8 million and sold 417,000 tickets during the month, essentially doubling its closest competition.
January is traditionally the slowest month of the year, with Elton John and Tool crowning lists in 2020 and 2022, respectively, with less than $20 million each. John himself set a high mark in 2023 with $40.9 million, and now Coldplay improves upon that by 44%. This year’s top 30 tours grossed a collective $271 million, up 75% from last January’s total.
This marks the third time that Coldplay has been No. 1 on Top Tours, having crowned lists in March 2023 and July 2022. The band achieved its hat-trick with eight shows in Asia. Including another two dates in early February and eight shows in November, the latest leg of the Music of the Spheres tour earned $143.3 million.
Coldplay’s January shows break down to two at the Philippine Arena in Manila and six at Singapore’s National Stadium. The latter batch grossed $43.4 million and sold 321,000 tickets, leading Top Boxscores by a margin of 2.8-to-1.
While the phrase “world tour” often translates to the U.S., Canada and western Europe, Coldplay has taken its time to travel the globe. The Music of the Spheres Tour launched in March 2022 and has included three legs in Latin America, two in the U.S. and Canada, two in Europe, and now 18 shows in Asia. More dates in Europe and Oceania await in 2024.
In all, Coldplay’s massive global trek has sold 7.7 million tickets. Only Ed Sheeran’s Divide (÷) tour (2017-19) has sold more, at 8.9 million. With 43 shows scheduled between June and September, Coldplay would need to average about 28,000 tickets per show — less than half of the tour’s global average so far — to close the gap and become the bestselling tour in Boxscore history.
Speaking of Sheeran, he sits at No. 2 on January’s Top Tours chart with Asian concerts of his own. He grossed $31.7 million and sold 194,000 tickets over six dates, with five more in February to count toward next month’s recap.
Sheeran grossed $11.6 million over two nights in Osaka and another $10.6 million from a double-header in Dubai. Similar to Coldplay, his dates in Asia are part of a global endeavor, following legs in Europe, Oceania and North America.
Not only do both acts rub shoulders atop the all-time tally, they wrestle on the opposite end of the top 10. Sheeran’s The Mathematics Tour has now grossed $556.4 million and sold 5.8 million tickets since its April 2022 debut, squeezing into the top 10 highest grossing tours of all time. Collateral damage, Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour (2016-17) dips to No. 11, just as the British rock band encroaches on Sheeran’s prior tour at the all-time summit.
At No. 3 on Top Tours, Madonna brought in $31.2 million from a string of arena dates in January. That leaves her just $500,000 away from Sheeran’s runner-up spot, held back by a margin of less than 2%. All of Madonna’s 11 January dates appear on Top Boxscores, spotlighted by her three shows at Madison Square Garden. Those grossed $10.3 million from 41,200 tickets sold.
Now at $121 million, The Celebration Tour is Madonna’s sixth to cross the nine-digit threshold. Only The Rolling Stones (nine) and U2 (seven) have more. Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles also have six $100 million tours to their names.
Madonna has 32 shows left to report in the U.S., plus five in Mexico City. When all is said and done, The Celebration Tour will likely become her third to gross $200 million or more, behind stadium runs Sticky & Sweet Tour ($407.7 million; 2008-09) and the MDNA tour ($305.2 million; 2012).
K-pop offers bright spots in the top 10, with SEVENTEEN at No. 4 with $19.6 million and ENHYPEN at No. 7 with $13 million. Each group played batches of shows in Asia, just like Coldplay and Sheeran. With restrictive weather in the U.S. and Europe, stadiums in southern Asia and Australia are often pillars of early-in-the-year box office.
Comedians make their mark on Top Tours as well, with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Peter Kay, Kevin Hart, Jo Koy and Brett Goldstein all ranking between Nos. 14-20.
Though not without significant highlights, the Top Tours chart embraces the winter doldrums of years past, delivering the lowest top-30 gross since last January. John Mulaney and NieR Orchestra close out the top 30 under $1 million, matching 2023’s two sub-million earners. February marks the stage returns of Blink-182, Karol G and P!nk, while introducing new tours from Bad Bunny and Olivia Rodrigo.
A version of this story will appear in the March 2, 2024, issue of Billboard.
It’s a big week for Usher. On Friday (Feb. 9), he’ll release Coming Home, his first studio LP in eight years. Two days later, he’ll perform as the official headliner of the 2024 Apple Super Bowl LVIII Halftime Show. On Tuesday morning (Feb. 6), he announced Usher: Past Present Future, his first solo headline tour in a decade.
But that doesn’t mean that Usher has been away from the concert stage. In July 2021, he kicked off Usher: The Las Vegas Residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace. A year later, he moved down the strip to MGM’s Dolby Live for My Way: The Vegas Residency. As he looks forward to a new album and some of the biggest performances of his career, he can celebrate the success of these two residencies: According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, Usher has grossed more than $100 million across these Vegas stints.
The Caesars residency was relatively brief, with 14 shows in July and August 2021, and another six around the turn of the new year. Those 20 dates earned $18.8 million and sold 84,000 tickets. The MGM run was more extensive, hitting 80 shows between July 15, 2022, and Dec. 2, 2023. There, he grossed $95.9 million and sold 394,000 tickets.
Altogether, these theater shows grossed $114.6 million and sold 479,000 tickets across 100 dates. That’s a higher revenue total than any of Usher’s prior tours, previously topped by the OMG Tour, which brought in $76 million in 2010-11. That lined up with Usher’s other Super Bowl halftime appearance, when he made a cameo during the Black Eyed Peas’ 2011 set.
On a per-show scale, My Way: The Vegas Residency has averaged $1.198 million each night, surpassing $1.026 million from the OMG Tour and $698,000 from Truth Tour (2004-05). The latter run supported Confessions, the 2004 album that spawned four Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s and was the top Billboard 200 album of the year.
By almost any metric, that album and tour was a rare commercial peak for an artist with multiple No. 1 singles before and after. To improve upon his demand as a live act by more than 70% with his Vegas residencies proves the strength of his talent, discography, and brand, more than 30 years after he first hit the Billboard charts with “Call Me A Mack (From “Poetic Justice”)” in the summer of 1993.
Of course, inflation and an ever-changing ticketing market make comparing concert revenues from 20 years apart a difficult task. But in a Vegas theater a third the size of most North American arenas, Usher is a high-demand destination ticket. Both residencies have averaged a $239 ticket, far beyond the post-pandemic highs at Resorts World Theater and Caesar’s Bakkt Theater.
And while Usher arrived in Vegas in 2021 with new-and-improved demand, he leaves Sin City with even bigger momentum thanks to word-of-mouth around both residencies, a well-received Tiny Desk Concert and a run of single releases. His first stretch of shows at Caesars averaged $928,000, before increasing on almost every leg, peaking at $1.5 million on his last run of 21 shows from Oct. 11-Dec. 2.
After he releases Coming Home and plays the Super Bowl stage this weekend, he will embark on Usher: Past Present Future later this year. The arena trek launches on Aug. 20 in Washington D.C. and is scheduled through two shows in Chicago on Oct. 28-29. The initial announcement’s 24 North American stops could yield more than $50 million at the box office. But a successful album rollout and Super Bowl performance could lead to additional dates, extending his routing and pushing potential earnings further toward the $100 million threshold that he cleared after two and a half years in Las Vegas theaters.