Touring
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At opening night of her Celebration Tour on Saturday night in London, Madonna proved that she still has all her life to live and all her love to give by covering Gloria Gaynor‘s disco classic “I Will Survive.” Madonna took a moment during her first show to talk about the serious health scare that postponed […]
The concert business is set to close out another record year fueled by pent-up pandemic demand, higher priced tickets and intense fan commitment to their favorite artists.
Hoping to capture a snapshot of the concert business when cumulative grosses for the top 100 tours and attendance are higher than ever, Variety VIP+ and talent agency UTA have released a new report titled “Peak Performance” combining data from Billboard and Pollstar with insights from PwC and an online survey of more than 1,500 concert goers.
“Our desire to do this study was spurred by the anecdotal evidence we were seeing from our own music representation and music brand partnerships business,” said Joe Kessler, UTA partner and global head of UTA IQ.
The report paints a bullish and optimistic picture of the concert business with more fans willing to spend money and travel farther to see their favorite artists live, as well as an increased urgency for consumers to find time for more live music and festivals in the post-pandemic period. But the rapidly increasing price of tickets and the increased use of credit cards and debit to pay for experiences continues to represent a potential liability for both music fans and the industry writ large, the report finds.
For the first time ever, the concert business is expected to cross the $30 billion revenue mark in 2023, with the top 100 tours accounting for nearly 20 percent of total sales. Survey respondents overwhelmingly agreed that some of their favorite memories took place at concerts and 79 percent of respondents agreed that attending a concert or festival is more important to them following the COVID-19 pandemic. Approximately 43% of consumers said live music events were more meaningful to them than other types of live events or experiences.
Driving the enthusiasm for concerts, Kessler explains, are millennials, now in their mid 20s to early 40s, who have “consistently and substantially shown a desire to want to engage in collaborative and communal experiences as a group.”
“Music has always been a big part of that,” Kessler says, noting that it was millennials who fueled the growth of the festival business over the last two decades.
“As the economy improve and they have more disposable spending, I think we’re going to see a continued rise in the desire to want to see live shows,” Kessler says,” a trend he expect to grow “as our lives become increasingly virtual and we spend more and more time behind screens.”
While Taylor Swift and Beyonce have dominated the headlines in 2023, the report found that men still significantly outnumber women in terms of concert attendance, with men more likely to have gone to a concert in 2023, with 42 percent saying they’ve attended a live music show in the past 12 months, compared with 31 percent of women.
The survey also found that more fans are traveling for events than ever before, with half of respondents traveling four hours or more to attend a concert, 39 percent have flown within the U.S. to attend a show, and 30 percent have traveled to another country for a live music event.
While fans are willing to spend more money that ever on concert tickets, the survey also finds that high ticket prices are among consumers’ chief complaints. With average ticket prices north of $122, more than 62 percent of respondents said the biggest impediment to live music attendance was the price, while 38 percent of fans reported that high ticket prices have prevented them from attending at least one concert in the last 12 months.
“That should not be all that surprising,” says Andrew Wallenstein, president and chief media analyst for Variety Plus, noting that while concerns over price have long existed in the concert business, ‘more than half of the consumers surveyed are just as willing to purchase VIP tickets now as they were prior to the pandemic, while 3 in 10 have become more willing” to buy expensive tickets.
“I think there is a demographic out there that despite the cost pressures feels there is more value in spending top dollar than ever before,” Wallenstein says.
Unsurprisingly, debt is fueling a large part of consumer spending. The survey found that more than one-third of fans had used a buy-now, pay later service to buy tickets, while 34% have opened a credit card specifically for a concert or music festival presale.
“Macroeconomic circumstances have to be paid attention to,” says Wallenstein, who notes that federal student loan payments are resuming this month after a three-year pandemic pause, but notes “this demographic values the concert going experience in a way that previous demographics may not have.”
“Despite the fact that student loan forgiveness is out the window, and many are not saving for things like home ownership, [millennials] may still spend money on concerts the same way they have in the past,” he tells Billboard.
While the report doesn’t offer up any forecasts as to how much runway is left for growth in concerts, Kessler says be doesn’t expect the business to cool off any time soon.
“No one can know how long it will last, but I don’t think this is a temporary blip on the map,” Kessler says. “The data that came through the study tells us that, this is here to stay for the foreseeable future.”
Click here to access a copy of the report.
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Madonna‘s highly anticipated Celebration Tour has officially kicked off with the premiere performance taking place in London on Saturday (Oct. 14). […]
After the opening night of The Celebration Tour in London on Saturday (Oct. 14) night at the O2 Arena, the verdict is in: Madonna is back. Despite a brush with death, the Queen of Pop delivered a two-hour-plus show full of smash hits, killer deep cuts and a surprise or two (or three). Candid as […]
After repeated monthly triumphs, a series of broken records and 39 cities turned to mute, Beyoncé closed out the Renaissance World Tour on Oct. 1. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the tour grossed $579.8 million and sold 2.8 million tickets across 56 shows in North America and Europe.
In a vacuum, those are massive numbers. And in the context of Boxscore’s nearly 40-year history, they are monumental. The Renaissance World Tour is the highest grossing tour by a woman, by a Black artist and by any American soloist.
Among women and domestic solo acts, Beyoncé passes Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet Tour, which broke ground upon its 2009 finale with $407.7 million. Among Black acts, she replaces herself atop the heap, exceeding The Formation World Tour’s 2016 gross of $256.1 million by a margin of 2.26 to 1. In the interim, The Weeknd’s ongoing After Hours Til Dawn Tour has slid in the middle, with a gross of $305.9 million as of Sept. 30.
Doubling her previous peak – already a towering high that topped Boxscore’s 2016 year-end round-up – and digging deep into the record books, Beyoncé breaks the top 10 highest grossing tours of all time, hitting No. 7. She’s barely blocked by Guns N’ Roses’ Not in This Lifetime… Tour, which earned $584.2 million from 2016-19, and ahead of The Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang Tour, which brought in $558 million from 2005-07.
Notably, those tours ran for four years and three years, respectively. In fact, the Renaissance World Tour is the only one among the all-time top 10 to take place within one calendar year. At 56 shows, it played for roughly half the length of all-timers by Coldplay, The Rolling Stones and U2; about one fifth of Ed Sheeran’s The Divide Tour; and one sixth of Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour.
Post-pandemic-era ticketing practices such as dynamic pricing and primary market resale have allowed fan demand to push an artist’s market value higher than ever before. The Renaissance World Tour averaged $253 a ticket, allowing grosses to bloom quicker than her fellow all-time leaders.
The next highest one-year earner is Taylor Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour, which brought in $345.7 million in 2018. Coincidentally, Beyoncé and Swift have shared a very bright spotlight this year, as their concurrent treks have dominated headlines and boosted economies. Official numbers have yet to be reported for The Eras Tour, but it’ll likely join the Renaissance World Tour in this vaulted space.
In speeding to the all-time top 10, Beyoncé maintained a breathtaking pace from May through October. The Renaissance World Tour earned $141.8 million and sold more than a million tickets from 21 shows in Europe. (Previous reports cited $154 million, but official numbers have since been adjusted.) That evens out to $6.8 million and just under 50,000 tickets (49,873) per show.
Though those averages were already the highest of any leg of any Beyoncé tour, (much) bigger business awaited across the pond. Her 35 Renaissance shows in the U.S. and Canada averaged $12.5 million each night. In all, the North American leg earned $438 million, alone enough to break the global touring records referenced above.
Three shows at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. (Los Angeles area), earned $45.5 million and sold 156,000 tickets. That makes it the sixth-highest grossing engagement in Boxscore history. Like the tour it was a part of, it’s the biggest reported Boxscore for a woman, Black artist and American soloist. And like its parent tour, it reaches its all-time status with brevity. The five higher-grossing engagements range from a six-night stay at London’s Wembley Stadium for Coldplay to Harry Styles’ 15-show mini-residency at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
The tour follows Renaissance, Beyoncé’s latest solo LP. The set debuted atop the Billboard 200 last year and spawned two top 10s on the Billboard Hot 100 – “Break My Soul,” which became her seventh No. 1 hit, and “Cuff It,” which became her longest-charting song on the tally earlier this year. Renaissance and both singles won Grammy awards at this year’s ceremony, making her the most awarded singer in Grammy history.
And while the Renaissance World Tour has come to a close, its lifespan hasn’t ended just yet. Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé opens in theaters on Dec. 1, distributed directly by AMC Theaters.
Across her 20-year solo career, Beyoncé has grossed more than $1.3 billion and sold 11.6 million tickets, including her portion of co-headline runs with Jay-Z, and Alicia Keys and Missy Elliott.
Gone is the typical start and stop of touring cycles. Releasing an album and going on tour every few years can make for a simple structure for a pop star career, but particularly in the post-pandemic era, artists are blurring multiple albums into one tour. Or, after postponing a tour for a couple years due to COVID, some are ending their originally scheduled treks and then jumping into a new one the following year.
But no one is doing it quite like P!nk: After wrapping 41 stadium dates on Monday, she’s hitting pause on Summer Carnival only to kick off an entirely separate arena tour on Thursday night (Oct. 12).
So far, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, P!nk’s Summer Carnival has grossed $257.6 million and sold 1.8 million tickets across 41 shows. (P!nk will play a makeup date at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, on Nov. 26 before the Summer Carnival resumes Feb. 9 in Sydney for a sweep of 20 shows in Australia and New Zealand.)
Summer Carnival began with 19 shows in Europe, bringing in $106.8 million from 871,000 tickets. The run was highlighted by two shows at London’s Hyde Park on June 24-25, earning $20.9 million and selling 130,000 tickets. Just behind The Rolling Stones’ $22.4 million, it’s the biggest gross by an American act or by a soloist in the venue’s storied history.
Just over the pond, P!nk flew Stateside for a $150.7 million run in the U.S. and Canada, selling 914,000 tickets. Boston and Philadelphia earned double-header status, claiming the North American leg’s tallest tallies. Two shows at Fenway Park (July 31-Aug. 1) grossed $13.6 million and sold 78,000 tickets, while two at Philly’s Citizens Bank Park topped out at $14.2 million and 93,000.
Not only were those the two biggest engagements on P!nk’s recent domestic run, they are the biggest continental engagements of her entire career. It’s not surprising, given this was her first stint in North American stadiums, after leveling up in Europe on the Beautiful Trauma World Tour in 2019.
The upcoming run in Oceania will be P!nk’s first try in stadiums over there, but one needn’t worry. On past tours, she’s stuck to arenas but played several shows in each city, sticking around for 18 nights in Melbourne on 2013’s The Truth About Love Tour. That equaled 235,000 tickets in the market, leaving more than enough room for multiple stadiums per city for the February-March leg.
But before we get there, P!nk has a 20-date arena trek. Consider Summer Carnival to be her grand reintroduction after a four-year gap since the Beautiful Trauma World Tour, while the impending start of the Trustfall Tour acts as the true celebration of its namesake album, released in February. Kicking off Thursday night in Sacramento and wrapping Nov. 19 in Orlando, it’s expected to earn more than $70 million and sell more than 300,000 tickets, according to promoter Live Nation.
Within 12 months, P!nk will have played three legs of Summer Carnival, all while squeezing in an entirely separate tour with the Trustfall shows. It’s likely to be the biggest year of her touring career, exceeding the $397.3 million from the Beautiful Trauma World Tour in 2018-19. When that wrapped, it was one of the 10 highest-grossing tours in Boxscore history. Edged out by recent runs by Elton John, Harry Styles and others, P!nk’s all-time stature continues to rise, as her career gross climbs to $973.6 million and total attendance just under 9 million. When it’s all said and done, Billboard projects she’ll be the newest member of two elite Boxscore clubs, blowing past $1 billion and 10 million tickets.
Whether he’s building live-music clubs and theaters or renovating them, Rick Mueller abides by a simple rule for his complex job: “The best venues bring out the best in the fans and the best in the band.”
As AEG Presents president of North America, Mueller, 50, oversees all of the rooms in the territory for which the company is the primary talent buyer.
His purview includes more than 100 U.S. properties — mostly theaters and clubs managed by one of 13 regional offices that report to him. Among them are those owned and operated by The Bowery Presents, a collection of destination plays such as Brooklyn Steel and Forest Hills Stadium in New York and a series of newly opened clubs in Boston, Denver, Atlanta and Cincinnati. He’s also heavily involved in business development, overseeing construction of new projects that AEG Presents will exclusively book, like Nashville Yards, as well as bringing existing venues like the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Bowl under AEG Presents management.
“We’re building AEG as [a collection] of more regionally run businesses,” he explains. “That allows us to be more responsive to those markets — what’s happening musically there and what the customer wants.”
Mueller, who is originally from the San Francisco Bay area and now lives in Los Angeles, contends that strategy gives AEG Presents a “distinct advantage” over its main competition, Live Nation, where he briefly worked. “Live Nation is a very centralized company,” he says. “They buy their talent centrally. They make their concession deals centrally. They probably have their alcohol sponsored, and it’s driving whatever they serve in their venues. I don’t know that they give a lot of specialized thought in any given city to what is a great experience.”
You have opened a lot of smaller clubs. How do you identify markets that need another venue?
Since the pandemic, we’ve opened The Eastern in Atlanta, Roadrunner in Boston and the MegaCorp Pavilion in Cincinnati. They’re all doing really well, and we want to continue to add a lot more venues to that list. We’ve got Nashville Yards, which will open up at the end of 2024 or early 2025. We’ve got a venue in Raleigh [N.C.] that will open up in the first half of 2025. These are brand-new builds. As for what markets we look at — any place there’s opportunity. Sometimes that’s a function of a certain capacity room that doesn’t exist in a marketplace.
What size venues are your sweet spot?
We’re focusing on locations with capacities of 1,500 to 5,000. There’s more and more bands that are coming out of this frictionless distribution of music. They are able to sell tickets, so there’s a huge demand for these size venues. The bands can’t find enough dates, and we want to make sure that we service that opportunity.
You’ve opened a club called Racket in Manhattan, a market where you already have a number of small clubs. Why open another?
New York is a market where we’ve invested in very small spaces because it’s a very important developmental market for our relationships and conversations with bands. We feel that finding any venue in Manhattan — in this case, we renovated the old Highline Ballroom —is an opportunity we’re going to look at every single time.
What niche will Racket fill?
Look, in New York there’s a variety of bands that could sell more tickets than probably any other market in the United States. It’s also a first statement-type play. These smaller rooms are where we do a lot of, call it R&D. We build relationships with young bands, and then we want them on a path to play our whole venue portfolio. We hope that carries all the way through to our bigger venues like Forest Hills. It’s a true vertical pipeline where we can service an artist’s needs at any level.
Are small music clubs the new A&R for artists?
I think the internet is A&R for artists. In this day of social media and frictionless distribution, artists can be their own advocates. As far as building a live base, New York is a very important market to start relationships with artists early. In key markets that can handle a lot of shows, we’re going to continue to invest in that.
A lot of live-industry innovations start at the club level. What are your priorities?
What you’re seeing across the board in the industry is the desire for more premium offerings. There’s a huge group of people out there who are willing to pay a little bit more whether it’s for a better seat, a better experience, a better drink, better dining. We’re looking at that, but we’re also tailoring our offerings so that there’s an experience for everybody. We want to make sure that we offer a range of experiences — from cheaper to high-end.
Billboard recently reported that Gen Z concertgoers aren’t big consumers of alcohol. How do you adapt?
We’re keeping a very close eye on that. It’s a big part of the business, and it certainly hasn’t dropped off a cliff. People are still drinking, and we’re doing more offerings, whether it’s nonalcoholic or specialty cocktails. Almost on a daily basis, we look at where our numbers are and try to understand why, but it’s something that’s really hard to see in the moment. You have to collect data, and by the time you see where the trends are going, you hope you’re in a position to adjust to it.
How does your division run differently than, say, Live Nation’s House of Blues chain and its smaller venues?
Live Nation takes more of, I’ll say, a cookie-cutter approach to music. House of Blues is a chain, and it’s the same somewhat uninspired experience anytime you go to one of them. We’re opening brands that we hope speak to their markets and stand with their own identity.
Have you noticed any changes in the way fans buy tickets since the pandemic?
When we first came back, the number of no-shows was much higher than we’re accustomed to. That pretty much leveled off and came back into what you’d call traditional ranges. There are trends where a fan might wait a little longer to buy tickets. That’s more market-specific, and that dynamic has always existed. When I first started in this business at Bill Graham Presents, Detroit was this crazy, huge, late-selling market and would do thousands of tickets week of show at some of the amphitheater properties. It doesn’t sell the same way now. San Francisco has had a lot of changeover in terms of its population. Sales are up, but we see [ticket purchases] shifting a little bit later in the overall cycle. We are seeing more of a strong close to a lot of shows there, and why that is I’m not sure. But as an industry, we’re still selling a lot of tickets early in the game, especially in big arenas and the stadium star category. Business has been incredibly good. You haven’t really heard about a lot of large-scale underperforming tours.
What are the hot genres for ticket sales?
Generally stated, country continues to explode, as well as the land that Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers and even Jason Isbell inhabit — they aren’t traditional-style country. Kelsea Ballerini’s most recent tour is exploding. We’ve also seen incredible results with dance music. If you look at what has gone on at Brooklyn Mirage, which is not in our company, they’ve had what appears to be a record season.
What headwinds do you see?
If there’s a negative trend in the business, it’s that more multigenre festivals have struggled to maintain success. The big experiences like Coachella, Lollapalooza, Outside Lands are stronger than ever. They’re brands that people trust, and the festival experience is great. Below that, some festivals have struggled, while you’re seeing more single-genre festivals — dance, for instance — succeed. Look at Electric Forest. It speaks to a very specific audience, and it’s stronger than ever.
A year ago, indie and smaller acts were canceling tours because they were losing money. Is that still happening?
It has leveled off. A lot of people had sold tickets at a different kind of ticket price before the pandemic and made their budgets on one set of dynamics. Then when it was time to go out and tour post-pandemic, it cost a lot more to be out on the road. If your sales weren’t that good or you weren’t expecting to earn any back-end, you could end up losing money, which is why I think some people pulled down their tour plans. Costs have gotten under control, but it’s still expensive to tour. The challenge for midlevel tours is finding a balance between prices that are welcome among the fan base and the costs of being out on the road. Sometimes you have to find a mix of festivals and soft-ticket money out there to help pay for the markets that don’t cover the nightly bill that you need to earn.
How does the currently high level of inflation affect AEG’s business?
It costs a lot more for security and the labor to run our shows. And again, in some of these big markets where there’s a lot of events going on on a given weekend, it can be hard just to find staff. So managing our labor costs has been a real challenge. We have to look carefully when we do an event and what that costs and if we can make enough money for it to be worthwhile. Sometimes you go into these unique situations where the artist doesn’t seem to make any money because it costs more to do the show, and we’re struggling to make money, but it’s an important look for the artist. So we are all going in with the right goals and intentions to grow that artist’s career so that they make money on their live shows when they come back to that market.
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday proposed a rule to ban any hidden and bogus junk fees, which can mask the total cost of concert tickets, hotel rooms and utility bills. President Joe Biden has made the removal of these fees a priority of his administration. The Democrat’s effort has led to a legislative push […]
Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles is opening the first ever Coke Studio — a 3,300 square-foot music studio and event space that will feature exclusive branded merchandise and product offerings along with podcast recordings, live performances, artist appearances and more. The Coke Studio is part of a renewed partnership with arena owner AEG, Coca-Cola North […]
Olivia Rodrigo is gearing up for her arena tour in support of her sophomore album Guts, and the star opened up about what her touring life is like with People. “I sleep so much when I’m on tour, it’s kind of crazy,” she told the publication. “There were some nights where I was just so […]