Touring
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Morgan Wallen released One Thing at a Time on March 3, kicking off a run of 11 (and counting) consecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200. One of the set’s focus tracks, “Last Night,” became his biggest hit yet, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for seven (and counting) frames. And now, his spin-off run of concerts – the One Night at a Time World Tour – crowns Billboard’s Top Tours chart.
According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, Wallen played four shows in April, earning $27.9 million from 145,000 tickets sold. He fends off Elton John ($27 million) and former tourmate Luke Combs ($25.8 million) in a narrow race, securing his first monthly victory.
Earlier this month, Wallen was forced to postpone the One Night at a Time World Tour for six weeks due to a vocal injury, resuming on June 22 at Chicago’s famed Wrigley Field. Including three shows from May 4-6 and a handful of dates in Oceania in March, the tour has earned $44.3 million and sold 258,000 tickets to-date.
Wallen will mix arenas, amphitheaters and stadiums across the remaining 45 scheduled dates. Running through June 2024, Wallen is on to soar past the $200 million mark (and then some), easily topping his own The Dangerous Tour ($113.5 million; 841,000 tickets) and further, Kenny Chesney’s Here and Now Tour ($135 million) and Taylor Swift’s The Red Tour ($150.2 million) to become the top-grossing country tour ever. Country tours are generally defined as by artists recording primarily country music at the time of a respective tour.
Wallen’s April triumph marks the first time in nine months that an artist scores a first month at No. 1. The last act to claim its first chart-topper was Coldplay in July 2022, who poetically closed the loop by repeating at No. 1 just last month.
In between, Bad Bunny (Aug. and Sept. 2022), John Mayer (Oct. and Nov. 2022, Jan. 2023), Trans-Siberian Orchestra (Dec. 2022), and Ed Sheeran (Feb. 2023) notched repeat wins. In 34 months since the monthly charts premiered, Wallen is just the 15th artist to lead the Top Tours ranking.
Among those 15 leaders, Wallen is the first country act to hit No. 1. Previously, the genre had peaked at No. 3 with George Strait (March 2019 and Jan. 2020) and Reba McEntire (Jan. 2022). In fact, stretching beyond the origins of Billboard’s monthly charts, the last time country spawned the top-grossing act of the month was Chesney in May 2015, almost eight years ago.
Including Wallen and Combs, country artists have five top three placements, or 4.9% of all top three ranks since the charts launched in Feb. 2019. When looking at the full 30-position survey, the genre makes up 11.8% of the chart, following only rock and pop.
While country has consistently been a core factor in the concert industry’s well-being, it’s taken more than three years (including COVID’s blackout period) for one of its own to lead, with more of its headliners in the teens and 20s of the monthly chart.
Much of that has to do with the structure of country tours, as most acts play weekend shows but take off during the week, compared to every-night or every-other-night routings for many pop, rock, Latin and hip-hop artists. Playing two or three shows a week, country artists can only sell so many tickets, limiting their total figures especially when compressing the chart’s tracking period to a strict timeframe.
For their parts, Wallen played in Milwaukee on a Friday and Saturday, and then Louisville and Oxford, Miss. on the following Thursday and Saturday. (Combs played one stadium show each week, except for a double-header in Nashville). But despite a limited show count, both artists scaled up to stadiums, able to compete with lengthier arena runs via massive nightly audiences.
Elton John, sandwiched between Wallen and Combs at No. 2 on Top Tours, played double the shows as either country competitor. Nine of those took place over the course of 16 days at London’s O2 Arena, averaging one show every other night.
John’s run at the O2 is No. 1 on April’s Top Boxscores, having earned $25.3 million and sold 148,000 tickets. It’s the month’s only engagement to break the $20 million mark or 100,000 tickets. Wallen (Nos. 2 and 5) and Combs (Nos. 4, 7-8) help flesh out the top 10, with Usher at No. 3 for an eight-night run at MGM’s Dolby Live in Las Vegas.
Not only does the O2 Arena push Elton to No. 1 on Top Boxscores and No. 2 on Top Tours, it is itself the top-grossing venue of the month. The last time it reigned was June 2022 with $41.7 million and 372,000 tickets sold, just north of April’s $41.1 million and 344,000.
Gorillaz is heading out on the road for a special tour this fall. On Tuesday (May 30), the group announced The Getaway 2023 tour, which is scheduled to take place in September. The limited run of shows will take place across four dates in the United States — as explained in the tour’s official description […]
As 2023 heads into summer, multiple signs point to a healthy and growing live music business for the rest of the year. In recent weeks, executives from the publicly traded concert promotion and ticketing companies have signaled that surging consumer demand won’t slow down, and there will be enough tours to satiate music fans’ appetite for live events.
Demand has been strong “and is showing no signs of letting up,” said Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino during the company’s May 4 earnings call. Live Nation expects to sell more than 600 million tickets in 2023, up from 550 million in 2022. To date, the concert promoter has sold more than 100 million tickets to Live Nation events, a 20% increase from the prior-year period, and expects to host a record number of fans in 2023.
Vivid Seats, the publicly traded secondary ticketing marketplace, shares Live Nation’s sentiment. “Consumers continued to crave live experiences in the first quarter,” said CEO Stan Chia during a May 9 earnings call, “and we believe this trend will continue for many years.” Vivid Seats does business primarily in the U.S. while German promoter and ticketing provider CTS Eventim focuses on Europe. “Both in Germany and internationally, we are pursuing organic growth and anticipate that our business performance will continue on its successful course,” said CTS Eventim CEO Klaus-Peter Schulenberg in the quarterly results released May 24 that reiterated the positive outlook in its 2022 annual report of “moderately higher earnings” for the live entertainment segment 2023.
The concert business is meeting — and perhaps surpassing — some lofty expectations. In 2022, as the concert business exited the pandemic, the widespread belief was that pent-up demand for in-person experiences would drive the concert business beyond pre-pandemic levels. That turned out to be true. Concert promoter Live Nation posted record revenue of $6.2 billion in the third quarter that was 67% above the same period in 2019. What’s more, the volume of fans returning to concert venues was augmented by an unmatched willingness to absorb higher prices. Frenzied demand — and sky-high prices on the secondary market — for tours by Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen have showed A-list artists have yet to find their ceiling on prices.
Concert promoters have posted strong quarterly earnings that fit their narratives. Live Nation’s first-quarter revenue was up 71% to $3.1 billion. CTS Eventim’s online ticket sales increased 58% to 18 million as consolidated revenue improved 163% to 366.2 million euros ($393 million). At Vivid Seats, which also does business in major sports such as baseball and basketball, first quarter revenue grew 23.2% to $161 million and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization doubled to $42.4 million.
Investors absorb past earnings history while figuring out what to expect in the future, and according to JP Morgan analyst David Karnovky they often ask two questions about Live Nation: First, is there enough supply to meet growing, healthy demand? Yes, Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold said at JP Morgan’s Global Technology, Media and Communications conference on Tuesday. That’s because global streaming platforms such as Spotify and social media apps like Instagram and TikTok allow artists to build global followings in ways that weren’t previously possible, he explained. K-pop and other up-and-coming genres of music “that maybe once were regional are now going global,” he said, and artists that used to sell out mid-sized venues are now selling out stadiums. “So, you’re seeing that supply continue to build.”
The second thing investors want to know is how demand will respond during a softer economy. Live Nation closely follows the indicators — such as on-sales show closings — Berchtold said, “but we’re not seeing anything that gives us pause.” Separately, Berchtold noted that Live Nation’s research indicates getting back to concerts are one of fans’ top priorities after the pandemic and will be “one of the last things they’re going to cut back on.”
Vivid Seats CFO Lawrence Fey also addressed the possibility of an economic downturn — a scenario becoming increasingly likely in the U.S. should Congress fail to find a compromise to raise the debt ceiling by early June. “[T]here’s a lot of chatter and concern out there” that demand will weaken “in the not-too-distant future,” said Fey, “but it continues to be the case that we’re seeing very robust demand across our event categories [and] across price points.” Beyond the consistently strong demand, Vivid Seats has “been pleasantly surprised by the supply calendar,” particularly a concert schedule that includes recently announced tours by Drake and Aerosmith, he added, “and [that] gives us optimism.”
Post-pandemic anticipation helped accelerate a new class of arena headliners, but also cemented long-time road warriors on their ways to new peaks. More than 20 years into the band’s touring career, Muse is reaching new heights on the Will of the People World Tour. With reported data through April 12, the glam hard rockers break the $200 million barrier in career grosses, having earned $206.6 million, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore.
The Will of the People World Tour launched in October with theater-sized underplays in major markets, before playing a quartet of shows in Mexico in January. Muse then traveled north for a proper run of arena shows in the U.S. and Canada, playing 24 dates across two months. In all, the tour has reported grosses of $36.1 million and sold 402,000 tickets over 30 shows.
Broken out by region, it’s the biggest tour of the band’s career. In Mexico City, two shows at Foro Sol grossed $6.8 million and sold 107,000 tickets, eclipsing plays in the same city in 2019, 2013 and 2007, in terms of revenue and attendance. In Guadalajara, the Jan. 20 show grossed $1.2 million and sold 13,000 tickets, up 34% from an area play in 2013.
In arenas in the U.S. and Canada, Muse’s business averaged out to $1.1 million per show, marking the band’s first North American tour to crack the seven-figure line. Previously, The 2nd Law World Tour (2012-14), the Drones World Tour (2015-16) and the Simulation Theory World Tour (2019) each paced between $700,000-800,000, while the current run represents a 50% increase from what had seemed to become their standard business.
Muse’s star rose throughout the 2000s and 2010s, reaching increasingly higher until they amassed some of the biggest rock hits of all time (2009’s “Uprising” and 2012’s “Madness” are Nos. 1 and 4, respectively, on Billboard’s Greatest of All Time Alternative Songs chart) and then scored a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with 2015’s Drones. But years beyond those chart peaks, Muse hits a new high on tour, backed by last year’s Will of the People.
The Will of the People World Tour resumes this weekend in the U.K., continuing throughout Europe with a mix of headline tour dates and headline-festival gigs. Muse’s tour history indicates that the shows across the pond will earn about 20% more than the spring’s North American dates, pushing the tour gross toward the $50 million mark.
More than two decades as road warriors, Muse’s latest grosses push their career total to $206.6 million and 3.1 million tickets.
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SeatGeek executives were scrambling to recover from an unforced error earlier this month when two discount codes leaked on social media granting users $500 discounts on the secondary ticketing marketplace. After about a half-hour of frenzied buying, the ticket resale site was forced to cancel thousands of sales and cover costs incurred by untold numbers of brokers.
The source of those troublesome codes? SeatGeek created the codes for a business conference for Major League Baseball box office managers and ticketing staff, sources tell Billboard — three months after SeatGeek signed a reported $100 million, five-year deal to take over from rival StubHub as the league’s official ticket reseller.
The $500 discount codes — “MLB1” and “MLB2” — were originally given out as prizes for a team building exercise during the event on May 3 at Globe Life Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home to the Texas Rangers. Known to most in the sports ticketing industry as the Baseball Ticketing and Marketing Meetings, the summit is a typically low key affair where baseball ticketing staff come together to network, share ideas and meet with league vendors. SeatGeek representatives were present at the meeting to discuss their new agreement with the league, according to multiple sources. The two discount codes did not include any expiration date or limit on how many times they could be used.
Nine days after the summit, the codes leaked onto the internet and quickly spread across social media. The first instance of the code sharing on Twitter on May 12 at 11:29 p.m. EST appears to have come from an account linked to a sports gambler named Drew Morgan, writing, “I just got 2 tickets to 2 different Steelers games 100% free on SeatGeek. Sounds too good to be true but there was zero catch at all.”
Holy shit I just got 2 tickets to 2 different Steelers games 100% free on Seat Geek. Sounds too good to be true but there was zero catch at all 🤯Use codes MLB1 or MLB2 for a $500 discount on the tickets. I have no incentive at all to promote this. My friend told me about… pic.twitter.com/8G6ELGHPkn— Drew Morgan (@DMProps) May 13, 2023
Three minutes later, an account calling itself “Lord Restock” with 168,000 followers posted the codes, kicking off a frenzy of fans using the codes to buy tickets to sporting events, SZA concerts and more.
Around midnight, SeatGeek staff noticed the frenzied use of the $500 discount code and took the SeatGeek site offline to investigate what was happening. The site remained offline for several hours before the issue with the codes was identified and the codes were deactivated.
A SeatGeek spokesperson declined to comment on specifics about the code leaks, but told Billboard in a statement, “Last week, some fans made purchases on our site using an ineligible promo code that was wrongfully distributed without authorization. Tickets acquired via these purchases are not valid and we are working to resolve each situation accordingly.”
Officials with Major League Baseball did not respond to Billboard’s inquiries about the SeatGeek ticket codes and how they leaked online.
In the days following, SeatGeek staff began contacting ticket sellers on the site, laying out plans to cancel any transactions that used the leaked discount codes, refund any money that was spent in transactions using the codes and claw back any tickets possible before they reached fans.
“At this stage, we have been able to contain the impact to SeatGeek, but that came at the cost of an operational burden that you have all helped us to shoulder,” company co-founder Russ D’Souza wrote in an email to ticket broker Randall Smith, CEO of America’s Top Tix, and obtained by Billboard.
SeatGeek operates as both a primary ticketing site for a number of sports teams, as well as a massive secondary ticketing site where tens of thousands of brokers list tickets for resale for concerts, sporting events and festivals. The company implemented a triage system to respond to the code leak, where sales made for teams that use the SeatGeek ticketing system could easily be canceled and reversed. Sales for tickets that haven’t been delivered yet will also be canceled.
Tickets originally issued by rival companies like Ticketmaster, however, were more difficult to claw back. While Ticketmaster technology does allow resellers to digitally transfer tickets from seller to buyer – a process SeatGeek can automate to occur immediately after a sale on its site is made – it can’t transfer the ticket back to the seller if an error is discovered. Because of this, SeatGeek is now covering any losses incurred by brokers who now must reselling tickets issued by Ticketmaster and other services.
As a result, dozens and maybe hundreds of fans who received Ticketmaster-issued tickets using the SeatGeek discount code are now in possession of tickets that can’t be canceled. Since the code was discovered and taken down, many of these fans have taken to Twitter asking other fans if they think the tickets are still valid.
Brokers on the site are also angry, saying SeatGeek took too long to respond to the crisis and should have to pay the same 100% fine it charges its own sellers when customer service mistakes are made.
“If a broker makes an error and cancels an order, they are penalized. If the exchange that dings you makes an error, they unilaterally effectuate a mutual cancelation without consent of the broker,” one reseller wrote on a forum for brokers. “It is a totally one-sided relationship, and I really hope customers, brokers, or both bring a well-deserved class action against SG.”
SeatGeek is the second largest ticket resale site in the United States and last year raised $238 million in Series E funding. A recently abandoned effort to take the company public valued it at $1.35 billion.
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