Touring
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Harry Styles is No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Tours chart for June. It’s the first time that Styles has claimed a monthly victory, and it comes just in the nick of time, as Love On Tour came to a close on Sunday (July 22) after launching as one of the first major post-pandemic tours in September 2021.
According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, its last full month of shows earned $105.4 million and sold 967,000 tickets.
That makes Styles only the second act to earn a nine-figure monthly gross, after Bad Bunny raked in $123.7 million in September 2022 on World’s Hottest Tour. Further, the pop star nabs the highest monthly attendance total since the charts launched in February 2019, soaring above Ed Sheeran’s 750,000 in June 2022 and Coldplay’s 736,000 in March of this year.
These shows are part of a late-in-the-game advance to stadiums in Europe, after primarily playing arenas for most of the two-year tour. Typically, stadium acts play fewer shows due to complex production logistics and high nightly attendance.
Styles packed 15 stadium concerts into June, pushing him to the top in a competitive month. Other acts in the top 30 with high show counts — The Cure (20), Matchbox Twenty (16), Shania Twain (16) and Dead & Company (15) — mixed arenas and amphitheaters, while Styles’ stadium peers such as Beyoncé and Coldplay, at Nos. 2-3, played 12 and 11 shows, respectively.
The combination of a packed schedule and larger-than-ever crowd counts fueled Styles’ record-breaking month. His four concerts at London’s Wembley Stadium grossed $36.4 million and sold 335,000 tickets on June 13-14 and 16-17. Those figures secure him the No. 1 spot on Top Boxscores as well, once again fending off Coldplay and Beyoncé at Nos. 2-3.
Multi-night engagements in Amsterdam and Paris earned $16.5 million and $14.2 million, respectively, with two dates at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, grossing $12.2 million. Those reports follow on Top Boxscores at Nos. 8, 12 and 15, respectively.
Though it’s Styles’ first month at No. 1, he’s been a consistent player on Top Tours over the last two years. June is his 12th month in the top five, including three appearances at No. 2 and another five at No. 3. Previously, he had peaked in attendance with 419,000 tickets this month last year, and in gross with $54.4 million in September 2022.
These June concerts push Love On Tour’s total gross to $566.2 million, plus a few July shows nudging it to $590.3 million. With four shows left to report, Styles has the fourth highest grossing tour in Boxscore history, likely to become the fourth $600 million tour.
Styles was No. 3 on May’s Top Tours tally. His rise to the top pushes that month’s top two acts — Beyoncé and Coldplay — down a peg to Nos. 2 and 3, despite both artists’ significant gains in June. Beyoncé earned $86.9 million (up 29% from last month) while Coldplay grossed $71.5 million (up 30%).
Styles, Beyoncé and Coldplay register three of the seven biggest monthly grosses in the chart’s history, all above $70 million. Another three of those $70 million grosses – Bad Bunny, Def Leppard & Motley Crue and The Weeknd – occurred in August 2022, with Bad Bunny’s September ’22 gross at the top of the heap.
The June Top Tours ranking is record-breaking beyond Styles’ attendance and the top three’s gargantuan grosses. There are 27 tours with a gross of $10 million or more, surpassing the previous record of 24 from just last month. There are almost more $20 million tours than ever before, with 14. Further, June either sets a new record or ties an old one for tours above thresholds of $30-, $40-, $50-, $60-, $70- and $80 million.
Some of those $10 million earners represent genres outside of Boxscore’s typical pop, rock and Latin headliners. Hans Zimmer is No. 32 with $12.3 million and 116,000 tickets sold, acting as one of three non-vocalists on the chart. He tours with a large symphony orchestra, re-creating some of his most iconic scores, from The Lion King to Inception to The Dark Knight.
At No. 26, Illenium is the only dance/electronic artist on the list, bringing in $10.1 million and 132,000 tickets sold from 15 shows. His June routing began in San Francisco on June 1and traveled through the West Coast, Midwest and down to Texas for a show at Austin’s Moody Center on June 30.
And rounding out the tally at No. 30, violinist and composer Andre Rieu grossed $8.7 million and sold 90,000 tickets. Quietly one of the most consistent headliners, this marks Rieu’s 21st month on the chart, having reached as high as No. 5 in January 2020.
Harry Styles wrapped up a mammoth tour over the weekend, closing out nearly two years of shows with a finale in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
And following his emotional goodbye on stage, the pop star shared a lengthy thank-you message on Instagram to the millions of fans who attended. “It’s been the greatest experience of my entire life,” he wrote in a Monday (July 24) note on his Story. “Thank you to my band, and all the crew who made the last few years so special. It’s been an absolute pleasure.”
“To everyone who came out to see us play, thank you,” Styles continued. “I feel so incredibly full and happy, it’s all because of you. You have given memories that will last a lifetime, more than I could have ever dreamed of.”
Deemed one of the 10 best-selling tours of all time, Love On Tour kicked off — after some delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic — in September 2021. More than 4.5 million fans came out to see the show, and the trek brought in nearly $600 million as of a week ago.
The global tour started out as support for Styles’ sophomore record Fine Line, which came out in 2019. When Harry’s House arrived in May of 2022, his shows refocused to serve both albums.
“Thank you for your time, your energy, and your love,” the “As It Was” singer added. “It’s been an honor to play for you, I hope you had as much fun as I did.”
Styles concluded, “Look after each other, I’ll see you again when the time is right. Treat People With Kindness. I love you more than you’ll ever know.” Signed, “-H.”
But that’s not all the Don’t Worry Darling star left his fans with. Styles also shared a video on YouTube and Instagram full of clips from various Love On Tour stops, including shots of the singer traveling to the stage in his infamous box, as well as footage of fans interacting with each other and telling stories of friendships made in the audience.
“To the most inspiring people I know,” Styles captioned the video on Instagram. “Goodbye for now. Love On Tour forever.”
Watch the video above.
Executives from the Sphere Entertainment Co. — the entity behind the forthcoming new event space opening soon in Las Vegas — have unveiled its new Sphere Immersive Sound system, created in tandem with Berlin-based audio company Holoplot. The system will appear this fall as a key production component of the company’s new Sphere venue in Las Vegas, which opens Sept. 29 with its 25-date U2 residency.
Executives involved with the project, including Jim Dolan (executive chairman/CEO, Madison Square Garden Corp. and Sphere Entertainment Co.), David Dibble (CEO, MSG Ventures) and Roman Sick (CEO, Holoplot), demonstrated the audio system on site in Las Vegas for a small group of reporters on Thursday (July 20).
“I don’t care if you’ve seen U2 100 times,” Dolan remarked before an associate pressed play on recordings including the Irish band’s recent reimagining of its 1984 classic “Pride (In The Name Of Love).” “You’ve never seen and experienced this.”
For the Sphere team, Sphere Immersive Sound is the cornerstone — along with its 160,000-square-foot LED display plane, which remained off during Thursday’s demonstration — of its new 20,000-capacity venue, located near the Las Vegas Strip next to The Venetian. And, somewhat surprisingly, Sphere partnered with Holoplot for the project, rather than a more established player in the pro audio space.
According to Dibble, Sphere executives learned of the German company, founded in 2011, through its work outside of live entertainment: In December 2016, the startup deployed its patented 3D Audio-Beamforming technology in Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, Germany’s largest train station, to send multiple messages at the same frequency simultaneously to different parts of the facility.
Applied in a concert venue, this technology can ensure that listeners, regardless of location, hear identical mixes at identical volumes. Holoplot’s technology also harnesses algorithmic machine learning and environmental data collected in real-time by sensors throughout Sphere to further refine and standardize the sound ultimately heard by attendees.
HOLOPLOT
Sphere developed Sphere Immersive Sound to perfect audio for the venue’s specific acoustic space. “You’ll notice very few right angles here,” said Dibble, noting that for Sphere’s intimate, amphitheater-style seating, the company read from “the playbook from the ancient Greeks.” The seating format is key to Sphere’s appeal, but also created a monumental challenge. “How can we tackle acoustics in arguably the biggest nightmare seating format in live entertainment?” Dibble recalled the team wondering at the outset of the project.
That starts with approximately 1,600 permanently installed audio modules and 167,000 individually amplified speaker drivers, comprising hundreds of Holoplot’s X1 Matrix arrays, spread behind Sphere’s sprawling LED screen. As its name suggests, the X1 Matrix arrays combine the functionalities of vertical and horizontal line arrays, allowing users more control over where sound goes in a venue.
Like much of the Sphere project, audio design wasn’t conceived in a vacuum; an inevitable challenge of placing so much high-end audio equipment behind a state-of-the-art screen was ensuring the sounds produced wouldn’t distort visuals as they passed through the LED to listeners. The team wanted to “make the LED screen acoustically invisible,” Sick explained, hence the high number of small drivers spread across the screen’s large area, each producing a relatively small amount of audio to avoid disrupting Sphere’s video components.
That type of engineering trickery extends to the venue itself, including the seemingly-unremarkable black material covering every seat, which Dibble said has “the same audio-reflective value as human skin.” Acoustically, Sphere’s seats behave similarly regardless of whether they’re occupied by a body, which is further guaranteed by their perforated undersides.
For artists like U2, Sphere’s audio capabilities are nothing short of revelatory.
“The beauty of Sphere is not only the groundbreaking technology that will make it so unique, with the world’s most advanced audio system integrated into a structure which is designed with sound quality as a priority; it’s also the possibilities around immersive experiences in real and imaginary landscapes,” The Edge said in a statement. “In short, it’s a canvas of an unparalleled scale and image resolution, and a once-in-a-generation opportunity.”
And according to Dibble, Sphere’s tools are also “intuitive, straightforward and, dare I say, easy.” The executive touted the notion of a “show on a stick,” where artists playing Sphere could effectively give the facility’s staff a thumb drive with specifics for their concerts and be up and running within minutes; sound engineers will even be able to bring in their own boards to interface with the system. It’s “not a heavy lift,” Dibble added.
But Sphere Immersive Audio’s richly detailed output also isn’t for the faint of heart. “Some artists will find it daunting,” Dolan said. “If you sing the wrong note, everyone’s gonna hear it.”
HOLOPLOT
While Sphere Immersive Audio has been customized and scaled for the Las Vegas venue, some artists have already used a version of the technology while performing at another venue in MSG’s portfolio, New York’s 2,600-capacity Beacon Theatre, which introduced it in August 2022 during a pair of solo concerts by Phish frontman Trey Anastasio.
Dibble expects MSG to implement the technology across its portfolio of venues, including its namesake arena — though, he concluded, “Let’s get this open first.”
Over just seven or eight months, touring has evolved from an emotional nightmare for small and mid-range touring acts to what many managers and agents say is a booming, healthy business. But the influx of artists hitting the road midway through 2023 continues to cause supply-and-demand challenges — specifically around vehicles and crew.
“Everybody seems to be out on the road and all the shows seem to be doing really, really well,” says Joady Harper, CEO and founder of Rocky Road Touring, the agency for Sisters of Mercy, Killing Joke, Peter Murphy and others. “It’s almost like all the problems are because of how successful everything is. I feel like the clock struck 12 on Dec. 31, and I haven’t put the phone or the computer down ever since. It’s just been go, go, go.”
Late last year, club and theater acts were despondent as they returned to touring after the COVID-19 pandemic. Supply-chain issues meant they had to scramble for backline equipment, personnel shortages made it impossible to track down truck and bus drivers and inflation meant touring artists came home with less money. And while things have improved dramatically — especially in terms of obtaining equipment, which has become much easier this year — some of those problems linger.
For touring acts, the biggest issue remains difficulty in procuring buses, especially on short notice. During the pandemic, many drivers left the business, and bus companies’ fleets were designed for a much lower level of demand. Now, with more acts on the road, personnel and vehicle shortages have led to higher prices. Andy Vickery, tour manager for rockers Boys Like Girls, reserved vehicles and crew for a September club-and-theater tour six months ahead of time, compared to what might have taken a few days ahead of the group’s previous tour in 2016.
Vickery says prices also remain “astronomical” for vehicles and crew. Dave Chavarri, drummer for New Jersey metal band Ill Niño, says bus prices have increased by 40—50% since 2019 — from around $690 a week pre-pandemic to at least $1,200 per week now, not counting a $500-per-day driver and hundreds of dollars in daily fuel costs. And a semi-truck that cost $30,000 per month to haul production equipment pre-pandemic is often “almost double” today, says Vickery. That’s not to mention additional costs for things like maintenance and internet service.
Liam Pesce, manager of shock-metal band GWAR, says some bands lease older buses and save as much as $1,000 per day — but those vehicles tend to break down more frequently, and “you get what you pay for,” he says. “With GWAR, we take what we can get, because there’s a shortage lately.” Inflation has decreased significantly over the past year, but gas prices remain high in much of the United States, particularly on the West Coast and in the Northeast, in addition to the higher costs of drivers and in-demand crew members — forcing small-to-mid-level acts to cut costs. Some have no choice but to set a grueling schedule on the road, often performing five or six nights straight. This can lead to fatigue for artists and crew — particularly singers, who often aren’t able to take needed breaks between shows to recuperate.
“They can’t afford to take days off. You’re still paying your staff weekly,” says Chavarri of Ill Niño, which begins a tour in October with Cradle of Filth and DevilDriver. “But a singer can only do so much with vocal chords. You have to rest.”
Brian Schwartz, who manages Dinosaur Jr. and other touring acts, adds that many bands are reluctant to raise prices due to fans’ own financial hardships as a result of inflation, but the artists still have to pay the increasing prices for hotels, buses and crews. (Managers of international acts say it’s also costly and time-consuming to come up with U.S. visas for touring — and those costs could go up even further this year.) “It’s still very much a reality we’re all having to deal with. It just becomes harder to tour,” Schwartz says.
While megastar stadium and arena acts are able to absorb the higher costs, artists at the club and theater level have had to rethink their businesses — and even create new ones. In response to higher bus prices, Chavarri used his music-business connections to start a bus-rental company, TBA Bus Co., with a fleet of 10 vehicles, along with his wife and a friend, charging lower-than-average prices to customers like Mos Def, Coal Chamber and his own band and tourmates.
Artists are finding a variety of other ways to make the tougher conditions work. Miles Sherman, who co-manages rock band Bad Omens with former Good Charlotte guitarist Benji Madden, says the band’s staff has simply worked harder to manufacture merch, find deals, ramp up production and adapt to adversity. When New Jersey’s Bamboozle festival, where Bad Omens was slated to perform, abruptly canceled in April, the band pivoted to setting up a last-minute local pop-up store and meet-and-greet.
“It’s been difficult but also rewarding,” Sherman says. “All the tours have been selling extremely well and we continue to level up.”
Harper adds that agents and managers have become skilled at planning for tours farther in advance than ever before — unlike late 2021 and early 2022 when vaccines started to kick in and many artists rushed back to the road on short notice. She’s hopeful that “kids who came of age during COVID” are finally able to see the bands they discovered online, creating what she calls “a brand-new, gig-going audience.”
Schwartz, who also manages Dawes and Hiss Golden Messenger, is more cautiously optimistic about the economic future of touring at this level. “We’re in this hybrid space,” he says, “where it’s not as bad as it was six months ago, it’s not as good as it can be, but we’re getting there.”
Since forming in 2015, Dead & Company has been one of the most consistent touring entities, mounting 10 separate tours in less than eight years. The last of those, its 2023 summer outing, wrapped on Sunday (July 16) and set an entirely new standard for the band, just as it is hanging up the mantle. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the Dead & Company Summer Tour 2023 grossed a new high of $114.7 million and sold 845,000 tickets across 28 shows.
The supergroup’s previous best was $53.7 million, earned during its Fall Tour 2021.
Dead & Company established a relatively unfussy format to its tours, much like its approach to setlists and song structure. The band sticks to the U.S. and Canada and plays in brief sprints of anywhere from 10 to 30 shows at a time. Even the name of each tour is plainly stated – Dead & Company 2015 Tour, Dead & Company Summer Tour 2017, Dead & Company Summer Tour 2018 and so on.
Dead & Company is comprised of former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, plus John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti.
Carrying on the legacy of the Grateful Dead, revenue and attendance have been steady as well. Average grosses have mostly stuck between $1 million to $2 million per show, and nightly attendance between 10,000 and 20,000. Routings have seamlessly woven arenas and amphitheaters, with a sprinkling of stadiums in select markets.
That all changed with Dead & Co.’s most recent dates. The announcement of the band’s final tour gave some extra momentum, as farewells are known to do. More than half of this year’s shows were played in stadiums, leveling up in Philadelphia, San Francisco and more.
Dead & Company’s final three shows at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (July 14-16) grossed $24.4 million, becoming the highest grossing engagement of the band’s tenure. A three-show stint at Boulder’s Folsom Field (July 1-3) sold 131,000 tickets, marking its best-selling report ever. Eight-figure grosses continue with double-header stadium stops in Chicago ($11.7 million), Boston ($11.6 million) and New York ($11.1 million).
Across all 28 shows, Dead & Company averaged $4.1 million and 30,200 tickets. Those figures are up by 69% and 46%, respectively, from last summer’s tour, easily setting new peaks for the band. Billboard has reported on many post-pandemic tours that have set new personal highs for a variety of artists. But even amidst the excitement of a farewell, there’s an extra level of skill in doing so after touring every single year (with the obvious exception of 2020) since 2015.
This may feel familiar for Grateful Dead members Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann. The band was one of the biggest touring acts of all time, also a group of habit in terms of routing and revenues. While its touring career launched in 1965 — decades before the advent of Billboard Boxscore — its early ‘90s tours delivered remarkably consistent results, routinely selling between 20,000-25,000 tickets per show. For every year between 1991 and 1995, the Grateful Dead was among the top 10 on Boxscore’s year-end Top Tours ranking, coming in at No. 1 on the inaugural ‘91 list and again in ‘93.
But upon its return in June 2015 (four months before Dead & Company’s first tour), Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead sold more than 360,000 tickets in just five shows, experiencing the full glory of a comeback and a goodbye, all at once.
Now, the Grateful Dead’s latest era ends, as its John Mayer-fronted lineup played its final shows to similarly spectacular results. After 10 tours, plus three editions of the destination event Playing in the Sand, Dead & Company has earned $455.9 million and sold 4.1 million tickets from 212 concerts.
Independent venue executive Andre Perry will serve as the new board president of the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). Announced at the second annual NIVA conference held in Washington, D.C., from July 9-12, Perry was elected after serving as vp of the board since 2021.
“Our NIVA family, our members, represent so many threads of the independent performance world, and it is an honor to be named NIVA’s next Board President,” said Perry in a statement. “We are small club owners, we produce festivals, we run performing arts centers, we are promoters, we are comedy people, we are music heads, we are multidisciplinary performing arts workers, we run for-profits — big, medium, and small 00 and we run nonprofits at a range of sizes, we are government affiliated or part of universities and colleges, or we are part of nothing — committed, brilliant loners who just do what we do for the good of the cause.”
Perry, who also works as the executive director of the Hancher Auditorium and the Office of Performing Arts and Engagement at the University of Iowa, will take over the president role from NIVA co-founder and founding president of the board Dayna Frank, who held the position for the maximum term of three years. Frank will continue her advocacy leadership as chair of NIVA’s advocacy and policy committee and continue to serve on the board of directors.
Frank led the association through the passage of the Save Our Stages Act, which resulted in $16.25 billion dollars in emergency relief for the live entertainment sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, as a driving force behind the Fix The Tix campaign, Frank will continue her critical efforts to protect consumers, artists, venues and festivals against harmful and deceptive ticketing practices.
“NIVA has made history in our three years of existence, and there are many challenges ahead for our industry. However, I know that our Association, chapter leaders, and members are capable of tackling these challenges because we have done it before,” said Frank in a statement. “One of those challenges is predatory ticket resellers. Together, independent venues, festivals and promoters will work with Congress to pass Fix the Tix and continue laying the groundwork to create the industry our fans deserve.”
NIVA’s membership also elected two new independent live entertainment industry leaders to its board of directors: Shahida Mausi and Jamie Loeb.
Mausi is president and CEO of the Right Productions, vp and chief strategic officer of the Black Promoters Collective (BPC) and operator of The Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre in Detroit.
Loeb is the senior vp of marketing at Nederlander Concerts. With more than 30 years of local, regional and national experience, she was instrumental in creating the vision for NIVA’s first two conferences and in planning NIVA’s Save Our Stages Fest in 2020.
“As NIVA embarks on this new chapter, the Association remains resolute in its mission to support, promote, and advocate for independent venues across the country,” said NIVA executive director Stephen Parker in a statement. “The appointment of Andre Perry as Board President, Dayna Frank’s continued leadership on federal advocacy, NIVA’s new slate of Board officers and the addition of Shahida Mausi and Jamie Loeb to the Board, signals a renewed commitment to advancing the interests of independent venues and festivals and ensuring their continued viability in an ever-evolving live entertainment ecosystem.”
Full 2023-2024 slate of NIVA Board Officers:
President: Andre Perry, executive director of the Hancher Auditorium and the Office of Performing Arts and Engagement, University of Iowa
Vp: Audrey Fix Schaefer, head of Communications at I.M.P.
Vp: Jim Brunberg, founder of Revolution Hall, Mississippi Studios; Composer/Performer
Treasurer: Brad Grossman, COO of Helium Comedy
Secretary: Jesica Gerbautz, CEO of Pnk Moon Productions
Continuing their service as board members:
Dayna Frank, co-founder of NIVA, founding president of the NIVA Board and CEO at First Avenue & 7th St Entry
Grace Blake, programming director at City Winery NYC
Kira Karbocus, president/COO at Newport Festivals Foundation
Hal Real, founder/CEO at World Cafe Live
Blink-182 is back together and bigger than ever. The band’s iconic lineup of Travis Barker, Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus reunited for their first shows in nine years, yielding the biggest results of their three-decade career. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the North American leg of the group’s World Tour 2023/2024 grossed $85.3 million and sold 564,000 tickets.
This isn’t Blink’s first reunion tour. The trio went on hiatus in 2005, returning in 2009 with the similarly simply titled blink-182 in Concert tour. At the time, that tour became the band’s biggest on every measurable metric. It was the highest-grossing ($22.5 million) and best-selling (660,000 tickets) tour of its career and set new highs on a per-show level, with $522,000 and 15,345 tickets on average.
Fourteen years later, Blink is pacing $2.4 million each night, multiplying its one-time-peak comeback numbers by four and a half.
These North American shows also set a new high for Blink in terms of attendance, but just barely. The tour averaged 15,664 per show, up 2% from the 2009-10 mark. The band found space to maximize its earnings by playing with pricing. Between 2009 and now, Blink’s ticket prices have exploded, from $34.03 to $151.33.
That quadrupled-and-then-some price is due to several factors. For one, touring simply costs more in 2023 than it did in 2009. The price of concert tickets has also exploded due to resale, dynamic pricing and increasingly creative platinum and VIP models.
Aside from environmental causes, Blink is in a unique position. The band’s 2009 comeback was highly anticipated, but it was still catering to a relatively young audience who had limits to their disposable income. And while that four-year break created heightened demand, 2009 was past the peak of the mid-’00s emo/pop-punk boom that Blink helped inspire. As bands like Fall Out Boy, Paramore and My Chemical Romance geared up for their own extended hiatuses, the new era of Blink’s career flirted with passé, even as the initial comeback was an unqualified success.
Blink’s touring in the 2010s was frequent but littered with asterisks. The 10th Annual Honda Civic Tour paired the band with pop-punk successors My Chemical Romance. Blink’s 20th Anniversary Tour stretched from 2012 to 2014 but stuck to small clubs and theaters in North America. Shows continued in 2016 and 2017, but without DeLonge, the band’s defining guitarist. In 2019, there was another co-headline tour, this time with Lil Wayne. Ticket prices pushed closer to $60 on that run, but attendance dipped below the 15,000-plus high, closer to 10,000 tickets per show on average.
That makes Blink’s recent North American leg the first proper-proper tour for the main lineup since that original 2009 reunion. Not only is its target demo older (and hopefully wiser and richer), but the band is returning in a more welcoming environment. The group’s 2022 single, “Edging,” was its biggest hit on the Billboard Hot 100 since 2004’s “I Miss You.” Further, on the Alternative Airplay chart, the track spent 13 weeks at No. 1, becoming Blink’s longest-running chart-topper ever on the tally, surpassing the eight-week reign of 1999’s “All The Small Things.”
On the live front, My Chemical Romance and Paramore have staged the biggest tours of their own careers by far — 10-plus years removed from their self-imposed breaks around Blink’s first return shows. With its biggest radio success ever on the Alternative Airplay chart, the strength of the current pop-punk nostalgia boom and the added infrastructure of the industry’s bulked-up pricing, Blink was perfectly situated to double, triple and quadruple its previous bests on the road.
After 36 shows in the United States and Canada, Blink-182’s World Tour is halfway done. The band will play 24 dates in Europe this fall before heading to Australia for 17 dates, plus a sea of shows in Latin America (a mix of festival engagements and five headline shows). Those concerts mark the band’s first hard-ticket headlines in Oceania since 2004, and its first major Latin American run ever. While there is no direct precedent for Blink’s international success, its North American total suggests a big nine months ahead. With another 36 shows before wrapping in April, earnings will quickly hit nine figures, ultimately heading toward $150 million.
MELBOURNE, Australia — Mushroom Group’s talent booking division welcomes MBA, a new agency operating across Australia and New Zealand for live bookings, strategy, touring and partnerships.
MBA is a partnership with Guven Yilmaz, founder and managing director of Vita Music Group.
With offices in Sydney and Melbourne, the new agency represents a slew of artists from the Vita roster, and boasts a lineup at launch that includes Peking Duk, Bliss n Eso, Conrad Sewell, Skin on Skin, Winston Surfshirt, BIG WETT, Kaylee Bell, Milan Ring and Tasman Keith.
“Mushroom has been esteemed as the independent leader in the Australian music and entertainment industry. Partnering with a company that not only emphasises but promotes an independent entrepreneurial culture was essential to me,” comments Guven in a statement.
Mushroom Group CEO Matt Gudinski is said to be keen to grow his independent music company’s booking capacity. MBA, he says, boasts some of the best in the business.
“We’re delighted to have Guven join the Mushroom family,” Gudinski comments. “He’s a very well respected agent and operator, with an incredible track record to boot.”
Supported by a “first-class team” including Shelley Liu, Sam Rogers, and Matt Thomson, Gudinski continues, “I am excited about the offering we are going to create for the talent we represent.”
For those artists repped by MBA, Mushroom’s doors will remain open for talent to work with the group’s production specialists to help build and design their live-show, in addition to accessing the Mushroom Creative House and the brand’s sprawling network.
Mushroom Group this year celebrates its 50th anniversary with a “once-in-a-lifetime” all-star concert and the release of a documentary, Ego, a study of the indie powerhouse’s former chairman Michael Gudinski, who at 21 years of age, founded the company.
Today, the Melbourne-based group numbers more than two-dozen affiliates active in every conceivable area of the music and entertainment industries, from touring to publishing, merch and marketing services, venues, exhibition and events production, neighboring rights, branding, labels, talent management and more.
The late Gudinski formed Mushroom Records in 1972 but had had learned the ropes by booking artists in the region years earlier. In 1970, he established the Consolidated Rock agency, which evolved into the Premier Artists/Harbour Agency.
Mushroom Group cut ties with Harbour Agency in 2021, following an investigation into claims from former Harbour Agency staff on past management behavior and workplace culture.
MBA sits alongside Premier Artists, which reps Jimmy Barnes, Vika & Linda, Marcia Hines and others.
The U.K. live music industry enjoyed a post-pandemic boom in 2022, resulting in a windfall for the country’s economy, according to new figures published Tuesday (July 18).
According to a new report from umbrella trade organization UK Music, more than 37 million people attended live concerts and festivals in the country last year, contributing £6.6 billion ($8.6 billion) to the local economy. It was the first full calendar year that the U.K. live music industry was open for business after months of intermittent COVID-19 restrictions led to the cancellation of thousands of concerts.
The report, called “Here, There and Everywhere,” also found that the resurgence of live music events such as the Glastonbury Festival — which returned in 2022 after two years away — and sell-out tours by big-name artists like Harry Styles, Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran and Stormzy helped attract more than 14 million international and domestic tourists to British gigs last year, reports UK Music.
Included among the 14.4 million “music tourists” — which UK Music defines as someone who has traveled at least three times the average commuting distance for their region — were 1.1 million overseas visitors.
Overall, the report found that more than 30 million people went to concerts in the United Kingdom last year — spanning everything from arena shows to tiny grassroots gigs — while 6.5 million music fans attended festivals.
“Here, There and Everywhere” is UK Music’s first report measuring the economic benefits of music tourism since its 2020 “Music by Numbers” study, meaning that accurate comparable numbers for preceding years are not available. According to 2020’s “Music By Numbers” report, which covered the prior 12 months, 33.7 million people attended U.K. live music events in 2019, including around 850,000 overseas visitors, contributing £4.7 billion ($6.1 billion) to the economy.
In 2022, 56,000 jobs were sustained by live gigs, said the London-based organization. The £6.6 billion ($8.6 billion) in music tourism spending for the year encompasses money spent on ticket sales, food and beverage sales, merchandise, venue parking, camping fees, accommodation, travel and additional spending outside of venues.
On a regional basis, London was the United Kingdom’s most popular destination for attending gigs, drawing 4.9 million music tourists who contributed £2 billion ($2.6 billion) in spending. The North West of England, a region which includes the cities of Manchester and Liverpool, was the second most popular destination for traveling music fans, with 1.9 million people visiting for live shows and spending £696 million ($907 million).
UK Music chief executive Jamie Njoku-Goodwin said in a statement that last year’s figures were a “testament to just how important a thriving musical ecosystem is for our towns and cities,” but warned that the sector still faces huge challenges as it continues its post-COVID-19 recovery.
“With a venue closing every week, one in six festivals not returning since the pandemic, and many studios facing huge economic pressures, it’s vital that we protect the musical infrastructure that does so much for our towns and cities,” added Njoku-Goodwin, citing research from the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) and Music Venue Trust (MVT).
Ricky Martin jumped for joy when he saw his twin sons, Matteo and Valentino, join him on stage during his show in Switzerland on Monday (July 17).
In a video the Puerto Rican superstar posted on social media, his 14-year-old boys take the stage to hype up the crowd and start jumping along with their father, whose facial expression says it all. “What a beautiful surprise! When my twins jumped on stage with me for the first time in Locarno, Switzerland,” he captioned the short clip with a crying emoji.
The “Tiburones” singer has been touring in Europe with shows in Spain, Switzerland and Monaco, where Martin posted another video with Matteo and Valentino writing, “Bonding time w the twins, before the show tonight.”
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Earlier this month, Martin and Jwan Yosef announced in a joint statement that they are divorcing after six years of marriage. “For some time, we have considered transforming our relationship, and it is after careful consideration that we have decided to end our marriage with love, respect, and dignity for our children — preserving and honoring what we have experienced as a couple all of these wonderful years.” Martin and Yosef share two kids: daughter Lucia, born in 2018, and son Renn, born in 2019. Before meeting Yosef, Martin welcomed twin sons Matteo and Valentino in 2008.
Following his show dates in Europe, Martin will co-headline The North America Trilogy Tour with Enrique Iglesias and Pitbull. The 19-date arena trek is set to kick off Oct. 14 in Washington, D.C., and will make stops in major cities such as New York, Miami, Houston and Las Vegas before wrapping up Dec. 16 in Vancouver, B.C.
Watch Martin’s sweet video of his twins joining him on stage.