The highest-grossing tour of all time
These days, making money from touring is a tricky task. In the last few months, Santigold, Weezer and various other artists have cancelled tours and voiced the physical and economic stresses that artists face in the modern climate. Meanwhile, for fans, you have other bands (or perhaps the people behind them) trying to recuperate money from the consumer by charging astronomical fees.
However, this hasn’t always been the case, and hopefully, it won’t be for too much longer. Playing shows was the bread and butter for artists in the past, so we’re looking back at the highest-grossing tour of all time. After all, a healthy live scene is a healthy music scene, it’s where artists grow and earn their spiritual spots.
So, who takes the top spot? Well, when you adjust the net gross of tours for inflation, the South Korean girl group Blackpink top the bill with their Born Pink Wold Tour that ran from 2022-2023. Despite only playing 60 shows, a far-cry from tours of old where the likes of Tina Turner would rack up 220 shows in a single year, because of the extent of the stage show and the ticket price it warrants, the band brought in a staggering $1,039,263,762.
Elton John mightn’t be far behind in second with his farewell tour collecting $939 million, however, that comes with a hefty asterisk. His tour spanned 330 shows from 2018-2023 making it more of a farwell half a decade rather than a succinct single tour.
In third place is U2 360 Tour, which racked up a whopping $736 million over 110 shows from 2009-2011. In today’s money, that gets topped up to $887 million, which is enough of a mind-bending figure to see them nip ahead of Ed Sheeran, whose massive 255-date tour from 2017-2019 would’ve earned him $822 million with inflation. Remarkably, both U2 and Ed Sheeran have both had more than one tour that comes close to being the highest grossing.
Now, before delving further into those figures, let’s mention the elephant in the room. Love them or loathe them, U2 and Ed Sheeran are certainly two very polarising artists (not to club them together). While some will be quoting the classic Peep Show line regarding popularity, “People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis, you can’t trust people, Jez,” others who attended U2’s 360 Tour would be proclaiming that it was a show worthy of the spot that it sits in.
Over seven million people watched the shows, which took place mostly in massive stadiums like Barcelona’s Nou Camp. In fact, they had an average attendance of roughly 66,000 over the course of the global jaunt. Playing such huge stadiums meant that they could offer rather reasonable ticket prices with a sliding scale of price categories to suit all budgets. Most tickets retailed between $30-55 in the US ($41-$68 today), with additional packages at $90 ($123 today) and $250 ($342 today).
The shows featured a huge spider look structure and spared no expense on production. This giant cyborg of LED screens dwarfed the stadiums by design to make things feel more intimate. Naturally, it had its own problems—it took 120 trucks to cart it from venue to venue. The crew numbered 300, and the tour overheads were reportedly in the region of $750,000 per day. That meant that despite being the highest-grossing tour of all time, profits actually weren’t all that high.
This begs the question, are the days of such tours over? Are they even viable in the current economic climate? And are they sustainable in the age of climate change? All of the above are highly doubtable, but perhaps the bigger question comes with supporting small music venues on the breadline that helped to bring the acts loved by millions to the fore in the first place.
