How many people have seen The Rolling Stones live in total?
The artist’s response to touring is always a bit of a mixed bag. Thankfully for The Rolling Stones, however, they have been able to get through by not taking themselves too seriously. Ever. As Keith Richards once reflected: “The songs grow as you play them; the older they are, the more magic there is in them. It’s never dull. We’re born to have fun, you see! We can’t help it.”
As a band that’s been around for as long as the Stones have, you might think they would have become disillusioned with the entire idea. After all, many musicians who are just starting out often feel the exhaustion and pressure of life on the road, but they didn’t emerge during a time when touring was seen as the entire lifeblood of a band’s success and legacy.
Back when the Stones were first starting out, touring was one of the only ways for them to connect with their audience and establish themselves as major players alongside some of the biggest names in the business. Were it not for their live shows, the Stones couldn’t have nurtured their explosive aura, nor could they have solidified the chaos that was so vehemently placed at their unrelenting core.
And now, even after countless performances worldwide and an infinite number of stories to tell, the Stones’ live shows continue to prove their position as forerunners of the timeless spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. Following the release of Hackney Diamonds, for instance, Richards rushed to show they have no plans of slowing down, no matter how much time passes: “Everybody’s in good fettle,” he quipped. “We’re having great fun doing this, and this is what we do.”
So, how many people have watched The Rolling Stones live?
Funnily enough, however, it seems even the gritty reality of time couldn’t stop the Stones from living on. Following Richards’ comments, Mick Jagger entertained the idea of one day putting on a holographic show, but even that seems far off at this particular juncture. As he mused, “When I’m like, ‘I can’t quite do that any more,’ the guitar will show me there’s another way of doing this.”
He added: “Some finger will go one space different and there’s a whole new door just opened here. And so you’re always learning. You never finish school, man.”
Still, even if the band were to hang up the hat tomorrow, their time on the road would have spanned longer than most musicians could ever dream of. Across their six-decade tenure, the band has performed in front of millions, with many of their record-breaking stadium shows appearing early on as they took on the 1960s like an unstoppable force of pure, unfiltered rock.
In fact, the estimate across all of their tours stands at over 45million, with numbers accrued from over 2,000 tours, making their numbers higher than most groups in all of music history. Their biggest show ever occurred in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as part of their monumental A Bigger Bang Tour, which incidentally also became the highest-grossing tour of all time until U2’s surpassed figure a couple of years later in 2009.
The cherry on top is that, in hindsight, this achievement seems almost effortless. While a lot of effort went into making the tour what it was, as with all their outings, it thrived even after unexpected setbacks—like Richards’ infamous fall from a coconut tree, which led to the cancellation of six $1million shows. Still, the fun and energy of the tour paid off in the end, just as he had always intended. After all, isn’t that what really matters?
