What was the highest-grossing rock and roll tour of all time?
Curiously enough, mammoth touring records are relatively recent phenomena in popular music.
Back when concert shows existed to promote an album rather than today’s inverse, most bands banked on the blockbuster record to ensure those chunky royalty cheques. Now, with so much revenue resting on the live circuit, touring priorities have seen all manner of marketing and internal resources thrown at the live spectacle and routinely breaking records to this day.
All the top 20 grossing tours take place firmly in the 21st century during the streaming age, when the broader economy began to cater to experience, and many fans willing to spend over a hundred pounds or dollars for their favourite acts. The number one of all time still stands as country pop sensation Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour across 2023-’24, raking in a gobsmacking over $2bn in gross sales, trouncing runner-ups Coldplay, Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road, and two lots of Ed Sheeran’s soft-folk-rap stadium behemoth.
Seismic sales began to run apace in the 1980s. The decade that saw The King of Pop in his element, gross milestones were reached twice with Michael Jackson’s massive world tours around setting all-time album sales records with Thriller.
While his former Jackson sibling troupe had taken a commercial dip, their star brother’s solo material had kept the former five afloat for The Victory Tour, ostensibly to promote their joint Victory album in 1984, but sales flew to over $75m due to Michael playing his Thriller hits during the set. Michael would break his own record five years later with his Bad World Tour, making an extra $50mn.
Rock and metal have a healthy place in the top 20: Metallica, AC/DC, The Rolling Stones, Guns N’ Roses, and even German pryrofetishists Rammstein standing tall in the gross league tables, but who tops in the rock canon may depend on your definition of ‘rock and roll’.
So, what was the highest-grossing rock and roll tour?
Even among their fans, there’s little debate as to whether U2 can be tagged with the rock and roll label. Rock for sure, but something about their widescreen anthemic appeal lacks sufficient roll, albeit getting close with their 1990s subversive theatre era. In at number five of the highest-grossing tours ever is the Irish heavyweight’s 360° Tour across 2009 to 2011 supporting No Line on the Horizon. Fitted with its novel four-legged ‘claw’ set-up enabling the band to play in the centre of every stadium they visited, U2 won a tidy $736,421,586 for their efforts.
With rock and roll in no dispute, however, is New Jersey’s The Boss. Coming in at sixth, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s 2023–2025 Tour, later renamed the Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, saw the ‘Born to Run’ singer generate ungodly levels of cash register kerchings, despite illness, Ticketmaster controversies, and public lambasting of President Donald Trump, shoving $729,700,000 into the E Street team’s wallet.
With pop becoming ever more lucrative live, rock’s place in the gross record books may begin to slide as its musical cache begins to ebb amid pop’s ever-evolving climate.
