IQ 113 out now: Coldplay, Lucy Dickins and more
IQ 113, the latest issue of the international live music industry’s favourite monthly magazine, is available to read online now.
The August edition sees IQ Magazine editor Gordon Masson go behind the scenes of Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres global tour and explore the band’s record-breaking success.
Elsewhere, he profiles WME’s global head of contemporary music and touring, Lucy Dickins, charting her extraordinary rise through the corporate ranks.
Meanwhile, our metal expert James MacKinnon tracks the genre’s impressive post-pandemic recovery, and Adam Woods learns about the mixed fortunes confronting touring artists and productions in an otherwise buoyant Swedish live music market.
For this edition’s columns and comments, Professor Chris Kemp examines the changing landscape of crowd behaviour in the post-Covid environment, and Music Support‘s Lynne Maltman provides a sobering reminder of the collective promises we made for our mental health.
As always, the majority of the magazine’s content will appear online in some form in the next four weeks.
However, if you can’t wait for your fix of essential live music industry features, opinion and analysis, click here to subscribe to IQ for just £7.99 a month – or check out what you’re missing out on with the limited preview below:
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Coldplay tour tops 4m ticket sales, extends to ’23
Coldplay have announced UK and European stadium dates for 2023 after their Music Of The Spheres world tour surpassed four million ticket sales.
The band, who completed their six-night sold-out run at Wembley Stadium last night (21 August), have now confirmed the tour will extend into next year with new concerts added in Portugal, Spain, the UK, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands.
The global trek, which began in Costa Rica in March, heads to Glasgow’s Hampden Park in Scotland later this week for two shows before switching to Latin America in September.
“It’s such a groundbreaking tour in such a challenging market”
“We had no doubt it was going to be massive, but to be able to pull off what they’ve done is a very unique thing that would be tough to beat,” the band’s agent Josh Javor of X-ray Touring told IQ earlier this summer. “We’ve broken a bunch of records already.
“It’s not very easy to define a specific window of how long this tour will run. There are lots more places they still want to play, so we will continue as long as they want to. It’s such a groundbreaking tour in such a challenging market. A lot of other things in the world are just not selling at the moment, but it’s completely bucked the trend.”
The tour has also been heralded for its groundbreaking sustainability initiatives, including a show powered by 100% renewable energy in almost all locations; the world’s first tourable battery system (made from 40 BMW electric car batteries); power bikes and kinetic dancefloors allowing fans to help power the show; solar panels and wind turbines at every venue; a pledge to cut tour emissions by 50%; incentives to encourage fans to travel by green transport; and one tree planted for every ticket sold.
The group’s previous A Head Full Of Dreams tour was attended by 5.28m people
A report by Bloomberg says Coldplay have been charging an average of US$77.80 per ticket.
The group’s previous A Head Full Of Dreams tour of 2016/17 was attended by 5.38m people across 122 shows for a total gross of $523 million.
The full list of new Music Of The Spheres tour dates is as follows:
Estádio Cidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal (17 May)
Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, Barcelona, Spain (24-25 May)
Etihad Stadium, Manchester, UK (31 May-1 June)
Principality Stadium, Cardiff, UK (6 June)
Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, Naples, Italy (21 June)
Stadio San Siro, Milan, Italy (25-26 June)
Stadion Letzigrund, Zurich, Switzerland (1 July)
Parken, Copenhagen, Denmark (5-6 July)
Ullevi, Gothenburg, Sweden (8-9 July)
Johan Cruijff Arena, Amsterdam, Netherlands (15-16 July)
The next issue of IQ features an in-depth look at the groundbreaking Music Of The Spheres tour. Issue 113 of IQ is out next week.
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.