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Top 100 tours grossed $5.65bn in 2017

The 100 biggest concert tours of 2017 collectively generated a huge US$5.65bn in revenue – a 15.8% year-on-year increase – in a “record-crushing” year for the international live music business.

That’s according to the 2017 edition of Pollstar’s traditional year-end special features, which track the value of the year’s biggest tours, promoters, arenas, festivals, individual concert grosses and more. The top 100 worldwide tours chart, topped by U2’s Live Nation-promoted Joshua Tree 2017 tour, also shows the tickets sold by the top 100 reached a new record high of 66.79 million – a 10.4% increase on 2016.

Average ticket prices rose by nearly 5% to $84.63, with 11 tours generating more than $100m worldwide – U2, Guns N’ Roses, Coldplay, Bruno Mars, Metallica, Depeche Mode, Paul McCartney, Ed Sheeran, the Rolling Stones, Garth Brooks and Celine Dion – compared to 2016’s seven.

Tickets sold by the top 100 tours reached a new record high of 66.79 million – a 10.4% increase on 2016

This, says Pollstar, demonstrates that “the most successful artists are clearly getting better at recapturing some of the revenue that had leaked into the secondary ticket market”, with Taylor Swift’s tout-beating ‘slow ticketing’ model putting her in pole position for the biggest tour of 2018.

Other headline year-end figures include Live Nation once again taking the number-one promoter spot, reporting a record 52.2m tickets sold, followed by AEG Presents (14.4m tickets), Mexico’s Ocesa (4m), Feld Entertainment (3.2m) and SJM in the UK (2.4m); Goldenvoice’s Coachella generating 2017’s biggest festival gross, at $114.6m over two weekends; and the UK punching above its weight in the top 100 arenas chart, with first-placed The O2, third-placed Manchester Arena and fourth-placed SSE Hydro leading a British invasion of the top five.

The top 20 venues, especially, show the “importance of the growing global concert market”, says Pollstar – confirming the findings of PwC, which noted the business is becoming “increasingly international”, earlier this year – with only seven located in the US; five are in the UK, two in Mexico and one each in Germany, Spain, Canada, France, the Netherlands and Belgium.

 


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