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Pollstar data suggests that last year’s tours by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen alone were responsible for ten percent of all live revenues.
The top 8 festivals worldwide in terms of gross revenue generated $192 million in 2023.
Topping the charts, according to Pollstar, are the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival, one of the biggest independently-owned music festivals in the U.S. which takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park since 2008, and the Hard Summer Music Festival, which takes place in Hollywood Park in Los Angeles and is mostly focused on electronic music.
The third entry is an outlier not only in terms of tickets sold, but also in terms of artists present. Phish: Riviera Maya is dedicated solely to the eponymous jam band and was held in February 2023 in Cancun.
Another notable facet of Pollstar’s roundup: Seven out of eight best-selling festivals are located in the Americas, with Mexico and the United States taking up six of eight slots.
The sole European entrant is Germany’s Hurrican Festival, which grossed $20.1 million in 2023 across 233,000 tickets sold.
The first festival on the top 20 list not being held in the Americas or Germany is Austria’s FM4 Festival, which grossed $10.7 million.
Bands used to tour (sometimes at a loss) to promote their latest LP. With the rise of streaming most of their money now comes from touring. An upside of this is that I can now see 80s bands like The Human League who didn’t even bother touring in the 80s.
Actually they wanted to tour but Virgin wouldn’t subsidise the tours and kept pressurising them to go back into the studio and make more records in the hope of creating another big hit, often pairing them up with others which sometimes worked (Giorgio Moroder) or didn’t (most others).
In my opinion the main reason this is booming is because ticket prices are through the roof.
Not surprisingly in expensive neighborhoods more so than other places.
What may also helps is baby boomers retiring, having money to spend and time.
Totally agree. Huge number of proper music venues – the 250 to 1000 punters standing ones – are closing.
Everyone just wants to see the very top performers and will pay astronomical prices so they can’t afford to go and look out for new music. I remember when you could see Pink Floyd for under a quid. Even Bowie, ELP and Led Zep couldn’t charge more than the price of an LP, about £2 from Virgin.
Uh … what happened to the only festival that counts ?
210,000 tickets at £355 a piece is about $80m.