POLSTAR’s 2017 Year-End figures are in and live music continues to demonstrate its growing popularity, making 2017 a record-crushing year for the concert business.
The Top 100 Worldwide Tours alone generated a record $5.65 billion in revenues. That represents a huge, 15.8% increase over the previous year. The total tickets sold by the Top 100 was also a record at 66.79 million. That’s up a remarkable 10.4% over 2016. And it was all done with a record average ticket price of $84.63, which is an increase of $3.97, or nearly 5%. U2 did the highest grossing tour worldwide at $316 million and the band’s North American segment also topped that chart at $176.1 million. There were 11 tours that generated more than $100 million worldwide as compared to seven tours in 2016.
The most successful artists are clearly getting better at recapturing some of the revenue that had leaked into the secondary ticket market. The importance of the growing global concert market is readily evident in an examination of the top 20 venues on the Arena Ticket Sales chart. Only seven are located in the U.S. while five were from the U.K., including The O2 London at No. 1. Two are in Mexico, and there’s one each in Germany, Spain, Canada, France, Netherlands, and Belgium. Live Nation was by far the world’s largest concert promoter and reported to Pollstar a record 52.5 million tickets sold around the globe. AEG was again a solid No. 2 among promoters reporting 14.4 million tickets sold. OCESA/CIE was No. 3 at about 4 million tickets. SJM was the top U.K. based promoter with nearly 2.4 million tickets sold.
So, how did Cirque du Soleil shows do in 2017?
World Gross Show AVG Tix AVG Tix Total AVG Cities Rank in Mil Title Price Sold Tix Sold Gross / Shows -------------------------------------------------------------------- 26 $61.8 Kurios $80.66 15,324 766,179 $1,236,000 50/411 28 $60.1 Luzia $84.89 14,448 707,975 $1,226,531 49/403 29 $60.0 Toruk $79.38 24,393 756,191 $1,936,367 31/169 35 $54.2 Ovo $72.52 16,986 747,380 $1,231,818 44/308 41 $48.2 Amaluna $79.97 15,848 602,239 $1,267,336 38/290 47 $41.8 Varekai $61.99 16,458 674,764 $1,020,282 41/282 50 $39.7 Kooza $85.41 12,232 464,816 $1,044,737 38/293 59 $35.9 Volta $74.66 16,042 481,274 $1,197,760 30/246 -------------------------------------------------------------------- $401.7 Million Gross 5,200,818 Tickets Sold