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In just 20 beautiful days on the concert trail last year, U2 racked up the highest-grossing North American tour of 2009, pulling in $123 million at the box office in a year in which overall concert business was one of the music industry’s remaining bright spots.
The Irish quartet’s bar-raising 360 Tour of sports stadiums, which visited 16 cities, sold more than 1.3 million tickets, translating to a nightly average of just more than 82,000 fans, according to Pollstar, the concert-industry tracking publication.
U2 was the only act to cross the $100 million mark last year, and its nightly average at the box office pummeled the competition, at nearly $7.7 million a show. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, which tallied nearly $95 million from 58 shows, follows U2 at No. 2 in Pollstar’s ranking. The hard-charging New Jersey outfit also drew more than 1 million fans to those shows, one of six tours to cross that threshold last year.
Compare that with 2008, when only one act – country star Kenny Chesney – topped 1 million total ticket sales.
Elton John and Billy Joel’s ever-popular joint tour placed the pair at No. 3 last year, with a box office gross of $88 million in 31 performances. Britney Spears’ “Circus” tour helped the erstwhile teen pop queen rebound from her personal and professional travails, placing her at No. 4 with a total take of almost $83 million.
She came in ahead of veteran Australian rock band AC/DC, which rounds out Pollstar’s top 5 with just less than $78 million from 47 shows.
“It does appear that overall gross revenue is up,” Pollstar editor Gary Bongiovanni said, noting that the magazine is still tabulating final figures for the year. “The No. 1 tour came in higher than last year’s No. 1 tour, the No. 25 tour was higher and the No. 50 tour was higher.”
That’s in line with Billboard’s recent report showing concert business up worldwide, with total revenue of $4.4 billion, up nearly 12 percent over 2008, and total attendance of 73 million similarly up nearly 13 percent from the previous year.
In addition to U2 and Springsteen, Chesney, the Jonas Brothers (which finished at No. 7, up from the siblings’ No. 13 ranking the previous year) and the Dave Matthews Band each pulled in more than 1 million ticket buyers during the year. Chesney came in sixth in 2009.
The Dave Matthews Band, which Pollstar recently crowned the top North American concert attraction of the decade, landed at No. 8 in 2009.
The other touring attraction that crossed the 1 million ticket sales mark was a relatively new one, “Walking With Dinosaurs – The Live Experience,” an event that put a life-size 42-foot-long animated T. rex and other creatures long extinct into sports arenas across the country. A relatively affordable average ticket price of $39.77, combined with a field-dwarfing 307 performances, helped attract large numbers of families with young children.
