Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band navigated The River 35th anniversary tour all the way to the bank in 2016, pulling in $268.3 million (Dh985.2 million) globally to score the top-grossing concert trek of the year worldwide, according to Pollstar, the concert industry-tracking publication.
Beyonce nipped close at the E Streeters’ heels, grossing $256.4 million from her Formation world tour, followed by Coldplay ($241 million), Guns N’ Roses ($188.4 million) and Adele ($167.7 million) to round out Pollstar’s top five.
“In what has been a banner year for the concert business, the Top 10 Tours alone grossed a combined $1.67 billion,” Pollstar editor Gary Bongiovanni noted in a statement. “That is significantly better than the $1.5 billion in 2015.”
It is, in fact, an 11.3 per cent increase.
Adele is one of just two performers to have emerged in the new millennium to make the Top 10, the other being Justin Bieber, whose tour grossed $163.3 million, placing him at No 6 on the list.
That’s a bit of a come down from last year, when Taylor Swift had the top-grossing tour of 2015 worldwide and the Top 10 also include such relative newcomers as One Direction and Ed Sheeran.
Following Bieber on the 2016 roster, Paul McCartney posted a worldwide gross of $110.6 million; Garth Brooks, $97 million; the Rolling Stones, $90.9 million; and Celine Dion, $85.5 million.
Coldplay, however, sold the most tickets, moving almost 2.7 million during the year, followed by Springsteen at 2.4 million and Beyonce at 2.2 million.
Dion easily had the top average ticket price of $146.26, followed by McCartney at $127.43, the Stones at $122.33, Beyonce at $114.59 and Springsteen at $111.48.
In terms of average gross per show, however, the Stones dwarfed the competition, taking in an staggering $9.1 million from just 14 performances in 10 cities. Beyonce finished second with an average of nearly $5.6 million at 49 shows in 46 cities, then Coldplay at just under $5.5 million from 60 shows in 44 cities and Guns N’ Roses at almost $5.4 million from 44 shows in 35 cities.
Brooks can claim the most affordable tour among the Top 10 finishers, tickets averaging just $69.29 for the 102 performances he gave in 25 cities.
Pollstar is still finalising figures for its annual ranking of the Top 200 tours globally and in North America.
Bongiovanni noted that Beyonce took top honours for the highest-grossing North American tour of 2016, but the figure for that portion of her world tour was not released.
Both Springsteen and Beyonce surpassed Swift’s field-leading gross of $250.1 million in 2015.
