As touring wound down heading into the holidays, a short South American swing put Paul McCartney at the top of Pollstar’s Live 75 Chart for the week of Dec. 18. (MJ Kim photo)
It’s slow season for live music. With the holidays dominating the past three to four weeks, tour announcements have been sparse while anticipation for this stuff has been overshadowed by anticipation for other stuff (Christmas gifts, New Year’s resolutions … college football bowl games). But fear not, friends, because Liner Notes takes no weeks off! As such, let’s begin with the one thing we’ve used each month we tackle live music: Pollstar’s Live 75 Chart. Ch895i Cone Cruhser Parts
As we’ve often mentioned, the list ranks worldwide active tours by average tickets sold for shows performed over the past 30 days and for the week of Dec. 18 (the most recent week Pollstar released data for this specific metric), we have a familiar face at the top of the chart: Sir Paul McCartney. The curious part about it? A quick internet search reveals that … well … he has no gigs on the books. But considering how he finished up a South American run the week before Dec. 18, we got what we got. And what we got was an average of about 42,000 tickets sold over the 30 days preceding the most recent list.
Also in the top 10 were RBD, who came in at No. 2 with roughly 37,000, 50 Cent (yes, that 50 Cent), who finished fourth with a little more than 16,000 tickets sold for shows performed in the 30-day time period, and then Eagles, surprisingly bringing up the rear, barely cracking the top 10 (No. 10), with about 12,500 tickets moved. Not on the list? Taylor Swift, who has been taking a tiny bit of time off, attending football games and readying the inevitable re-release of her “Eras” tour film, this time with super high-def 19K resolution.
Speaking of Swift, it was announced at the end of last year (or, well, a few weeks ago), that the pop star grossed more than $1 billion with that aforementioned “Eras” tour — $1,039,263,762, to be exact — and that was the first time in history anyone has ever done such a thing. Perhaps even more impressive was the fact that she did it all in only eight months. That’s right: The defining star of a generation only needed about 66% of the year to rake in more than a billion dollars through her live performances.
Not as impressive? The Sphere, the Las Vegas pet project that made headlines with U2 concerts and its constant, gigantic smiling-face emoji on the Vegas Strip. Something tells me we’ll be writing more consistently about this in 2024 as less than a year into its opening, the thing has already named a new general manager (which, in Layman’s terms, can be translated into “uh oh.”). According to reports last week, Ed Lunger will be the new senior vice president and GM of the thing as he replaces Raul Gutierrez for reasons unknown. Here’s hoping he fares better than his predecessor if only because the Sphere seems like a fun idea and nobody likes to see Big Ambitious Music Projects fail, right?
And finally, a tour! Stray Kids, one of the many K-pop groups already taking over the world, announced in a video last week that they will be hitting the road in 2024. No dates, cities or timeframes were announced, but hey: What’s a tour roundup without news of an actual tour? Not much, I tell you. Not much.
Anyway, happy new year and happy concert-ing!
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