A swift rebound and unprecedented tickets sales for live music after pandemic shut venues down

Powered by big stadium tours from artists like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, ticket sales are booming and it appears likely that live acts will continue to draw massive crowds this year after the pandemic closed down concert venues globally for close to two years.

Concert and event producer Live Nation confirmed this week what data has been showing for more than a year: With COVID largely in the rearview mirror, millions are seeking entertainment away from home and they’re willing to spend a lot of money to do it.

Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, said in a filing with regulators this week that 2023 brought all-time highs in both attendance and ticket sales.

Attendance jumped a 20% to a staggering 145 million in 2023, compared with the previous year.

In 2021, when venues began reopening with mask requirements, attendance was a paltry 35 million. The company is not providing attendance figures for 2020, when COVID-19 began to spread. Attendance was 98 million in 2019.

Live Nation expects demand to continue to snowball.

“This is going to be a great year,” CEO Michael Rapino told investors on a conference call Thursday. “We actually look at 2025, it looks like it’s going to be a monster stadium year again as that pipe kind of reloads itself.”

And though Live Nation controls a huge part of the live event sector, others are also predicting big growth for the broader industry in the coming years.

In December, entertainment data firm Pollstar reported that Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was the first tour to cross the billion-dollar mark in revenue and predicted a big 2024 for Swift as well. The magazine projected the Eras Tour will once again reach $1 billion within their eligibility window, meaning Swift is likely to bring in over $2 billion over the span of the tour.

In worldwide revenue, Swift’s tour was followed by Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band. But it was a big year musically beyond top-tier tours.

Ticket sales for the top 100 tours of the year worldwide jumped 46% from 2022, bringing in $9.17 billion in sales.

In North America, that number jumped from $4.77 billion in 2022 to $6.63 billion last year.

Additionally, an October report from Allied Market Research forecasts that the global live events industry market — which includes everything from concerts to sporting events to conference — would double in value, reaching $1.2 trillion by 2032.

Associated Press, The Associated Press