This statistic shows the most successful music tours worldwide in 2015, based on gross revenue. One Direction's "On the Road Again Tour" generated 107.7 million U.S. dollars revenue, with 70 shows in 39 cities and more than 1.7 million tickets sold worldwide.
Concert business – additional information
Cirque du Soleil regularly appears in the ranking of best-earning concerts, usually with more than one title. The year 2014 was not so generous for the performers, since they fell in the worldwide rankings to the 21 spot. However, in 2013, they landed ten titles among the 100 most successful music tours worldwide by revenue. In seventh place was their latest show “Michael Jackson: The Immortal”, written and directed by Jamie King (also responsible for Madonna’s Super Bowl XLVI halftime performance), which was a mixture of Michael Jackson’s music and Cirque du Soleil's acrobatics. Ranked twentieth was “Corteo,” a contemporary circus show, which premiered in Cirque du Soleil’s native Montreal, Canada in April 2005.
The concert and event promotion industry was expected to generate 25 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2014 in the United States alone, up from 23.3 billion five years earlier. In 2011, popular music concerts in the U.S. attracted 54.3 million visitors, which was a sharp increase from 47.4 million a year earlier. It has been estimated that 25 percent of the U.S. population attended a concert in 2012. That same year, Colorado’s capital city of Denver, along with Buffalo, New York and Des Moines, Iowa, earned the titles of the most concert-going cities in the United States – 34 percent of their respective populations attended a concert or bought a concert ticket.
Live Nation Entertainment is one of the leading companies in the concert/entertainment business in the United States. Their concert revenue amounted to more than 4.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2013, which constituted nearly 70 percent of their total revenue. Ticketing and artists management accounted for the remaining 30 percent. However, the company accrued losses anywhere between seven and 228.4 million U.S. dollars every year between 2006 and 2013.
