The year’s Top 100 tours earned $1.5 billion. That’s right up there with 1999’s numbers, when the Top 100 accounted for $1.26 billion. Compare that to $1.13 billion in 1998 and $1.02 billion in 1997.

For the second year in a row, ‘N Sync sold more tickets than any other act. The teen heartthrobs sold 1,647,630 tickets to barely edge out the Dave Matthews Band by a few thousand stubs.

Four other acts Britney Spears, KISS, Tina Turner, and Dixie Chicks – also sold more than 1 million tickets in 2000. The Faith Hill/Tim McGraw package, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Creed all sold more than 900,000 tickets.

Tina Turner, who announced this year’s outing as her final big tour, went out on top with an industry-leading, career-high gross of $80.2 million in North America.

During the first half of the year, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band did highly successful reunion tours.

The hardest working band in the Top 100 was KISS, which strapped on the platform boots for another 128 farewell shows in 2000. Only “Weird Al” Yankovic’s 150 shows demonstrated a greater work ethic. The shortest outing went to Barbra Streisand and her 4-show, 2-city coast-to-coast tour, which boasted an average ticket price of a mere $471, not counting service charges.

Country music had two highly successful tours in the Top 10: the Faith Hill and Tim McGraw co-bill, and the debut headline tour by the Dixie Chicks. But with the exception of the 10 dates on the George Strait Country Music Festival tour, the rest of the genre appears to have again had a generally down year.

Latin music was well represented with eight tours among the Top 100 – the same number as 1999.

The teen pop phenomena continued unabated. Four acts alone – ‘N Sync, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and the Backstreet Boys – accounted for more than 4 million tickets sold and $156 million in gross sales.

Forty-two tours grossed more than $10 million in 2000, compared to 37 in 1999.