Madge Smashes Ticket Record

Madonna’s Aug. 6 show in Helsinki, Finland, has smashed the company’s box office records by selling 80,000 tickets for the West Harbour show.

“They went in a little under three hours,” Live Nation Finland head Risto Juvonen told Pollstar after his parent company announced it sold 210,000 tickets across five Madonna shows.

The Norwegian show in Oslo (July 30), the Swedish show in Gothenburg (Aug. 9) and a Tallinn show co-promoted by Peeter Rebane’s Baltic Development Group (Aug. 4) have all sold out, the company said. And a Danish show at Copenhagen Parken is running out fast.

The Helsinki show will be the first time West Harbour (or Länsisatama) has been used for a concert. It’s still the main passenger terminal between Helsinki and Tallinn, but part of it was drained and the land reclaimed when the main freight terminal was moved to Vuosaari (East Harbour) in 2008.

Live Nation also announced selling more than 200,000 tickets for six Bruce Springsteen shows in Finland, Norway, Denmark and three in Sweden.

Along with other major gigs including Coldplay’s three stadium shows, LN international chairman Thomas Johansson reckons the company shifted more than 700,000 tickets in two weeks.

He said that represents selling a ticket to 3 percent of the combined population of the Scandinavian countries. Achieving the same percentage in England would involve selling 1.8 million tickets, he added.