Harry Styles & Niall Horan Find Success With Solo Tours, Grossing Millions In Ticket Sales

One Direction members Harry Styles and Niall Horan have both proven their chops this year as solo headliners, making their mark at the box office with successful world tours. 

Styles wrapped his 10-month trek – titled “Harry Styles: Live on Tour” – last month, racking up more than $62 million from over 800,000 sold tickets. Horan, now in the final leg of his Flicker World tour, moved 95 percent of the available tickets during the first four months of his 2018 run, grossing $12 million from 203,330 sold seats.

Styles hit the road last fall in support of his eponymous debut studio album that arrived in May 2017. With a string of 13 theater dates on tap in North American markets, the English singer kicked off the tour on Sept. 19 in San Francisco. For the remainder of 2017 he was booked in Europe, Asia and Oceania, also primarily in smaller, theater-sized venues, but he jumped to arenas when he resumed the trek in March after a winter break.

He began his 2018 schedule with a 20-city run in Europe that included an engagement at London’s O2 Arena and a $2.1 million take – his top gross outside of North America. With sellout crowds on two nights (April 11-12), total attendance was tracked at 29,212. It was his second two-show stint in London, having played the 5,300-seat Eventim Apollo on Oct. 29-30 during the first European leg of the tour.

The highest boxoffice gross during the tour came this summer during Styles’ final run through North America. He sold out two shows at Madison Square Garden in New York on June 21 and 22 and drew 36,353 fans, grossing $2.8 million. Those boxoffice counts are second only to U2 at the Garden this summer, based on reports to Pollstar since Memorial Day. The Irish band’s three shows (June 25-26, July 1) took in $8.7 million from 55,575 sold tickets. Styles did best the other headliner at the arena who also sold out two shows this summer — fellow countryman Sam Smith with a $2.1 million total from concerts on June 29-30.

Styles took the No. 13 ranking on Pollstar’s Mid-Year Top 100 Worldwide Tours based on $50.9 million in revenue from 663,711 total tickets in 49 cities worldwide. The Mid-Year rankings, based on a January through June time period, encompassed the bulk of his tour, but not all of it. As noted earlier, the tour’s final overall gross ultimately reached $62 million.

Owen Sweeney / Invision / AP – Niall Horan
Niall Horan plays a tune during Q102 Jingle Ball at Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia Dec. 6.

Like Styles, Horan’s world tour also supports his own debut album that bowed last year. Dubbed Flicker, it was released in October while the Irish singer was promoting the album with a string of 20 theater and club dates in select markets around the world. The brief trek, called the “Flicker Sessions” tour, kicked off in Dublin in August 2017 and ran through late November, ending in San Francisco.

His current “Flicker World Tour,” staged in both theaters and arenas, launched on March 10 in the Irish town of Killarney followed by appearances in both Dublin and Belfast. Horan played a total of 30 concerts in 14 countries during the tour’s opening European leg that stretched through May 12.

The highest-grossing venue on the tour so far this year not surprisingly comes from his home country, where he performed twice at 3Arena in Dublin. A combined boxoffice take of $1.2 million was the result of sellouts on March 12 and again on March 29, with 22,874 sold seats.

After Europe, brief treks through Oceania, Asia and Latin America brought the Flicker tour to mid-July when Horan kicked off the tour’s homestretch, a series of performances booked in 36 North American cities. The final leg is set primarily in outdoor amphitheaters, although a handful of arena, theater and fair grandstand shows are included in the mix. Horan will wrap his Flicker World tour in West Palm Beach, Fla. on Sept. 23.