Boxoffice Insider: Foo Fighters Full On At The Garden

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for FF – Foo Fighters
at Madison Square Garden June 20, which sold out at 15,371 tickets and grossed $1.4 million, as reported to Pollstar.

The return of the Foo Fighters to New York’s Madison Square Garden on June 20 was far more than just the band’s first show there in three years. Coming fifteen months after the shutdown of most live concert activity in North America, the reality of a full-capacity crowd indoors at an arena was as monumental and symbolic as it was fulfilling for a big-time Foos fan or anyone who simply wanted to hear some good rock & roll – or just be inside an arena with a packed house again.

Various arenas have been hosting shows regularly in 2021 with social distancing and other pandemic-led protocols in place, but the show at the Garden marked, not only the first at full capacity in a U.S. arena, but a portent of what’s just on the horizon for many artists. For Foo Fighters, it’s L.A. and their second sold-out arena crowd this summer at The Forum on July 17.

And the band’s return to The World’s Most Famous Arena definitely paid off at the boxoffice, based on ticket sales results reported by Madison Square Garden. At the June performance, the 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees moved 15,371 tickets at the sold-out concert – 119 more than the single-show average in 2018 when they brought their “Concrete and Gold” tour to the arena for two nights. This summer’s gross of $1,401,255 is a new Foo Fighters record for one concert at the venue, topping the gross average from their 2018 two-show engagement by 2%. The June event’s ticket prices ranged from $50 to $119 – also a new threshold for the group who offered a top ticket price of $93 for New York fans three years ago.

Pollstar’s boxoffice archives include four Foo Fighters appearances at the Manhattan arena during the past decade and a half, the first being a sold-out concert on Feb. 19, 2008. That year the band toured in support of their RCA album Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace, released the previous September. Attendance was logged at 15,228 for the concert with the gross hitting $678,540.

Then in 2011 following the April release of the Grammy Award-winning album Wasting Light, they returned to the New York arena on Nov. 13 during the tour’s fall North American leg and played for a full house of 17,958. It remains their highest attendance on record at the venue for a single performance. Gross totals at the concert stretched over $1.08 million from tickets priced at $45 and $65. The “Wasting Light” tour included more than 30 shows in North American arenas that year with per-show averages hitting about $586,000 in earnings from 12,000 sold seats. The tour also played markets in Europe, Oceania and South America and stretched through September of the following year.

The next tour covered the same four continents along with Asia and launched in the summer of 2017 ahead of their Concrete and Gold album that arrived that September. The New York shows occurred in 2018, though, during the trek’s final stretch through North America from July through October.

Along with arena performances, that leg also included shed dates and festival appearances as well as stadium shows in Toronto, Boston, Chicago and Seattle. Madison Square Garden was the only arena during that period to host the group for two nights. Grosses totaled $108.5 million from 1.3 million sold tickets at 63 reported shows during the tour, 43 of which occurred in 2018 when the band ranked No. 14 among the year’s top 100 worldwide tours.

Although the band’s July 17 concert in Los Angeles was postponed due someone in the band’s camp testing positive for COVID-19, Foo Fighters’ upcoming schedule includes a series of festival and amphitheater dates stateside that stretch into the fall.

Among those are mainstage appearances at Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and Jazz Fest.