Boxoffice Insider: The Lumineers Live — The First Decade On The Road

The Lumineers spent just over six months on the road in 2022 with their “Brightside” world tour that launched on Feb. 24 at Nottingham, England’s Motorpoint Arena and wrapped with a stadium performance at Wrigley Field in Chicago on Sept. 3. It was the group’s fourth headlining concert tour since the spring of 2012 when founders Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites began touring with the release of their self-titled debut album.

In the past decade, a total of 322 performances have been reported to Pollstar from the band’s headlining events worldwide. According to our box-office archives, they sold over 2.1 million tickets at those reported shows for an overall gross of $107.1 million.

The earliest date reported for the Denver-based band was on March 31, 2012, just three days before the first album’s release date. It was a sold-out show at Neumos in Seattle just over a week into the tour. Reported sales figures from that year show an average of 807 tickets sold for a $14,709 gross per show, but 2012 ended with a two-night New Year’s run at Denver’s Ogden Theatre with 3,200 fans.

Then, beginning in the spring of 2016, the band hit the road a week after the release of Cleopatra, the second studio album that bowed on April 8. Along with shows in both Europe and North America through December 2017, the group also traveled to Japan, Australia and South Africa in the tour’s second year.

Box-office averages from the “Cleopatra” trek jumped to 6,217 per show in sold tickets with a gross average surpassing a quarter-million dollars. The top box-office numbers came from three sellouts at the Denver-area shed Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre, in August 2017, with 48,534 tickets sold for a gross just over $2 million.

“III” was The Lumineers’ world tour that supported their third studio album released in September 2019, yet it kicked off in May, beginning with a run of festival appearances worldwide. Headlining arena dates started in November, but the tour was sidelined with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic the following March. Original plans were for the tour to run throughout 2020 and continue into the following year, but the remainder of the shows were canceled.

Ultimately, 32 concerts on the “III” tour were reported from November 2019 through the final concert at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum on March 11, 2020, that grossed $611,088 from 10,252 tickets. The tour averaged 9,892 sold seats per concert for a gross average of $553,792. Two nights at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, Feb. 13-14 moved the most tickets: 26,232. However, the highest gross, $1.65 million, was recorded on two nights at Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Ill., the following week.

This year the “Brightside” tour grossed a total of $45.9 million from 748,538 tickets at 62 shows in Europe and North America between February and September. The tour finale at Wrigley Field in Chicago on Sept. 3 set a new gross record for the band with $3.6 million in sales from 40,683 tickets. Their July 22 concert in Denver at Coors Field also topped the
$3 million threshold, coming in at $3.12 million. With 40,931 tickets sold, it was the best-attended concert on the tour.

The top-grossing arena in 2022 was Spectrum Center in Charlotte, N.C., with a $958,560 gross from 13,842 tickets, Aug. 27.

The biggest haul at an amphitheater was $1.99 million at Budweiser Stage in Toronto, June 11-12, from 31,924 sold seats.

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