Boxoffice Insider: Lady Gaga – No Novice At Stadium Headlining

With the completion of “The Chromatica Ball” tour, Lady Gaga ranks among the year’s highest-grossing touring artists heading into the homestretch of 2022 based on tickets sold at 20 performances in eight countries. The tour’s $112.9 million gross earned during its nine-week span is currently the fourth highest overall among artists who have been booked exclusively in stadium-sized venues this year.

Yet, even though this is the first all-stadium tour of her career as a concert performer, it is not her first tour as a stadium headliner. The 13-time Grammy Award winner has played at least one stadium on every tour since “The Monster Ball,” the second headlining trek of her career that ran from November 2009 through May 2011. That tour was booked primarily in arenas and large theaters, but she ended the run at two stadiums in Mexico.

She sold out a performance at Guadalajara’s football venue Estadio Tres de Marzo on May 3, 2011, followed by two shows held at Mexico City’s Foro Sol on May 5-6 with 111,060 sold seats for a $6.7 million gross. It still ranks as her best-attended concert engagement of all time and one of only two topping 100,000 in ticket sales at a single venue.

The other one was a two-show stint on the “Born This Way Ball,” her third tour that played six continents from April 2012 until February 2013. London’s Twickenham Stadium logged 101,250 in attendance on Sept. 8-9, 2012 for a $10.7 million box-office haul, making the venue one of her three ever to surpass $10 million in grosses at one engagement. The highest was $17.9 million earned on the same tour at the Saitama (Japan) Super Arena, while two shows on this year’s tour at the recently re-named Belluna Dome in Tokorozawa, Japan took in $11.5 million, Sept. 3-4.

She played 19 stadiums on the “Born This Way Ball” including Stade de France in Paris where she sold 70,617 tickets and Johannesburg, South Africa’s FNB Stadium with 56,900 in attendance. And at Seoul, South Korea’s Jamsil Olympic Stadium where the tour kicked off on April 27, 2012, the headcount was 51,684 for one show.

Lady Gaga’s fourth concert tour, “ArtRave: The Artpop Ball” in 2014, was booked almost exclusively in arenas in North America, Australia and Europe, yet the tour also included one two-show engagement at a baseball stadium in Chiba, Japan that recorded 50,453 sold tickets. The QVC Marine Field (now ZOZO Marine Stadium) welcomed the trek on Aug. 13-14 and is one of the 17 events during her career that moved over 50,000 tickets for one engagement.

Her “Joanne” world tour (2017-2018) included four dates at Major League Baseball parks during the summer of 2017 beginning with San Francisco’s AT&T Park (now Oracle Park) on Aug. 13 with 39,225 sold seats. Then from Aug. 25 through Sept. 2, she played Chicago’s Wrigley Field, Citi Field in New York and Fenway Park in Boston back-to-back, performing for a combined total of 179,485 fans in all three cities.

This year, the ticket total on “The Chromatica Ball” reached 833,798 at 18 stadiums with two of them booked for two nights. One was London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium with the tour’s highest attendance of 86,508 on July 29-30. And the $11.5 million take at Belluna Dome in Tokorozawa, Japan, the highest gross recorded, came from the other two-show run on Sept. 3-4.

The best-attended single performance this year was her July 24 event at Stade de France with 78,866 tickets sold, while Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles had the top one-show gross of $9.3 million on Sept. 10.