Bad Bunny Sets All-Time Touring Record Grossing $435M In A Calendar Year

Bad Bunny closed out his 43-date “World’s Hottest Tour” at Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium on Saturday and Sunday (Dec 9-10) and with those two performances set the all-time record for the highest-grossing tour in a single calendar year. Bad Bunny, a.k.a. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, grossed more than $10.5 million over two nights giving him a grand total of $435,388,660 for the calendar year, according to box office reports submitted to Pollstar.

His mammoth $435.3 gross surpasses Ed Sheeran’s “Divide Tour,” which topped Pollstar’s 2018 Year-End Worldwide Top 100 chart with a record $432.4 million, the all-time highest-grossing live entertainment act in a calendar year—until now.

“I think we all feel very proud of what he’s accomplished,” Hans Schafer, SVP of Global Touring at Live Nation, which promoted the tour, tells Pollstar. “It’s a feat that is remarkable. It is huge for Latin music and unprecedented and a remarkable accomplishment on its own, regardless of genre to see an artist of his age reaching those heights is just something that makes it very promising for us, of what the future holds.”

Bad Bunny had 81 shows this year across two tours. He performed in arenas earlier this year during his “El Último Tour Del Mundo Tour” run, which ran from Feb. – April grossing $113 million and selling 574K tickets. In August, he made his prodigious leap into stadiums for “World’s Hottest Tour.” The superstar sold 2,478,796 tickets, which averaged $176.64 each, and earned an average of $5,375,168 per night.

“In April 2021, when we put ‘El Último Tour del Mundo’ arena tour on sale, which ultimately started in February of ‘22, what we saw from a numbers perspective were indicative of demand being off the charts,” Jbeau Lewis, Bad Bunny’s agent and a partner at United Talent Agency, told Pollstar about making the leap from arenas to stadiums. “When you look at a ticketing queue for a show that can hold 17,000 and there’s 300,000 in the queue, it certainly suggests there’s a lot more meat on the bone to be had.”

Lewis recalled a conversation he had with Bad Bunny’s manager Noah Assad of Rimas Entertainment when tickets for the arena tour went on sale and both were thinking the same thing: “We got to hold stadiums for next year.”

“I give Noah and [Bad Bunny] all the credit in the world,” Lewis said. “They have such foresight, and vision as to what they want to do, they’re always ten steps ahead of everybody else.

“The plan to go on the arena tour, release the album a month after that tour ended and have a stadium tour that would start a couple of months after that was hatched 18 months ago at this point. We’ve just been working toward the execution of it.”