Boxoffice Insider: Lizzo’s ‘Special Tour’ Tops $53 Million With European Leg

With the launch of her “Special” world tour last September in North America, Lizzo made the jump to arena touring as a concert headliner and racked up almost $40 million during her opening months on the road. Now she has added $13.5 million more to that total with ticket revenue from Europe – the first of three tour legs planned for 2023. So far, she has grossed $53.14 million worldwide, but that total won’t stand for long, as she is set to begin her second trek through the U.S. and Canada later this month.

In Europe, she performed 16 shows at 15 venues in 10 countries during a four-week period, moving 187,606 tickets. That takes her overall attendance on both continents to 538,147.
She began the European run in Norway with a sold-out performance at the Oslo Spektrum on Feb. 17 and continued through March 16, wrapping with a pair of shows at The O2 in London. As the only arena in Europe hosting the tour for two nights, the London arena produced the largest ticket count and highest gross. From concerts March 15-16, she sold 34,765 tickets for a two-show haul of $2.77 million.

Among the remaining venues with single-show results, another UK facility, the AO Arena in Manchester, had the highest gross for one performance. Her sold-out concert there on March 11 earned $1.25 million from 15,545 sold seats. However, Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome logged the best attendance with a sold-ticket total of 16,069 on Feb. 23 and a gross of $1.04 million.

Other UK venues with grosses topping the $1 million mark were Utilita Arena in Birmingham with $1.19 million from 14,457 sold tickets on March 9. Likewise, at The OVO Hydro in Glasgow, she earned $1.18 million at the box office from 13,851 sold seats on March 8.

Lizzo also performed in four of those cities the last time she toured in Europe. It was in 2019 during the second leg of her “Cuz I Love You” tour, which was renamed “Cuz I Love You Too” for the fall stretch. In London, she played for two nights at the O2 Brixton Academy, Nov. 6-7, followed the next night by a show at Glasgow’s O2 Academy. Then Manchester’s O2 Victoria Warehouse welcomed the four-time Grammy winner on Nov. 11, and one week later she appeared at the AFAS Live concert hall in Amsterdam. Altogether in 2019, she averaged 3,462 sold tickets per show with a gross average of $154,668 at theaters and clubs.

Her first headlining tour was two years earlier – the “Good as Hell” trek in 2017 which, like the 2019 tour, also featured an opening leg early in the year and a slate of added dates in the fall. The rooms were smaller, primarily clubs, so her box office averages reflect that with 727 sold tickets per show and an average gross of $13,606.

Lizzo’s performance history at Pollstar stretches back to 2013, though, and includes myriad live events in the early years. Many of her early performances recorded in the archives were as a support act, but she also had festival appearances as well as one-off headlining dates.

She opened shows for Har Mar Superstar, Clean Bandit, Chvrches, Sleater-Kinney, My Morning Jacket, and St. Paul and the Broken Bones at various times and landed multiple festival gigs in both Europe and North America. Among her early solo appearances were sold-out shows at First Avenue in Minneapolis and Chicago’s Subterranean in February 2016 – and a return to both venues in December of that same year, again with sellout crowds in attendance.

Since 2013, Lizzo’s career box office gross as a headliner comes to $66.2 million overall. And her combined attendance during the past decade totals 834,928, based on box office data reported over the years. The number of headlining shows logged in the archives totals 158 – beginning with her first performance on record at Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis with 375 in attendance on Dec. 28, 2013, to her most recent event: the two London concerts in March that drew 34,765 fans.