Blake Shelton Tops $23 Million With ‘Honky Tonk’ Arena Tour

Final box office figures have been reported for Blake Shelton’s “Back to the Honky Tonk” tour that wrapped in late March, averaging a gross of $1.29 million per show on the four-week trek that played 18 U.S. arenas. Overall, the tour’s gross reached $23.1 million with ticket sales totaling 229,238 – an average of 12,735 sold tickets per night. With Carly
Pearce and Jackson Dean onboard as show openers, the tour launched Feb. 16 at Pinnacle Bank Arena in Lincoln, Nebraska, and continued through March 25 before ending at Buffalo, New York’s KeyBank Center.

The venue with the highest gross and attendance recorded on the tour was Thompson-Boling Arena in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the country star entertained a sellout crowd of 15,082 on Feb. 24 and racked up a gross of $1.62 million. According to Pollstar archives, his last performance at the venue was a decade earlier during his “Ten Times Crazier” tour that played North American venues from 2013 through 2015. His Knoxville appearance on that tour came on Sept. 27, 2013, a sold-out concert with 14,991 fans in the house and a gross of $629,445.

Thompson-Boling was the only arena on this year’s tour with attendance surpassing the 15,000 threshold, but Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio, came close with a headcount of 14,912 at a March 10 performance. Sold-ticket revenue for that show hit $1.46 million.
Three other arenas landed in the 14,000 range in ticket sales including the tour finale at KeyBank Center that logged 14,798 sold seats and grossed $1.47 million. KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, Kentucky, sold a total of 14,403 tickets for a March 9 concert that grossed $1.26 million, while Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, moved 14,151 tickets. The Feb. 18 event there grossed $1.55 million.

Historically, Shelton’s box office results from archived, career-spanning concerts produce an overall total of $160 million in grosses with sold tickets numbering 2,538,352. Those figures are based on 243 performances reported since 2001.

From his earliest shows on record through the end of 2010, his concerts as a headliner averaged 1,085 tickets with a $31,810 gross per show from bookings primarily at clubs, theaters and fairs – although the early 2000s also included support gigs for Toby Keith, Rascal Flatts and a handful of others. But he made the jump to arenas with 2011’s “All About Tonight,” averaging 4,560 tickets and $174,761 in grosses per show from 13 reported headlining dates.

Attendance on his “Well Lit & Amplified” tour in 2012 jumped 63% compared to the previous year, averaging 7,429 sold seats per night. Likewise, gross averages more than doubled with a per-show average totaling $358,789.

His 50 shows reported for “Ten Times Crazier” produced a total gross of $37.1 million from 860,654 sold seats. It averaged $741,974 in grosses and 17,213 sold tickets per night. It was booked primarily in arenas and sheds, but also featured his first headlining stadium show on record. On July 19, 2014, he performed at Wrigley Field in Chicago with 40,912 tickets sold for a $2.7 million haul. The Band Perry and Dan + Shay opened the show along with Neal McCoy who played host for the event.

He grossed he grossed $18 million in 2016 from 296,158 tickets at 26 concerts with two-show stands in four cities, while the next year his “Doing It To Country Songs” tour took in $9.4 million from 151,329 tickets at 13 reported shows. Then, the 14-show “Country Music Freaks” tour in 2018 racked up $14 million from 178,612 tickets. Nationwide Arena had the top numbers on that tour with a $1.23 million take from 15,851 tickets.

Shelton’s latest tour prior to 2023 was his “Friends and Heroes” trek that began in 2019 and booked into the early months of 2020. Most of the shows were completed prior to the pandemic shutdown, yet a handful were postponed and eventually completed in fall 2021. The tour grossed $45 million from more than half a million tickets sold for 47 performances.