Harry Styles Hit By Object During Vienna Concert

2 AUS HarryStyles
What the interaction between fans and artist should look like, and thankfully still does for the most part. Harry Styles, shown performing at the BRIT Awards 2023 in London, where he took home four trophies. (Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)

Harry Styles got hit by an object during his June 8 performance at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadion.

Video footage captured by fans, show an object thrown by an audience member, hitting Styles in the eye. He briefly coveres his face, but resumes walking up a set of stairs, and reportedly continued and finished his performance.

It’s not the first time the four-time 2023 BRIT Award and Grammy winner got assaulted on stage. Last November, during his sold-out 15-date residency at the Kia Forum Los Angeles, an audience member threw a handful of skittles at Styles.

A month earlier, Styles reportedly took a hit to the groin from a “rogue water bottle” during a concert in Chicago, in August 2022, chicken nuggets got hauled onto the stage Madison Square Garden.

He joins a sadly long list of artists, who’ve had objects thrown at them during performances. Pollstar guest author, Alexandra “Alé” Chernooki-Lavorato, was at Bebe Rexha’s June 18 homecoming show, where the singer got assaulted with a phone that got thrown at her by an audience member. She wrote a guest post about her experience.

Guest Post: I Was At Bebe Rexha’s NYC Show When She Was Attacked – That Should Never Ever Happen

The premiere of Rolling Loud Germany, July 7-9, was marred by aggressive behavior of some audience members, which included the throwing of stones at security staff – overshadowing what could have been a glorious arrival of the Rolling Loud brand in Deutschland.

“Interestingly enough,” Olivier Toth, president of the European Arenas Association (EAA), told Pollstar in our last interview, “I’ve heard from colleagues that there is some violent behavior that they see at some of the shows, that they didn’t expect, or didn’t see pre-pandemic.”

In her recent guest post, Chernooki-Lavorato went deep on the possible reasons for what is hopefully not becoming a trend: violent outbursts by audience members at live shows, and asks “why would anyone ever want to hurt an artist,” especially after you’ve paid “hard-earned money to come to a show.”

Mid-Year Top Tours: No. 3 Harry Styles’ ‘Love On Tour’

It’s particularly sad that incidents like the recent one at Harry Style’s show in Vienna overshadow remarkable facts about his “Love On Tour” world tour. The aforementioned sold-out Las Vegas residency, for instance, grossed $47,755,551 on 256,258 tickets sold.

The tour also resided at Madison Square Garden for 15 nights, selling out 276,852 tickets for a gross of $63,102,676 as reported to Pollstar’s Boxoffice. It’s feats like these that earned Styles his second Pollstar Award for Tour of the Year in a row, and placed “Love On Tour” on the third spot of Pollstar’s Mid-Year Top 100 Worldwide Tours.

Subscribe to Pollstar HERE