Impact International: UK/Euro 2024 Honoree Simon Jones

“CREATING HISTORY IN EACH PLACE WE HAVE GONE TO”

Simon Jones promoted two of the biggest tours in history with two of the biggest artists of all time out on the road at the same time in 2024: 81 stadium and outdoor shows over 10 months across 34 countries, and 40 cities with Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran. An experience that “will live long in the memory and a highlight difficult to top,” as Jones wrote on his socials.

Jones promoted 24 dates of the 2024 leg of Ed Sheeran’s “Mathematics Tour” spanning 19 countries, and “taking the show to far flung places,” including “some that he has never been before,” he wrote. Along the way, Sheeran broke several attendance records, leading to the biggest ever shows in many of those new markets.

Sheeran, for instance, performed for two consecutive nights at the newly renovated Darius and Girėnas Stadium in Kaunas, Lithuania, Aug. 3-4, gathering more than 80,000 fans, and setting a new ticket sales record in the Baltic states for a show by an international artist. The box office report for this record hadn’t been submitted to Pollstar at the time of writing, but another one had: two sold-out shows at The Sevens Stadium in Dubai, Jan. 19-20, the best-selling concerts in UAE history. Sheeran moved a total of 58,707 tickets across both nights, grossing $10,579,734.

Moving on to Taylor Swift, one slowly runs out of superlatives. “Eras” is the highest grossing tour to date, exceeding $1 billion in gross in just a year. The overall figure, when the tour wraps in December having visited 57 stadiums worldwide, will be much higher. In London, she equalled a record Take That have been holding for 13 years: performing at the iconic Wembley Stadium eight nights in a row. In Swift’s case, the residency was split up into two parts. It’s still a record for solo artists, eclipsing Michael Jackson’s seven nights at the Old Wembley during his “Bad” world tour in 1988.

The stars aligned for Jones when Sheeran joined Swift on her first night at Wembley to do a couple songs. “Nuts,” Jones wrote on his socials. He added, “The whole year has been quite inconceivable and unfathomable. Articulating the scale is almost impossible. Thank you to all of team Ed and Taylor and all of my team that have worked relentlessly hard across all shows creating history in each place we have gone to.”