Blockbuster Tours, Boutique Festivals & A Bespoke Pop‑Up Stadium: The International Business Has It All

This has been another year of massive business, but one figure outshines them all: $2 billion, the mark Taylor Swift broke on “The Eras Tour,” which wrapped at Vancouver’s B.C. Place Stadium, Dec. 8, setting a new all-time touring record for overall gross, as well as the 10 million-plus tickets that generated it. A substantial amount of that business was done internationally, including eight performances at London’s Wembley Stadium, where Swift equalled a record Take That have been holding for 13 years.

Ed Sheeran joined her on stage for one of those shows, incidentally an artist who once broke a former all-time touring record himself.

Just like “Eras,” Sheeran’s current “Mathematics” tour has been setting attendance records in many cities. He, for instance, performed for two consecutive nights at the newly renovated Darius and Girėnas Stadium in Kaunas, Lithuania, Aug. 3-4, setting a new ticket sales record in the Baltic states for a show by an international artist on 81,118 tickets sold at a $8,652,692 gross, according to the box office report submitted to Pollstar. Or the two sold-out shows at The Sevens Stadium in Dubai, Jan. 19-20, moving 58,707 tickets ($10,579,734 gross) – the best-selling concerts in UAE history. Sheeran’s tour is ongoing, scheduled to wrap in September next year.

“Having the stars align like they did and for them both to perform together at Wembley was an incredible and emotional moment,” Simon Jones at AEG Presents, international promoter for both these stand-out artists, wrote on his socials.

As Pollstar’s year-end charts show, there’s also healthy business to be made at the arena level. It’s the grassroots sector, where all the above mentioned talent, including the crews that put together these shows, learned and honed their craft. And, as Pollstar’s reporting across 2024 shows, the grassroots sector is struggling. But help is coming, with the UK leading the way: Coldplay pledged to donate 10% of their 2025 UK ticket income to grassroots venues; Katy Perry pledged to donate £1 per ticket sold on her UK dates next year. The country’s new Labour government has mandated that the UK industry come up with a ticket levy system, whereby revenues from the blockbuster shows would be injected into the grassroots economy.

Small businesses are endangered in the current economy: 70 independent festival cancellations or outright closures in 2024 in the UK alone prove it. Which is why the launch of Found Festival in 2025, a new boutique, family-oriented event in Buckingham, England, with a capacity of 2,000, is encouraging – especially because its founders had to put a stop to another event, Towersey Festival, after 60 years, celebrating its very last edition Aug. 23-26.

One event in Europe this year combined both massive scale and a boutique approach: Adele’s 10-night Munich residency in Germany in August. A team of this industry’s finest brought to life a 76,000-capacity pop-up stadium made to measure for a single artist, surrounded by an Adele-themed adventure park full of surprises for any real fan.

From the show’s design, its stage, including a 200-meter wide LED wall, the impeccable audio to the financing of this nine-figure undertaking: the sheer effort it took, and the brilliant result the audience was treated to, are probably best summed up by Live Nation GSA CEO Marek Lieberberg, who directed this production symphony, and spoke of a “once in a lifetime achievement, a true milestone in music history.”

Another instrumental partner involved in this feat, Adele’s production manager Paul English, was also over the moon about this project, describing it as a career-high. But he also spoke of the divide between this industry’s top and bottom as maybe the biggest challenge to overcome. “I hope that gap closes between the small and the big,” he said, “support is required for the smaller venues, because that’s where we came from.”