This Week’s Top Tours: Luke Combs Draws Nearly 100K For Ohio Stadium Show

Luke Combs notches another milestone in his live entertainment career with the seventh highest concert attendance ever recorded for a single performance worldwide by a solo headliner, according to box-office totals reported to Pollstar. He sold a total of 97,367 tickets at Ohio Stadium in Columbus on April 25 during his ongoing “My Kinda Saturday Night Tour.” That ticket total is also the third highest ever recorded at a U.S. venue.

Only George Strait has sold more tickets at a single concert stateside, and The King of Country did it twice. He performed for a sellout crowd of 110,905 on June 15, 2024, at Kyle Field in College Station, Texas, and another 104,793 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, a decade earlier.

Three other artists besides Strait have a higher single-show ticket count than Combs during The Pollstar Era that began in the early 1980s. The Rolling Stones sold almost half a million tickets for an outdoor concert in Toronto on July 30, 2003. Then veteran Italian singer Luciano Ligabue topped 100,000 in sales at two events, one in 2005 and another in 2022, both at RCF Arena in his hometown of Reggio Emilia, billed as the largest outdoor music venue in Europe. And Brazilian pop duo Sandy & Junior sold just under 100,000 tickets for the finale of their 2019 tour, held at Parque Olímpico in Rio De Janeiro.

Combs’ performance on The Ohio State University campus was the fifth stop on his 2026 stadium tour that kicked off on March 21 in Las Vegas. With a total of 368,774 tickets sold at the first five venues on the trek, he averaged 73,754 tickets per night to score his second consecutive appearance at No. 1 on LIVE75. Grosses on his tour so far total $45.4 million for a per-show average of $9.1 million, the highest of any concert headliner on the chart.

Also on LIVE75, Phish joins the lineup based on ticket sales reported from the band’s nine-show residency at Sphere in Las Vegas. During the opening week of the run, sold tickets totaled 49,618 at three performances, April 16-18, for an average of 16,539 per night. That total earns the group the No. 2 ranking as well as the “Hot Shot” tag as the concert headliner with the highest-ranked debut on the chart. The gross from their opening set of shows reached $10.3 million for a per-show average of $3.4 million.

Phish is the fifth headliner with a multiple-show engagement at Sphere so far this year. They follow Backstreet Boys, Zac Brown Band, Eagles, and ILLENIUM, who, together, sold a total of 590,580 tickets across 36 performances. Those four headliners have racked up $131.2 million at the venue since the beginning of the year.

After their Las Vegas residency concludes on May 2, a 21-show summer tour will be next for Phish, beginning on July 7 at Madison, Wisconsin’s Kohl Center. With multiple performances planned in most venues, both the Indianapolis and Denver markets will host three-show amphitheater runs, while New York City’s Madison Square Garden is on the schedule with five concerts booked in July. Also planned are two shows at Boston’s Fenway Park, marking the band’s first concerts at the ballpark since 2019.

The Artist Power Index features a repeat at No. 1 by Bruno Mars, who tops the chart for a third consecutive week. Along with the highest Airplay ranking of any concert performer, he also scores within the top 15 on all three of the other chart metrics. He has the seventh highest Live score based on recent stadium performances on “The Romantic Tour,” his current world tour that began in Las Vegas on April 10.

Global Concert Pulse features a new top-ranked artist as Ed Sheeran moves to No. 1 with a three-month gross average of $7.1 million. His total is based on the last 12 concerts on the Oceania leg of his “Loop Tour.” The tour launched in mid-January with a seven-week trek through New Zealand and Australia and is set to resume May 9 in Latin America.