Boxoffice Insider: Nine Years Of Lolla Latin Style

Santiago Bluguermann / Getty Images – Sam Smith
Sam Smith was one of many at Lollapalooza’s second consecutive year in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 29-31 at the Hipodromo de San Isidro.

It’s the early days of autumn in South America and, for local music fans, that’s festival time, as the Lollapalooza music festivals that occur each year in Argentina, Chile and Brazil arrive. The 2019 events are all in the books now, having each wrapped in recent weeks. The festivals in Buenos Aires and Santiago both ran for three days during the last weekend of March, and São Paulo’s festival occurred the following weekend, from April 5-7.

This year, the top draws on the Latin American lineups were Twenty One Pilots, Arctic Monkeys, Kendrick Lamar, Post Malone, Sam Smith, Lenny Kravitz and Tiësto. Kings of Leon and Brazilian rock supergroup Tribalistas both played exclusively at the Brazilian event.

Chile was the first South American country to host a Lollapalooza-branded, multi-day event, launching in April 2011 with a two-day event. After staging Lollapalooza’s popular flagship event in Chicago’s Grant Park for six years, beginning in 2005, the festival’s producers had decided to expand into international markets, and Lollapalooza Chile was the result. The Killers, Kanye West, Deftones and Jane’s Addiction led a slate of some 60 acts for that inaugural 2011 event.

Last year, the Chile festival – held at Santiago’s Parque O’Higgins on March 16-18, 2018 – stretched to three days for the first time with Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Killers headlining a list of performers that also included The National, Chance the Rapper and Liam Gallagher, among others. Daily attendance was 85,000, according to boxoffice data reported to Pollstar.

In 2018, Lollapalooza Brazil, which debuted in 2012, a year after Chile’s event premiered, also expanded to three days for the first time. In its first two years, the Brazil festival was held at the Jockey Club in São Paulo, but since then it has been staged at the city’s auto racetrack, Autódromo de Interlagos. 

Boxoffice counts reported last year by T4F-Time For Fun – producer of the festival along with C3 Presents and WME – showed 100,000 attendees each day for the March 23-25 run that featured, as in the other two markets, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and The Killers as headliners.

Last year’s overall gross reached $23.3 million (USD) based on tickets that ranged in price from R$297.50 to R$2,000 ($91.50-$615.50 USD). That set a new single-day gross record for the event that topped earnings from the previous year by $1.1 million. Contributing to the rise in gross sales was a top ticket price that almost doubled last year, jumping 92 percent from R$1,040 in 2017.

T4F’s reports from the past five festivals in São Paulo show a steady increase each year in gross earnings, as reported in the local currency, the Brazilian Real. The 2014 gross topped at R$23.1 million and then R$23.4 million, R$30.5 million, R$41.1 million and R$75.9 million consecutively for the next four years.

Daily attendance shows more variance from year to year, with rises and dips generally around the 100,000-ticket range, but 2018’s total was 47 percent higher than the single-day attendance of 67,936 in 2014.

Argentina’s 2019 Lollapalooza festival on March 29-31 also stretched over three days for the second consecutive year, as it did in Chile and Brazil. 

The festival’s first year of operation in Buenos Aires was 2014 with an April 1-2 stint that featured Arcade Fire, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden among the slate of entertainers. Producers have not reported box-office data from the Argentina festival since the opening year, which saw a $10.7 million gross from just over 50,000 attendees each day. s