Post Malone By The Numbers: How His ‘Runaway Tour’ Raised The Bar

Burak Cingi/Redferns – Post Malone at Reading Festival 2019.
at Reading Festival 2019.

When the pandemic forced the shutdown of live entertainment in mid-March of last year, Post Malone was one of the fortunate few who had completed the bulk of their scheduled tour dates. Only a handful of shows were left on the itinerary of his “Runaway Tour” when he performed at Denver’s Pepsi Center (now Ball Arena) on March 12, his last appearance before the concert industry hit the proverbial brick wall.

The tour had launched six months earlier on Sept. 14, 2019 just one week after the release of his third studio album titled Hollywood’s Bleeding. It opened with a sellout crowd of 16,781 at the Tacoma (Wash.) Dome, the first of 58 headlining performances reported to Pollstar. The first leg of the tour was originally booked through mid-November, but it was extended into the following year with a second leg of shows planned for U.S. and Canadian arenas beginning on Feb. 4.

Ultimately, reported boxoffice stats from the first show in Tacoma through the final one in Denver showed a gross totaling $96.9 million for the trek. And the combined attendance tallies from both the 2019 and 2020 North American legs totaled 775,619.

Most of the cities on the tour hosted the rapper for one performance, but five arenas booked him for two nights, all during the fall leg. New York City’s Madison Square Garden was the most successful at the boxoffice, claiming both the highest gross and the largest attendance among the five venues. With ticket revenue hitting $4.2 million, it was the only arena to top the $4 million threshold in grosses. It was also the only one to surpass 30,000 sold tickets with its two-show total of 30,486 from concerts on Oct. 14-15, 2019.

TD Garden in Boston had the second-highest gross of $3.4 million from 27,489 tickets at performances on Oct. 8-9, while Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena took in $3.1 million on Oct. 3-4 and logged a headcount of 29,320, second only to Madison Square Garden in the number of sold seats. Two southern California arenas round out the list of five venues with two-night stands. The Forum in Inglewood scored a $2.9 million gross from 27,258 tickets, Nov. 20-21, and Anaheim’s Honda Center logged $2.7 million in sales from 26,568 fans, Nov. 16-17.

Also during the fall of 2019, Malone headlined the final night of the Life Is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas on Sept. 22 as well as the Voodoo Music + Arts Experience in New Orleans on Oct. 27. Promoter Another Planet Entertainment reported the boxoffice counts from the three-day Las Vegas event, Sept. 20-22. The event grossed $17.7 million that weekend with a sold-ticket tally of 129,795.

In 2018 and much of 2019, Malone traveled the world with his “Beerbongs & Bentleys” tour that covered six continents during a 16-month span. Most of his headlining dates were staged in arenas and, in North America, some amphitheaters, but he also played a considerable number of festivals worldwide throughout the tour. Excluding the festival appearances that are not counted in his individual boxoffice numbers as a concert headliner, his solo performances averaged a gross of $970,144 from 12,854 tickets per show. The tour also featured a ticket price average of $75.47.

Those averages in comparison to those from the more recent tour show the growth in his boxoffice results, as the average ticket price for the later tour jumped to $124.91. That contributed greatly to the 72% increase in the gross average from the “Beerbongs & Bentleys” trek to “Runaway” which averaged $1,670,366 in grosses per show. The ticket average on “Runaway” was 13,373 – higher but much closer to the average ticket count on the earlier tour which was only 4% less.

Pollstar’s boxoffice database shows that overall numbers reported for Post Malone – stretching back to his first archived performance on May 30, 2015 at New York’s Webster Hall – total $158.9 million in revenue from 1,628,415 total tickets at 145 headlining performances.