Boxoffice Insider: Female-Led Bands In The Spotlight

Girl Power:
John Shearer / Wire Image – Girl Power:
Gwen Stefani and Hayley Williams team up during a 2009 gig at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine, Calif., just one of many female-led bills to do well at the boxoffice.

Along with this week’s cover story on the bands Evanescence and Halestorm, who are set to launch a co-headlining tour later this year, we take a brief look at concert touring highlights from some of rock ‘n’ roll’s other female-fronted bands. Pollstar’s Boxoffice archives showcase many of the touring success stories by female-led rock ensembles, both in contemporary times as well as from past decades.

Twelve years ago, No Doubt also headlined a tour with other bands on the bill that featured a female lead singer. Two of them, in fact. Paramore was in the lineup that year along with Swedish indie rockers The Sounds who opened select shows. No Doubt, with frontwoman Gwen Stefani, performed at venues in 57 cities in the U.S. and Canada from May through August that year, producing a sold-ticket count of 781,615 and $34 million in grosses.
Hayley Williams and Paramore kicked off their own headlining tour just a month after the shows with No Doubt and performed 21 dates in both North America and Europe. The Sounds, with lead singer Maja Ivarsson out front, did the same. They kicked off their fall U.S. and Canadian tour on Sept. 12, 2009 in Montreal before heading to Europe in November and December.
Paramore’s Boxoffice history stretches back to June 2005 and their earliest reported show was at House of Blues in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. During the past 16 years, they have appeared on the “Vans Warped Tour” and the “Honda Civic Tour” among others and co-headlined with Fall Out Boy and Jimmy Eat World. The combined grosses from their headlining dates total $63.1 million with more than 1.4 million tickets sold at 321 reported concerts, the most recent being a Sept. 7, 2018 performance at Nashville Municipal Auditorium.
One rock band that opened for Evanescence and Halestorm at various times since they first hit the Pollstar charts in 2009 is The Pretty Reckless with frontwoman Taylor Momsen. They supported Evanescence at 10 theater performances in 2011, averaging 2,863 sold seats per show. Then in the spring of 2015, they opened eight Halestorm concerts, also set in theaters or clubs, with a sold-ticket average of 1,665 per concert.
Indie rock group Sleater-Kinney rose to fame in the early 2000s before going on hiatus in 2006 but returned for a new album in 2014 and a tour the following year. The band, now a duo after the departure of drummer Janet Weiss in 2019, features the group’s founders Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein who released new music earlier this summer. The boxoffice archives include 175 shows by the band between 1997-2020, grossing $26 million from 677,870 tickets.
Alabama Shakes, which went on hiatus in 2018, won four Grammy Awards during their nine-year run as a blues/rock band with Brittany Howard as lead singer and guitarist. Headlining shows reported for the group were set primarily in theaters and clubs, although quite a number of 2016 and 2017 dates are amphitheater shows. With 136 shows in the archives, the band has a total recorded gross of $15.7 million from 397,898 sold tickets.
Two of the iconic rock bands from past decades featuring women as the face of the group are Heart with Ann and Nancy Wilson and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts who crossed paths on four different tours in recent years. In 2015 they teamed up for seven shows and performed for 34,087 fans at U.S. arenas. Then, the next year they toured Canada, playing nine shows with attendance logged at 33,073. Also in 2016, they joined Cheap Trick for the “Rock Hall Three For All” summer shed tour, performing 31 concerts and selling 344,675 tickets. Most recently, Jett joined Heart for their 2019 “Love Alive” tour. From 13 shed and arena dates reported, the tour averaged 8,755 sold tickets and over half-a-million dollars in grosses per show.