Live Nation Leads Promoter Pack In Disrupted Mid-Year

To no one’s surprise, Live Nation comes in at No. 1 for this year’s Top 100 Promoters ticket sales chart, though, as is the case with many on the chart, with numbers well below last year.

This year’s reported totals for Live Nation are 6,854,356 tickets sold and $610,496,487 grossed, less than half of last year’s ticket sales (13,549,891) and bit more than half of the gross for the same period ($1,186,179,283). The industry-wide shutdown brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is no doubt singularly responsible for the massive decline in revenue and ticket sales (see page 21).

Interestingly, Live Nation’s average gross per ticket (gross divided by tickets sold) at Mid-Year this year is $89, roughly the same as last year’s at $87.5. 

AEG Presents, as one would expect, comes in at No. 2 with 1,971,738 tickets sold for $181,086,059 grossed, with each figure similarly at about half of where it was at Mid-Year 2019 (4,270,509 tickets sold, $343,178,782 grossed). 

In addition to their main company, Live Nation and AEG both have subsidiaries or partners listed independently on the chart. The Live Nation family is also represented by MCD Productions (No. 13), Live Nation Global Touring (No. 14), NS2 (No. 20), FPC Live (No.22), C3 Presents (No. 38) and AC Entertainment (No. 54). AEG partners include Messina Touring Group (No. 8), Concerts West (No. 12), The Bowery Presents (No. 53), Goldenvoice (No. 55) and PromoWest Productions (No. 64).

Feld Entertainment (1,577,554 tickets sold) and OCESA / CIE (1,550,053 tickets sold) rank third and fourth, respectively, which is a reverse order from last year. Feld’s numbers held remarkably steady, as they reported 1,764,276 tickets sold during the same period in 2019, indicating either most of their business is conducted before mid-March or they had a huge uptick in business in Q1 this year.

Australia-based Frontier Touring Company came in No. 5 in ticket sales, with 1,158,033, but it was the third-highest grossing promoter, with $122,269,566 grossed. 

The story of last year’s promoter chart was Australian promoters, largely because the chart period encompasses Aussie Summer. This year has six Aussie promoters in the Top 100, whereas last year’s chart had 10. 

Germany is another country well represented on this year’s promoters chart, with seven total, the largest of which are Semmel Concerts Ent. GmbH at No. 6 (1,039,637 tickets sold, $53,171,317 grossed) and FKP Scorpio Konzertproduktionen (396,947 tickets sold, $14,626,833). As is the the story for much of the chart, those figures are approximately half of what they were on last year’s chart.