Boxoffice Insider: Holiday Highlights – Record-Setting Gross For L.A.’s Jingle Ball

Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic – That My Best Friend
Saweetie performs at 102.7 KIIS FM’s Jingle Ball at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif., on Dec. 3, 2021.

?One of the holiday season’s annual live music traditions in the Los Angeles area is the 102.7 KIIS-FM Jingle Ball concert that packs fans in a Southern California entertainment venue each year just days before Christmas. Since 2017, the multiple-act music celebration has been held at The Forum in Inglewood, although following its debut in 2000 at the Shrine Auditorium, the event was also staged in various years at Crypto.com Arena, Honda Center and Microsoft Theater.

According to reported box-office results from the sold-out 2021 concert, the Dec. 3 production established a new record gross for the yearly event. Along with a ticket count of 16,472, the performance at The Forum earned over $2.4 million, a 5.4% increase compared to the gross from two years earlier (no in-person concert in 2020). The 2019 show topped $2.2 million in sales – also a record at the time – and is the only other show in the series to top the $2 million mark at the box office.

Last year’s concert was one of six with a ticket tally surpassing 16,000. The Dec. 5, 2014, performance at Crypto.com Arena, then named Staples Center, moved the most tickets among them with 16,729 seats sold, only four more than the final count for the Dec. 6, 2019, event at The Forum. The Dec. 4, 2015, concert drew a crowd of 16,538 to Staples to rank as the third best-attended Jingle Ball, while the 2021 show follows with the fourth-highest ticket count.

The lineup at the Inglewood arena in December included some of today’s hottest acts such as BTS, Ed Sheeran, Lil Nas X, Doja Cat and Saweetie among others. Tickets for the iHeartRadio-produced event ranged from $42 to a top price of $757. That price scale has remained the same for all four years at The Forum. Since the first concert there, more than 50 artists have participated in the holiday radio show that has logged a combined attendance of 65,146 at the venue. The grosses from all four performances comes to $8.5 million.

The box-office archives also store four-year totals for three other host venues during the Jingle Ball’s history. Staples Center presented the event six times since 2001, yet the archives include the totals from only 2003, 2014-2016. With a price scale ranging from $35 to $425, the arena’s total gross from those four years lands just under $6 million from 63,655 tickets.

The producers took the show to Anaheim’s Honda Center five times: 2002, 2004 and 2006-2008. Based on the data reported from all but their second year, the arena moved 46,168 tickets at four events, grossing $2.6 million. Tickets in that era began at $35 and topped out at $150.

A smaller-scaled version of the Jingle Ball was held from 2009 through 2012 at Microsoft Theater, then known as Nokia Theatre L.A. Live. With box-office figures from five performances reported at the venue (the 2012 event was on two nights), the overall ticket count was 34,744 for a gross of $3.5 million – an average of 6,949 tickets per show for a gross average of $693k.

Overall, with ticket sales data from 16 of the Jingle Ball’s 21 years reported, the number of tickets sold at 17 performances is 209,713, an average of 12,336. The gross from those shows tops $20.5 million, producing a gross average of $1.2 million.