Divide And Conquer: Ed Sheeran Sets The All Time Touring Record

Ed Sheeran
Zakary Walters / Zakary-Walters.com – Ed Sheeran
on his way to play Tusindårsskoven, Odense, Denmark, July 27, 2019.

Ed Sheeran is doing something he rarely does: taking a break. “This is my last gig for probably 18 months,” Sheeran said Monday night (Aug. 26) on the final stop of his record-setting “Divide Tour” at Ipswich’s Chantry Park in his home county of Sussex, England. He called the moment “bittersweet” before leaving the stage. This came after a marathon-like 893 days and 255 shows with a staggering 8.9 million tickets sold (more precisely 8,880,927) and a massive gross of $775.6 million ($775,591,676) – the most ever by any artist. 

 On average, Sheeran played a stadium or arena twice a week for two and a half years. From Pala Alpitour in Turin, Italy, on March 16, 2017, to his Chantry Park finale, Team Ed was in constant touring mode – a perpetual ballet of ceaseless travel, set-ups, teardowns, planning the ones ahead, staying on point with promotions, production, transportation, vendors, ticketing, and of course, the performances. All of which begs the question: Why? 
“If your business is music and you want to entertain people then you want as many people as possible to hear your music,” says Stuart Camp, Ed Sheeran’s longtime manager. “That’s always been an overarching motto.” When we speak it is late July and Team Sheeran is a few days out from surpassing U2’s record-setting gross of $735.3 million from its “360 Tour.”

Ed Sheeran
Zakary Walters / https://www.zakary-walters.com – Ed Sheeran
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But for Camp, who uncoincidentally says his favorite band is U2, notes it was never a goal to break revenue records. “It was never a driver for us,” he says. “Bums in seats was always quite special to me because I was always very aware of what that record was. When we knew we were going into the third year Jon [Ollier, of CAA, Sheeran’s longtime agent outside of North America] and I started adding it up and realized, ‘Okay, we’re actually going to do this.’”
Ed Sheeran
Zakary Walters / https://www.zakary-walters.com – Ed Sheeran
“This” happened on Aug. 2 at Messegelände, a fairgrounds and outdoor exhibition area in Hannover, Germany, where the “Divide Tour” reached $736.8 million and surpassed U2’s eight-year record gross of $735.3 million on the “360 Tour,” which ran from February 2009 through July 2011.
“All props to them, it’s a great accomplishment,” said a gracious Arthur Fogel, chairman of Live Nation Global Music and the promoter for U2’s “360 Tour.” “Well, you know, fucking Babe Ruth, right? Records get broken. And it’s a good thing. It’s certainly not a bad thing. So props to Ed Sheeran. It’s a great achievement.”  This he says acknowledging that comparing the two tours is somewhat like “apples to oranges.”
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This bears out when examining the tours’ radically different approaches: Sheeran’s 255 shows at 168 venues was more than double U2’s 110 performances at 76 venues. Though the 360’s configuration allowed for greater capacities while its massive multimillion-dollar “Claws” of which there were three constantly leap-frogging across the globe, made for hefty production costs, far more than Sheeran’s one-man show with just LED screens and effects pedals. 
Unfortunately, both jaunts reinforced the need for touring insurance as each had serious health scares: Bono underwent emergency back surgery in May 2010 causing an eight-week delay and the U.S. leg of the tour to be postponed; while a bike accident in 2018 for Sheeran could have fared much worse (and did for Bono on a later tour).
“It was after the North American arena tour which finished in October 2017,” Camp recalls. “We were due to have three weeks off before going to Asia and Ed went home for the weekend. He was riding his bicycle and just went over the handlebars and landed on both hands. He went to the pub and carried on drinking and didn’t think anything of it. And then at five a.m. he woke up in extreme agony. His girlfriend called and said, ‘He’s not doing well, he’s in the hospital and he’s broken his wrist.’ At that point it was like, ‘Oh my fucking Lord.’ It was a fractured elbow and a fractured wrist but it was the way round where he could heal in four weeks and play guitar. If he had fractured the opposite elbow and the opposite wrist we would have lost half the tour and probably all of it. Your first concern for about three seconds is, ‘Is he okay?’ And then you start shouting at him.”  
Ed Sheeran
Zakary Walters / https://www.zakary-walters.com – Ed Sheeran

Parental “empathy” aside, perhaps the biggest difference between the “360” and “Divide” jaunts and the ensuing eight years was the development of the international touring market. Where U2 hit 28 different countries, Sheeran played 43 or 53.5% more. “If 20 years ago there were 20 to 30 markets, or countries, that were sort of regular touring stops,” Fogel says, “now there’s probably 50 to 60.”

Indeed, looking at the records Sheeran set on his global juggernaut is a geography nerd’s heaven (see page 30): At Reykjavik Iceland’s Laugardalsvöllur, Sheeran played the biggest shows in the island nation’s history with one in seven of the population attending; he was the first artist to play three dates at Sao Paulo’s Allianz Parque Stadium; and he had the largest concerts in the history of Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Latvia, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Helsinki. From Mumbai and Dubai to Buenos Aires and Johannesburg for nearly two-and-a-half years the sun never set on Sheeran’s planetary run.
“You found me out,” cracks CAA’s Ollier, when asked about following the sun as a routing strategy. “Because these are outdoor shows, you need to do them when the weather’s right. In the UK or Europe really, you can do outdoor shows from the beginning of May, if the football season has finished and there’s no fixtures getting in the way, to the end of August. Right after that, it’s too cold, it’s too wet. In Asia and South America you have quite spectacular weather events a with thunderstorms and monsoon seasons.” 
It was either incredibly good fortune then or brilliant planning or perhaps a modicum of both that over the course of 255 shows, “Divide” had but one weather-related cancellation with a lightning storm in Hong Kong (which is being re-scheduled for arena shows in November); otherwise the weatherized Sheeran, often clad in Hoax clothing (his skater clothing line of choice based out of native Suffolk), had no qualms playing through driving rain, wind, chill or otherwise. 
But then there was the resurgent Milwaukee Brewers, something no agent or promoter should ever have to face and something both Paradigm’s Marty Diamond and MTG’s Louis Messina lament. With the fall 2018 U.S. jaunt, the “Divide” tour’s North American agent and promoter, respectively, faced unique challenges with overlapping U.S. baseball and football seasons. “There was a one-percent chance of the Brewers making the playoffs,” said Messina. “But not only did they make the playoffs but they went to the seventh game of the ALCS so we had to now reschedule that date.”
Unlike much of the “Divide Tour,” the latter North American stadium dates in the fall of 2018 (this followed an arena leg in the early summer of 2017) were largely single stadium shows, with the exceptions of doubles at MetLife in East Rutherford, N.J. (grossing $11.2 million), Gillette in Foxborough, Mass. ($9.8 million), and Rogers Centre in Toronto ($8.4 million). While it’s absurd to think of single stadium shows as “underplays,” in the context of Sheeran’s global record-setting jaunts with massive multiple plays, one could argue that a lot was left on the table in the world’s most lucrative market.
Meanwhile, the “Divide” tour’s largest grosses were close to double North America’s including four shows at London’s Wembley Stadium yielding a jaw-dropping $28.7 million gross; a quartet at Sydney’s Etihad Stadium (now Marvel Stadium) grossing a record-setting $20.8 million; a quadruple at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium which earned $19.8 million; and another four at Dublin’s Phoenix Park brought in $17.1 million. 
As astronomical as these grosses are, credit Team Sheeran’s steadfast and egalitarian commitment to keeping ticket prices fan affordable with nary a VIP section in sight while attempting to play before as many fans as possible (Garth Brooks has taken a similar approach). The “Divide” tour’s $87.33 average ticket price was some 16% lower than the ”360” tour’s $101.15 average ticket price. More impressive, the “Divide” tour’s 2018 average ticket price of $88.96 was 42% below that same year’s Top Ten average of $126.75. 

Ed Sheeran
Zakary Walters / https://www.zakary-walters.com – Ed Sheeran
Sheeran’s team takes great pride in its efforts to keep tickets out of the secondary market and into the hands of adoring fans. “Basically, we had to figure out a way we could do this on a large scale, particularly in the UK in venues where we couldn’t necessarily put customer’s names on tickets because we were going into huge stadiums where they don’t necessarily have the technology to print tickets with names or cross-check them as you go through a turnstile,” says CAA’s Ollier. “So we had to come up with a means to stop the secondary market and identify tickets that ended up on there. I can’t go into great detail about how we did it because that would be giving away the game, but suffice to say we had systems we devised to identify these tickets that allowed us to handle them.” 
At the core of all this quantified success, obviously, is a prodigiously talented and driven 28-year-old Edward Christopher Sheeran. His ability to write and record irresistible hits – look for the earworms that are “Shape of You” and “Perfect” to played in perpetuity at weddings, funerals and empty hotel bars – and his preternatural ability to perform them solo before millions of transfixed fans who sing along full-throated en masse with parents, neighbors and entire communities across the globe in a way unmatched by any artist.
“Fearless and relentless” is how Camp describes Sheeran’s work ethic as far back as when he was sleeping on his London couch circa 2009. This came after seeing the 17-year-old wunderkind perform in Leeds before a half empty room and left gobsmacked by the teenager’s talent.
“He’d play open mics and poetry evenings and things that weren’t your standard rock crowd,” Camp recalls. “If anyone wanted to have him, he’d go. I’d go see him thinking, ‘Let’s go have a beer and go home afterward,’ and he’d go, ‘Oh no, no, no. I’ll see you later, I have to do another one.’ He’d play people’s parties, he’d advertise, ‘Give me 20 quid and a couple of beers and I’ll come and play your house party.’ That was always his strong point. Just put yourself in front of people and the word of mouth will spread.” 
A decade later that word’s spread in an unprecedented manner to nearly 89 million people in 43 countries in 168 venues over the course of 29 months in a marathon of touring for which Sheeran’s A Team should also be fully credited. In addition to the aforementioned Camp, Ollier, Diamond and Messina, there’s Kilimanjaro’s Stuart Galbraith and Steve Tilley, DHP Family’s Dan Ealam, FKP Scorpio’s Folkert Koopmans and Australia’s Michael Gudinski of Frontier Touring who together made the global tour run on time and many of whom made their way to Ipswich for this historical tour’s last hurrah. 
“It was a very, very emotional,” says Gudinski of the tour’s final performance and afterparty. “He just gave it everything he could. He said, ‘I’m going to lose my voice tonight, I don’t care, you’re going to sing along.’ It was a very emotional ending from management, to crew, to 
Ed himself, to a lot of us that have worked on the tour.”