With the news that Coldplay’s massive Music of the Spheres World Tour will continue into 2025 with more UK stadium shows next summer — at Hull’s Craven Park Stadium on August 18 and 19, before a record-breaking run of 10 shows at Wembley Stadium in London between August 22 and September 8 — it’s a good time to reflect on the marathon run’s place in the all-time list of blockbuster tours.
Pollstar recently anointed Music of the Spheres as the “highest grossing rock tour of all time”, noting that the run, which began in the spring of 2022 following the release of the LP of the same name, has raked in more than $1bn while shifting almost 10 million tickets. That figure recently rose again after tickets for Hull and London sold out, with the band confirming that 10% of their proceeds will be donated to the Music Venue Trust.
Coldplay have been putting up numbers similar to these for years. In fact, at this point it’s easier to see them primarily as a live spectacle — a Cirque du Soleil-type revue rooted not in the circus but polite indie-rock. The records keep coming (‘Moon Music’, a companion piece to the original ‘Music of the Spheres’, is on its way) but Chris Martin et al seem to exist most vividly on stage, surrounded by people, pastels and plumes of eco confetti.
In that sense, they are cut from the same cloth as U2, The Rolling Stones and Pink, artists who have made the live arena their lucrative, pyrotechnic playground for decades. But what drove history’s other blockbuster tours? Here we take a look back in order to understand why certain shows cross over into something that lingers in our shared consciousness.
Get hold of the conversation
The last tour to wear the crown as Pollstar’s most lucrative ever tells us that omnipresence and the wrangling of the zeitgeist are big drivers behind outsized success: Taylor Swift’s big-beyond-big Eras Tour rapidly became its own industry (the gears are about to grind back into motion for more shows in North America) off the back of her prolific recorded output and a razor sharp understanding of how to structure a show in order to capitalise on a moment. We probably won’t see another quite like it.
But that doesn’t mean its use of context is unique. History is dotted with similar examples, from Beyoncé’s incredible Renaissance shows (hat tip for needing comparatively few dates to break records) to Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA run, which rolled on for more than a year, and more than 100 shows, in the mid-1980s. It was for a time the biggest of them all, and a crowning glory for an artist whose music had squared the circle between the muscular bombast of the era and a thoughtful (oft-misunderstood) undercutting of Reaganism’s many trickle-down miseries. It was a spectacle for its times.
Time to say goodbye
Getting a last chance to see a legend play is a powerful thing. Elton John’s long farewell on the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road Tour was a winding, sentimental send off that spanned almost half a decade, with Billboard’s Boxscore reporting receipts of $939.1m and six million tickets sold upon its conclusion in the summer of 2023. On a similar tip you have The Jacksons’ 1984 Victory Tour, a big bucks post-’Thriller’ sign off from Michael to his family band (whether they knew it was a sign off is a different conversation).
Looking ahead to next year, Ed Sheeran could add his own two cents to this conversation with the next leg of his Mathematics Tour, which is ostensibly a goodbye to his era of naming stuff after mathematical symbols. Having already pitched up at stadiums worldwide as part of the run, next summer’s European tour could push him to the top of the table with the biggest tour of them all.
Flipping this one on its head for a minute, there’s also something special about a debut, particularly one like Janet Jackson’s 131 show Rhythm Nation World Tour in 1990. There the pop icon — who is currently on the road with her Together AgainTour — overcame an unusual set of circumstances and heavy expectations. It’s not often that a first headline tour uses a runway of four era-reshaping albums to get off the ground, but that’s what Jackson did thanks to a blend of wild choreography and surprisingly nimble, funky performances.
No, do call it a comeback
There’s a lot to be said for finally seeing something you’d convinced yourself you’d never actually see. Something like Axl Rose and Slash on the same stage, maybe. After decades of “will they, won’t they, they definitely won’t, they might” back and forth, Guns N’ Roses’ Not in This Lifetime... Tour became a truly remarkable success story for its near three year run between 2016 and 2019. The rock icons got it together and held it together long enough to bank, according to Billboard, $584m and 5.4m clicks of the turnstile, which is bananas when you consider the open animosity of the preceding years.
Also in this bracket it’s worth considering Pink Floyd in the mid-to-late 1980s, when their A Momentary Lapse of Reason Tour became a phenomenon. The band hadn’t been a true touring proposition for years by that point and, while the insane theatrics of ‘The Wall’ lingered long in the memory, there were fears that they might never be again.
With Roger Waters also on the outside looking in following his exit in 1985, there were certainly obstacles to overcome. But coming in just shy of 200 shows, and ending with a date at Knebworth in the summer of 1989, the tour was a monumental success that brokered a new era of the band now led by David Gilmour (who’s currently playing shows behind his new solo record), Nick Mason and Richard Wright that would continue into The Division Bell Tour several years later, itself the biggest tour of all time for a while. On the other side of the coin, witness Bob Dylan rolling on well into his 80s with the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour feeding into his self-styled Never Ending tour, which very much does what it says on the tin. No comeback required.
Coldplay Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Wed October 30 2024 - MELBOURNE Marvel Stadium
Thu October 31 2024 - MELBOURNE Marvel Stadium
Sat November 02 2024 - MELBOURNE Marvel Stadium
Sun November 03 2024 - MELBOURNE Marvel Stadium
Wed November 06 2024 - SYDNEY Accor Stadium
Thu November 07 2024 - SYDNEY Accor Stadium
Sat November 09 2024 - SYDNEY Accor Stadium
Sun November 10 2024 - SYDNEY Accor Stadium
Wed November 13 2024 - AUCKLAND Eden Park
Fri November 15 2024 - AUCKLAND Eden Park
Sat November 16 2024 - AUCKLAND Eden Park
Mon August 18 2025 - HULL Hull College Craven Park
Tue August 19 2025 - HULL Hull College Craven Park
Fri August 22 2025 - LONDON Wembley Stadium
Sat August 23 2025 - LONDON Wembley Stadium
Tue August 26 2025 - LONDON Wembley Stadium
Wed August 27 2025 - LONDON Wembley Stadium
Sat August 30 2025 - LONDON Wembley Stadium
Sun August 31 2025 - LONDON Wembley Stadium
Wed September 03 2025 - LONDON Wembley Stadium
Thu September 04 2025 - LONDON Wembley Stadium
Sun September 07 2025 - LONDON Wembley Stadium
Mon September 08 2025 - LONDON Wembley Stadium
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