On Wednesday (May 28), Billboard revealed its midyear Boxscore report, tracking the top touring artists, concert venues and promoters around the world. From October 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025, the midyear recap focuses on the biggest tours from the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025, before global stadium tours and music festivals take over the summer.
The animated graphic below shows how the top 10 tours have shaped and shifted over this six-month period.
The immediate leader was Paul McCartney. The legendary Beatle played a sold-out stadium show in Montevideo, Uruguay on the first day of the tracking period, bringing in $4.5 million from 37,573 tickets sold. Later that week, he had two dates at Estadio River Plate in Buenos Aires, adding $20.6 million and 128,000 tickets to his totals.
But by October 9, Bruno Mars stole McCartney’s thunder. Four shows deep into a six-night run at Sao Paulo’s Estadio do Morumbi, Mars’ $28.2 million surpassed McCartney’s $25.1 million. These early shows, plus Luis Miguel’s seven nights in Mexico City and Aventura’s stadium shows in Argentina and Peru, helped establish Latin America as live music’s center of gravity for the early days of the 2025 Boxscore tracking period.
Before the end of October, estimates for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour overtook Mars, McCartney and everyone else, as she began the final leg of her record-breaking two-year trek. While overall tour gross and attendance was reported by The New York Times, show-by-show data has still not been reported to Billboard Boxscore. Therefore, Swift remains absent from official midyear charts and her specific grosses in this time period have not been officially submitted.
Swift stays on top throughout the rest of the video, ultimately grossing an estimated $250 million in the tour’s final months in the U.S. and Canada. But the top 10 continued to fluctuate with November and December shows from Aventura, P!nk and Usher.
After bouncing around the top five in the late months of 2024, Coldplay asserted itself under Swift in January. The band played shows in the United Arab Emirates and India, breaking stadium attendance records for the 21st century with its two nights in Ahmedabad, India (more than 111,000 tickets each show).
Late-in-the-game moves come from K-pop boy band SEVENTEEN and Latin pop icon Shakira. Both artists grossed more than $100 million by the end of March, with Shakira banking her entire $130 million in just the last two months of the tracking period.
Coldplay, Shakira, Eagles, and Usher have all had reported shows in April and May that set them up for bigger totals by year-end. And the last few weeks have seen the kick-off for major tours by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar & SZA and Post Malone. By the end of 2025, this top 10 will likely get shaken up several times over.
