No Taylor? No problem.
Even without the record-shattering presence of an Eras tour, the global concert business has been booming throughout the first three quarters of 2025, propelled by stadium-filling superstars, ascendant genre kingpins, a consumer thirst for ‘90s/2000s-era nostalgia and a generational rock & roll reunion.
Throw in the fact that top names such as Sabrina Carpenter (CAA) and Chappell Roan (Wasserman) never really seem to be out of cycle anymore, and it’s no wonder Michael Rapino and Live Nation nearly outsold their entire 2024 ticket count (151m) through fiscal Q2 alone.
That milestone can be attributed in part to more and more acts reaching the stadium level and elevating their shows into must-see experiences. The biggest beneficiary from Swift’s marketplace absence has been Beyoncé’s genre-blurring, Live Nation-promoted COWBOY CARTER tour (CAA), which grossed nearly $408m from 1.6m tickets sold to 32 stadium shows, making it the top-grossing country outing of all time.
Beyoncé's COWBOY CARTER tour became the highest-grossing country outing in history. (Parkwood Entertainment)
Stadiums have been singing along loudly this year with other Live Nation-promoted familiar faces such as Coldplay (Wasserman U.S. and Canada; WME ex-U.S.), SALXCO’s The Weeknd (CAA; the artist signed with WME this summer), Ed Sheeran (Wasserman U.S. and Canada; One Fiinix Live ex-U.S.), Imagine Dragons (Wasserman) and Shakira (WME). Coldplay’s three-year Music of the Spheres concluded Sept. 12 after more than 230 shows, bringing in a reported $1.4b at the box office with 13m tickets sold.
The Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn tour became the top R&B tour ever with grosses of more than $635m and 5m-plus tickets sold, and was just extended into early September. Per Pollstar, Sheeran raked in another $140m on his Mathematics tour, which is closing in on overall grosses of $876m since beginning in 2022, and Imagine Dragons soared to $201m from a Europe-dominated run that moved close to 1.7m tickets.
The Grand National tour, co-starring Kendrick Lamar, above, and SZA, made history around the world. (Greg Noire/pgLang)
Kendrick Lamar and TDE's SZA (Wasserman) were a stadium slam-dunk on their history-making Grand National tour. The worldwide run grossed $55m at three May SoFi shows alone, and a July MetLife Stadium double for 108k fans brought in $24.8m. Grand National also set records for the top-grossing hip-hop tour and co-headlining tour, cementing two new seat-filling stars for decades to come.
Fellow rap iconoclast Tyler, the Creator (Wasserman) was on the road longer in 2025 than any in his career, but grosses in the $200m region for his CHROMAKOPIA tour surely made it worth the effort. The trek was highlighted by six sellouts at Crypto.com Arena in L.A. and four at London’s O2, feats Tyler will follow Nov. 15-16 with his annual Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival at Dodger Stadium alongside Childish Gambino, Doechii, A$AP Rocky and Clipse.
Post Malone (CAA) also proved up to the challenge of leaping from arenas to stadiums, as his Jelly Roll-assisted Big Ass Stadium tour grossed nearly $170m following a Coachella headline play. Posty will be back out in secondary and tertiary markets in 2026.
It has been a touring comeback for Shakira, whose Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran world tour reaped nearly $128m and sold 1.6m tickets to make it the biggest Latin run of 2025. The tour was particularly strong in Latin America, where it was expanded to more than 30 shows in nine countries. In Mexico, Shakira set a new mark with 12 dates at Mexico City's GNP Seguros Stadium in front of 1m fans.
Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan cemented their places as future stadium-fillers during their 2025 roadwork.
Carpenter cleaned up abroad with the second leg of her Short n’ Sweet tour (including a sold-out London Hyde Park play for Jay Marciano and AEG’s British Summer Time), which is dovetailing seamlessly into a fresh fall arena run in support of her latest album, Man’s Best Friend. Insiders have tipped her and a new class of stars such as Olivia Rodrigo, Dua Lipa and Roan (who headlined major European festivals this summer and recently sold 80k tickets for two short-notice October shows at Pasadena’s Brookside at the Rose Bowl) as poised to jump to stadiums on their next round of dates.
Numerous acts raised their games into arenas for the first time, highlighted by Full Stop’s Tate McRae (CAA) and her Live Nation-promoted Miss Possessive tour, and Benson Boone (WME), whose AEG-repped American Heart world tour has gone clean in the most prestigious buildings in North America this fall. Lainey Wilson (WME), Sandbox’s Kelsea Ballerini (CAA) and Laufey (Wasserman) also proved they were worthy of larger buildings, while U.K. upstart Olivia Dean (CAA) quickly leveled up to arenas by selling out four O2s in spring 2026. She’ll open for Carpenter in U.S. arenas in the fall.
If loud guitars are your thing, you may have contributed to the box office dominance of Metallica (IAG), System of a Down (WME), My Chemical Romance (CAA North America and U.K.; Wasserman Europe, Asia and South America), Crush’s Green Day (CAA), Deftones (CAA North America; Wasserman ex-U.S.) and Nine Inch Nails (WME). The longevity of those bands has led to new career milestones.
Oasis, however, were the true returning heroes, as Noel and Liam Gallagher strutted back into the spotlight for the first time since 2009 and are barreling toward a half-billion in grosses on their worldwide reunion tour. The Brit-pop blokes instantly sold out doubles at stadiums in New Jersey, Chicago, Toronto, L.A. and Mexico City for overjoyed, multigenerational audiences, many of whom had never put faces to billion-streamers such as “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and “Wonderwall.”
Oasis instantly sold out doubles at stadiums in New Jersey, Chicago, Toronto, L.A. and Mexico City for overjoyed, multigenerational audiences, many of whom had never put faces to billion-streamers such as “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and “Wonderwall.”
There were plenty of young faces in the pits on Metallica’s M72 tour, too, which after two years has brought in a whopping $476m and this summer set attendance records in Denver, Houston and Syracuse, New York. The Q Prime-overseen M72 will pass $700m at the gate by the time it wraps next summer.
System of a Down’s 15 shows—all stadiums—were its most in eight years, a trend that will continue with seven additional European gigs next summer with support from Silva Artist Management’s Queens of the Stone Age. Mid-2000s emo standard-bearers My Chemical Romance cleared an astonishing 450k tickets from 10 North American stadiums this summer, and will be back in ballparks next year, as well as at the top of Danny Wimmer Presents hard-rock fests in Daytona Beach, Florida, Columbus, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky.
Exclusively in non-U.S. markets save for a few festivals, Green Day’s Saviors tour remained a monster into its second year, crossing the 100-show threshold and approaching nearly $400m in grosses. Fellow Northern California rockers Deftones rang in their 37th year with their largest tour to date, as a Gen-Z audience newly exposed to the band through TikTok helped them earn first-time sellouts at Madison Square Garden and Kia Forum.
Bad Bunny will follow his groundbreaking Puerto Rico residency with worldwide stadium dates through June 2026.
Bad Bunny’s music has very little guitar and precisely zero English, but those attributes were hardly impediments to demand for his 31-show No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí residency (UTA) at the 18k-capacity José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum in San Juan, Puerto Rico. While in the midst of a new worldwide leg in support of the 12-time Latin Grammy-nominated DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, Benito will headline the Super Bowl XL halftime show on Feb. 8 in Santa Clara, California.
For country artists, the road was a bountiful place in 2025, as the genre continues to gain popularity internationally. After vowing to abandon traditional touring following his 80-plus show Quittin’ Time tour last year, Zach Bryan and his team at AEG and WME plotted a short but groundbreaking run that sold 180k tickets for two nights in Dublin, 130k at two Hyde Parks in London and culminated at the first-ever concert held at the University of Michigan’s Big House in Ann Arbor. A North American-record 112,408 people turned up.
Luke Combs (WME), Morgan Wallen (The Neal Agency), Red Light’s Chris Stapleton (WME) and Kane Brown (WME) also helped keep the genre sizzling at the box office, while Kenny Chesney (Wasserman) successfully brought Nashville to Sphere for the first time ahead of a Zac Brown Band (CAA) residency at the Las Vegas venue in December.
Such a lovely place: Next year, the Eagles will set the record for most shows at Las Vegas' Sphere.
As it approaches its second birthday, Sphere has enjoyed a banner year with residencies from the Eagles, Dead & Company, Backstreet Boys and Chesney. It has also seemingly cracked the code to fill its dark nights by screening one of the most beloved films of all time. Indeed, the stock price for James Dolan’s Sphere Entertainment Co. clicked its heels to a 52-week high in mid-September after the company sold more than 500k tickets to the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz in its first two weeks on screen. It has now shifted more than 1m tickets, good for $130m at the gate.
And at a time when K-pop has spawned the most-watched Netflix film of all time in KPop Demon Hunters, its real-life artisans are among the fastest growing in live revenue. Seventeen (PLEDIS) brought in $3.5m a night on its RIGHT HERE jaunt, which is in the $200m ballpark to date, while Stray Kids’ Dominate world tour (JYP) has gone north of $185.4. BLACKPINK’s 15 worldwide stadium shows (Wasserman), its first in two years, were also huge hits.
Now’s usually the season when bookers are sweating out the remaining opens on their 2026 calendars, but with Coachella, Stagecoach and Barcelona’s Primavera Sound having announced their lineups significantly earlier than in the past, much of the guesswork has faded from next year look-aheads.
From Newport Folk to Lollapalooza, Luke Combs became a bona fide festival headliner before his massive 2026 outing.
The pop headliners for Paul Tollett’s Coachella (Carpenter, KAROL G and Justin Bieber) belie a typically eclectic undercard featuring David Byrne (UTA), Devo (CAA), Young Thug (UTA) and Addison Rae (WME)—a combination that led to a sellout of both weekends within a matter of days. Stagecoach, which sold out in advance in 2025 with headliners Bryan, Jelly Roll and Combs, will feature Malone, Lainey Wilson and Cody Johnson in 2026.
Among the promising tours already up and out the door for next year, or soon to be: Lady Gaga (CAA), Iron Maiden (CAA North America; K2 ex-U.S.), Sheeran, the resurgent Foo Fighters (WME), Linkin Park (WME), Activist’s newfound stadium inhabitants The Lumineers (Wasserman), Good World’s Ariana Grande (CAA), mgk (WME), Gorillaz (CAA North America; X-ray ex-U.S.), Pierce the Veil, Carpenter, Halsey (UTA), Lorde (Wasserman North America; CAA ex-U.S.), Tame Impala (CAA), Doja Cat (CAA), Yungblud (CAA), the reunited Rush minus the late Neil Peart (IAG), TWICE (JYP), Carín León (UTA; the first Latin artist at Sphere), RAYE (Wasserman), Cardi B (UTA) and Nine Inch Nails. Those in the know remain mum about an extension of the Oasis tour, with a rumored return to the 125k-capacity Knebworth said to be in the offing,
Punters are abuzz about the return of Radiohead, which has barely uttered a peep since 2018 but will assemble for 20 shows in five European cities, starting Nov. 4 in Madrid.
And punters are abuzz about the return of Radiohead (CAA North America; 13 Artists ex-U.S.), which has barely uttered a peep since 2018 but will assemble for 20 shows in five European cities, starting Nov. 4 in Madrid. Thom Yorke and friends will have a presence as part of a mysterious installation at Coachella dubbed “The Bunker Debut of Kid A mnesia,” but a proper tour will likely have to wait until 2027.
One major wrench in the gears for 2026 is the impending World Cup, which will eat up significant space on the schedules of 16 of the biggest stadiums in North America next summer. Some acts are sitting out the season, while others are mulling scaled-back arena runs or experimenting Bryan-style with shows in college football stadiums or baseball parks.
And while there’s no venue too large for Swift to scale, she doesn’t seem in any hurry to get back onstage in 2026. “I am so tired when I think about doing it again, because I want to do it really well again,” she told BBC Radio 1. “I could only do the Eras Tour when I was on the Eras Tour, and that’s two years of having no other hobbies.”