At midyear, business is good.
According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the 50 biggest tours of the first half of the chart year collectively earned more than $2.7 billion and sold 20.7 million tickets. Compared to last year’s first half, those figures are up — not with the velocity of the supercharged, early post-pandemic standard, but with single-digit percentage gains that show promise as the business heads into the prime of stadium season.
Billboard’s midyear Boxscore charts are based on reported shows between Oct. 1, 2025, and March 31, and ranked by cumulative gross. International grosses are converted to USD.
Lady Gaga and Bad Bunny top the midyear listing — with the former securing the top spot in a photo finish. Gaga leads Bunny by a margin of less than 3%, and only overtook him in the final week of the tracking period. Both acts posted stunning grosses for such a short span of time.
Gaga’s The Mayhem Ball is the highest-grossing tour at midyear, with $236.2 million grossed — the highest midyear gross in Boxscore history (dating to 1991), outpacing U2’s Sphere stint ($231.6 million) from two years ago. U2 got there by brute force, charging an average of $368 per ticket for the venue’s inaugural residency. Gaga had a still-high-but-earthbound ticket price of $203.98 but won by persistence. She played 52 shows in six months, roughly double Bad Bunny’s count and more than any act in the top 50 other than Trans-Siberian Orchestra, with its dual ensembles touring the country at once, and comedian Nate Bargatze. That show count exceeds all the acts on last year’s midyear ranking too, again with the asterisk of TSO and stand-up comics.
With Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS World Tour at $230 million, this is the first time that two acts grossed more than $200 million in the same midyear period. Last year, no artist even cracked $150 million in that period.
But while the rest of the top 10, and entire top 50, is strong, the top two’s groundbreaking performance doesn’t extend further: Paul McCartney and Shakira are next, each with less than half of Gaga and Bad Bunny’s earnings. There are fewer $100 million tours than in previous years (five, compared to six in 2025 and eight in 2024), and $50 million tours (16, compared to 19 and 20, respectively). By the bottom of the top 50, 2026 regains a lead, as Rüfüs Du Sol rounds out the chart with $23.7 million, up from $21.6 million for Dead & Company at No. 50 last year and $22.1 million for Peso Pluma in 2024.
Overall, this year’s $2.7 billion is up 8.4% over last year’s $2.5 billion, but still down 16% from 2024’s $3.2 billion. That year included not just U2 at Sphere, but P!nk, Madonna and Luis Miguel all over $150 million, plus Coldplay, RBD, Depeche Mode and Eagles each with nine-figure grosses.
But while last year’s midyear Top Tours chart took a 22% slide year-over-year after 2024’s enormous growth, the results at the end of the year were almost exactly even. At year-end, 2025 was down just 0.3% from 2024, marking the first annual decline, small as it may have been, since 2015 (excluding COVID years). Last year’s leveling off is lightly offset by 2026’s 8% midyear uptick, but perhaps confirms that the era of explosive post-pandemic growth is over.
2025’s midyear report also showed a drop-off in ticket prices, down 5.5% among the top 50 tours from $147.17 to $139.09. That slide has continued this year, off another 6.3% from one midyear to another, to $130.36. “Buyers are getting more educated,” Tixr’s Sara Mertz told Billboard in May. “Artists are impacted by high touring costs, and buyers are also dealing with high gas prices. And 100%, I do think a correction is coming.”
Then again, the midyear period — spanning the fourth quarter of the preceding year and the first quarter of the current one — has never been a perfect indicator of where a year is headed, as demonstrated by last year’s second-half catch-up. Since the midyear tracking period closed at the end of March, Bruno Mars and BTS kicked off stadium tours in early April, and Harry Styles began his 10-date Amsterdam residency in mid-May (by the end of the chart year, he’ll also stage a 12-date residency in London and the first half of his 30-date run at New York’s Madison Square Garden, in addition to multi-night stands in São Paulo and Mexico City). This mirrors last year’s spring stadium launches for Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Post Malone and Beyoncé, all three of which finished among the year’s top 10 tours.
Plus, using the midyear Top Tours chart as a north star regarding the health of the touring industry only tells part of the story. Growth among the biggest tours is mirrored by increases in grosses and attendance overall for the biggest of Billboard’s six capacity-defined venue rankings. In stadiums, arenas and amphitheaters worldwide, earnings are up more than 20% across the board, padded by platinum tickets and VIP packages. But for rooms smaller than 10,000 seats, numbers are more even compared with last year.
The 20 highest grossing venues with a capacity of 5,001-10,000 (large theaters and boutique arenas) are up 7.3%, collectively, from last year. Among venues with cap of 2,500 or less (small theaters and clubs), grosses are down by almost 9% and attendance is off by 6%. As top-tier ticket prices and show grosses have skyrocketed in the 2020s, there has been parallel discourse about how touring has become increasingly difficult and expensive for mid-level and small acts.
The race among the highest-grossing venues at midyear was as tight as the margin on Top Tours, spread across three different capacity-based charts. Las Vegas’ Sphere is top dog again (No. 1 on Top Venues, 15,001+ capacity), up 12% from last year with $185.2 million and 819,000 tickets sold from residencies by Eagles, Zac Brown Band, Backstreet Boys and Illenium, as well as the Unity: Insomniac x Tomorrowland EDM show.
Mexico City’s Estadio GNP Seguros was the most-attended venue of the tracking period with 1.7 million tickets, and it nearly reached Sphere’s earnings, with $182.6 million (No. 1, Top Stadiums). And New York’s Radio City Music Hall leads Top Venues, 5,001-10k cap with $180 million and 1.4 million tickets, largely powered by more than 200 shows of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular between November 6 and January 15. All three venues fall within less than 3% of one another in gross, and are set to maintain a top five position by year-end.
