These 5 Bands Have Made Over $1 Billion From Touring

It’s widely believed that the current Rolling Stones world tour, which includes their much-anticipated return to Australia this October, could well be the last in their legendary half-century career. But as the tirelessly touring UK quartet have proven, a rolling stone may gather moss but a lifetime of touring also means rolling in the stone cold big bucks.

How big? Over one-and-a-half billion dollars big, which puts The Rolling Stones at the top of an exclusive club of just five artists who have made over a billion dollars from touring since 1990.

Rounding out the Top 5, falling behind the Stones’ #1 position in ranking order, are U2, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Bon Jovi. The new figures come from a new Billboard report tracing the 25 highest grossing touring acts of the last 24 years, as Consequence Of Sound points out.

It makes sense given each of the billion dollar five are usual suspects of year-end touring lists based on Billboard‘s Boxscore charts, as well as regularly ranking on Forbes‘ highest earning and highest paid year-end lists.
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Heck, the Rolling Stones’ two-year long A Bigger Bang Tour alone netted the band over $558 million, while U2’s globetrotting, giant claw starring 360° Tour is the highest earning tour of all time, grossing over $736 million.

But what is surprising is just how much bang for their buck the Top 5 top grossing touring artists make. Rolling Stones and U2 each bust the $1 billion mark from just over 500 shows played since 1990, while Madonna raked in over $1.1 billion from just 382 shows in the same time. Meanwhile The Boss, typically seen as one of the hardest touring acts in the biz, gracing Australia twice in the last year, has played 727 shows since 1990 but only beat Madonna’s earnings by some $56 million but playing nearly twice as many shows (and charging less, presumably).

The rest of Billboard‘s Top 25 list (view in full here) is dominated by similarly heritage music acts, featuring many artists that first broke in the ’70s (Elton John, Eagles, Aersomith) or ’80s (The Police, Metallica, AC/DC) while 15 of the Top 25 feature artists who are now over 60. Of those Sir Paul McCartney, understandably for a former Beatle, has to perform the least to earn the most – grossing $505 million from 220 concerts’ worth of touring since 1990.

The only newer act to make the cut is Coldplay, who have generated nearly $380 million from ‘just’ 315 shows since first emerging in 2000, a pretty princely sum for 14 years’ worth of touring and given they continue that trajectory, could well see them becoming the next Rolling Stones or U2 in the next few decades. After all, as Billboard puts it “biology alone dictates that at some point these touring stalwarts will relinquish their stranglehold, and the question of which acts will replace them has been posed for some 20 years… If the Stones are any indication, U2 – preparing its next world tour in 2015 – has some 20 years of future viability.”

View the five artists that earned over $1 billion from touring below.