2019-11-19 - Adelaide
Tour: Joshua Tree Tour 2019
Songs played: 25
Audio recordings: 2
  1. Originally posted by melon51:[..]
    Hm, agree for the most part. But if the demand for the stones (in attendance, not revenue) is similar, why did they bother playing 6-8 arena shows then? For the band it's the same effort as doing stadiums?
    Swings and roundabouts... The Rolling Stones are huge in Japan and sold out 3 shows at the Tokyo Dome on the same tour, playing to 150k. U2 is playing twice at a smaller arena on this tour in Japan.
  2. Originally posted by deanallison:[..]
    Just to mix things up a bit. The same reason why u2 don’t always do stadiums. It’s not always about demand but more about the type of show the band want to put on. Maybe the Stones have played certain stadiums and don’t like the atmosphere compared to arena’s which are more built more for concerts anyway.


    I could understand that if they toured AUS regularly. They might think "we feel like doing arena's now, we'll do stadiums in 2-3 years". Would still make it weird to also do 2 stadium shows on that leg though. But this was their first proper tour in 11 years in that region. I have to say that tour was a mix of arenas and stadiums in other places as well. Playing to 150K people over 3 nights in Tokyo clearly shows them trying to meet the demand there. So my guess would still be that they tried that in AUS/NZ as well, which resulted in 2 stadium- and the rest arena shows..
  3. So apart from regional popularity and one-off records by other artists, according to Pollstar U2 is the single most popular touring act in the last 9 years. That should at least settle some of the debate here

    "From 2010 to today, U2 stands alone as the only touring artist to eclipse $1 billion according to Pollstar’s Boxoffice records, with $1.038 billion grossed and 9,300,500 tickets sold on 255 shows (not counting the full “Joshua Tree 2019” run that hasn’t wrapped yet, which Fogel says is another 500,000-600,000 tickets.)"

    Full article: https://www.pollstar.com/article/artist-of-the-decade-u2s-experience-dominace-142820
  4. Originally posted by melon51:So apart from regional popularity and one-off records by other artists, according to Pollstar U2 is the single most popular touring act in the last 9 years. That should at least settle some of the debate here

    "From 2010 to today, U2 stands alone as the only touring artist to eclipse $1 billion according to Pollstar’s Boxoffice records, with $1.038 billion grossed and 9,300,500 tickets sold on 255 shows (not counting the full “Joshua Tree 2019” run that hasn’t wrapped yet, which Fogel says is another 500,000-600,000 tickets.)"

    Full article: https://www.pollstar.com/article/artist-of-the-decade-u2s-experience-dominace-142820
    In the interest of fairness it should be noted that in that time the Rolling Stones played not much more than half that number of shows and played to more than 5.5 millions people bringing in over $900million. So the figures suggest the Rolling Stones would be on target to at least match u2 if they had played as many shows and bring in substantially more money. The credit to u2 is that they’ve actually done they number of shows and achieved they figures as opposed to hypothetically being able to. I still think the Rolling Stones are a bigger band worldwide than u2 though, but u2 will always be the best for me.
  5. Originally posted by deanallison:[..]
    In the interest of fairness it should be noted that in that time the Rolling Stones played not much more than half that number of shows and played to more than 5.5 millions people bringing in over $900million. So the figures suggest the Rolling Stones would be on target to at least match u2 if they had played as many shows and bring in substantially more money. The credit to u2 is that they’ve actually done they number of shows and achieved they figures as opposed to hypothetically being able to. I still think the Rolling Stones are a bigger band worldwide than u2 though, but u2 will always be the best for me.
    That might be true, but is (as you say) hypothetical. We also don't know if there would be enough demand for that, to be honest.

    My guess would be that the Stones could indeednoutscore U2 in revenue (which is partially due to their "babyboomer" audience demographic). My other guess is that U2 would outscore the Stones in attendance numbers. But both guesses are hypothetical as well..