Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard’s Stadium Tour Sold $173 Million in Tickets
I guess it really was worth coming out of retirement. A new feature at Billboard reports that The Stadium Tour featuring Mötley Crüe, Poison, Def Leppard and Joan Jett raked in $173 million in ticket sales.
The 36-date tour sold 1.3 million total tickets, with an average 37,520 fans attending each night. Numbers were obtained by Billboard Boxscore, an organization which tracks the ticket sales at venues and on tours. The Stadium Tour was the biggest of either headliner’s career and their first time playing stadiums.
Boston was the city that loved the tour the most, drawing a cool $9.3 million at Fenway Park on August 5-6, selling 64,000 tickets. Charlotte, North Carolina; Denver; Glendale, Arizona; and Inglewood, California all broke the $6 million mark.
The bright minds at Billboard point out that this is fucking huge for both headliners, whose last tours didn’t turn out nearly this well:
“Both Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe had previously peaked as solo headliners in arenas and amphitheaters with 10,000-11,000 tickets per show on both sides of the Atlantic. The Stadium Tour averaged 37,520 tickets each night, hitting more than three times the audience that each band previously reached on their own.
“Def Leppard experienced something similar on its last co-headline jaunt, breaking one million tickets alongside Journey in the summer of 2018. But despite playing nearly half the number of shows, this year’s Stadium Tour grossed almost twice as much, and pushed an additional 300,000 tickets.
“Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe toured together in Europe in 2011, but the limited reporting for that brief run shows $705,000 and 11,000 tickets in Manchester, less than a third the attendance and about one seventh the gross of the average show on their second go-around 11 years later.”
The report cites COVID-related shutdowns and surging ticket prices as likely reasons that The Stadium Tour grossed so much more money and drew so many more people than previous tours. Mötley Crüe’s “farewell” tour grossed $44.3 million.
Based on Tommy Lee and Vince Neil‘s performances, we’re left wondering how many of those 1.3 million people left feeling like they got their money’s worth.
