Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour surpassed all previous concert runs in terms of revenue back in January. John has since continued to add to the tour’s enormous total with one last leg of arena performances in Europe. The tour has made $887 million and sold 5.7 million tickets over 309 gigs, according to data provided to Billboard Boxscore through May 30.
John’s nine-show run at London’s O2 Arena, which made $25.3 million from 148,000 tickets between April 2-17, was the largest boost to the already-record-breaking numbers. That earns Elton John the No. 2 slot on the midyear Top Tours list with $138.2 million in revenue, placing him at No. 4 on the midyear Top Boxscores table. The programs that were included in the Midyear Boxscore charts ran from November 1, 2022, to April 30, 2023.
Before his Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour comes to an end on July 8 at Stockholm’s Tele2 Arena, he still has 18 scheduled concerts to report, including a festival appearance at Glastonbury (which won’t count toward his Boxscore total). His yet-to-be-reported totals might be close to $40 million and 250,000 tickets given that this current leg of concerts has been averaging $2.2 million and 13,817 tickets each event.
Charts during the middle of the year are based on data submitted to Billboard Boxscore. programs that debuted between November 1, 2022, and April 30, 2023, are eligible.
The total revenue from Elton John’s farewell tour will reach $925 million, making it the first tour to make over $900 million after breaking the $800 million barrier earlier this year. John’s ticket sales in June and July will bring the tour’s overall attendance tantalizingly close to 6 million, but it will probably only reach closer to 5.9 or 5.95 million. He would need to sell around 17,000 tickets on average every event in order to surpass 6 million, which would be challenging considering that most venues can only hold that many people.
Recently, Elton John’s career gross surpassed $1.9 billion; it is at $1.928 billion. That indicates that, once everything is said and done, he will probably come up just shy of the $2 billion barrier.
Change at the top of the all-time list is inevitable due to the size of John’s tour, expanding foreign markets, inflation, and changing ticketing procedures. At over a year into the Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour, Sheeran reached a new peak, raising the possibility of a potential challenger to the throne from below.
With their current tours, Coldplay and Harry Styles have been circling the list of the top 10. Even if they have additional performances scheduled for 2023, it will be challenging for them to overtake Elton John, who has a $400 million advantage, without extending their schedules into 2024. Sheeran, the former record holder who will wrap up The Mathematics Tour in September, is probably in the same boat.
Future all-time rankings for Beyoncé’s The Renaissance World Tour and Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour are further unknowable. Both tours just started, but they haven’t yet given Billboard Boxscore their earnings. And while every celebrity has stadium dates all year long, Swift has recently begun sporadically announcing additional overseas performances.
John’s farewell haul will be challenging to achieve for any of the aforementioned performers, or for anybody else for that matter. With a summer or calendar-year route, it will be considerably more difficult than previously to defeat the competition because it would likely finish approximately $150 million above the previous record-holder. Elton John will push his record into previously unexplored terrain in the last month of Farewell Yellow Brick Road, dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s on a hall-of-fame global tour.
