A look back on the biggest concerts ever: including the Eras Tour and Bon Jovi

For some music fans, seeing your favourite artist live means everything.

But some musicians are so popular that their fans are willing to go to extreme lengths just to catch a glimpse from the nosebleeds. 

Music is unifying, and sometimes it's enough just to share the space with people who have the same taste as you. Yet at these events, the concert-goers are sharing the experience with tens of thousands.

With live music coming back in a big way after the COVID pandemic, we’ve gathered up a list of the largest concert events in history – just to give you some FOMO.

Highest grossing music tour - the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift

If you read the news in 2024, it should come as no surprise to you that Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is the highest grossing music tour of all time. 

Swifties came out by the thousands to represent their favourite artist and Guinness World Records ICON Taylor Swift, whose career-spanning discography was combined into a 3.5 hour-long show for her world tour. 

The Eras Tour marked the first music world tour to make over a billion, grossing a record-breaking $2,077,618,725 based on 10,168,008 sold-out tickets over 149 dates. 

Taylor comfortably outpaced Beyoncé’s 56-date Renaissance World Tour ($579,813,546; £468,775,773) in 2023, and knocked Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour ($939 million, or £734.49 million, from 328 shows played between 8 September 2018 and 8 July 2023) off the top spot as the highest-grossing music tour on record.

Highest grossing music festival - Outside Lands

Every year, thousands of music fans travel out to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California (USA) for the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival. While pop culture enjoyers might be surprised that Coachella isn’t the biggest festival out west, Outside Lands has consistently been one of the biggest music fests in recent years, drawing artists like Kendrick Lamar and Lana Del Rey in 2023. 

Outside Lands has broken a few records for highest grossing music festival, such as when they broke the record for the first time in 2019 after making $29,634,734 (£24,624,200), but 2023 has been their most profitable year to date.

They sold over 200,000 tickets that year and made over $40 million in revenue.

Most expensive concert VIP package - Circle Tour, Bon Jovi

And speaking of pricey concert tickets, just be glad you weren’t a Bon Jovi (USA) superfan in 2010. If you wanted to see the rock legend as part of the “reserved, front row, Diamond VIP package” during his Circle world tour, you’d have to shell out $1,875 (£1,212) to get close to the artist.

The package included a “next generation” collectable concert chair (“You sit in it. You watch the show in it. You take it home with you.”), VIP check-in, pre-show hospitality featuring an open bar, buffet, dedicated on-site host and your favourite Bon Jovi hits, a fully autographed tour programme, a $150 (£97) gift voucher to redeem at the band’s official website store, a commemorative souvenir concert ticket and an exclusive leather bag.

Nevertheless, fans of the New Jersey rockstar loved the performance, and Bon Jovi’s Circle tour was the most profitable concert trek of 2010, grossing $201.1 million (£129.9 million) from 85 sold-out shows in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Oceania. A total of 1,909,234 concertgoers attended the shows.

 Header image: Generic image of a crowd at a concert by Nainoa Shizuru/Unsplash