Festival and event titan Live Nation has announced that Coldplay's "A Head Full of Dreams Tour" is the third-highest grossing global tour of all time.
The 114-show tour, which ended its run at a sold-out stop this week in Buenos Aires, took in a total of $523,033,675 in ticket sales, according to Live Nation. It turns out the band actually took over the No. 3 spot a couple weeks ago, before its last five shows in South America. According to Billboard Boxscore, the gross at the end of October was right at $500 million ($499,077,863 to be exact) through 109 shows. That's more than former No. 3 Roger Waters' The Wall Live, which grossed $459 million between 2010 and 2013.
Live Nation also notes that Coldplay reached several high-water marks in their career since embarking on the tour in support of A Head Full of Dreams in March 2016, including playing the Super Bowl 50 Halftime show and setting an attendance record at Mexico City's Foro Sol venue.
Approximately 5,389,586 million fans saw Coldplay in the year-and-a-half long tour, Live Nation reports, their biggest and longest outing to date. The tour was praised for its extensive visual productions including laser shows, confetti cannons, pyrotechnics and interactive light-up wristbands.
The all-time highest grossing tour remains U2’s 360 Tour, which tallied $736.4 million during its run from 2009 through 2011. In second place is The Rolling Stones' A Bigger Bang Tour and its $558.2 million gross between 2005 through 2007.
The success of such tours throughout 2017 has been credited to expanding capabilities for arena shows, which constituted a large number of Coldplay's itinerary. Doug Thornton, an executive overseeing more than 230 stadiums and arenas for SMG, told Billboard that "people that go to a stadium show now, [they] have a better opportunity to see the artist because of the size and quality of the screens...and Coldplay’s show is the best I’ve ever seen. The production of it was amazing. That adds to it."
Additional reporting by Bob Allen.
