On A Roll: The Rolling Stones rocked Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo on July 11th, 24 hours and 350... [+]
At approximately 9:15 p.m. last Friday,
Almost exactly 24 hours later, some 350 miles away on the outskirts of Buffalo, the lights went out at Ralph Wilson Stadium and its similarly-sized multitude. Perhaps twice as old as their counterparts in New Jersey and twice as drunk, but equally intoxicated on the experience, they wailed at a somewhat lower pitch as another jumbotron offered its interpretation of the American skyline. Then the Rolling Stones charged to the stage to play “Jumping Jack Flash” as a sea of cell phone fireflies chronicled their every move.
“It’s good to be back,” said Keith Richards a few songs later. “It’s good to be anywhere.”
That certainly seems to be the case these days for both the Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift, two acts that couldn’t seem more different. Traveling to their shows on back-to-back nights at the height of summer touring season gave me a fascinating window into the state of the stadium show—its past, present and future—and how, though separated by nearly a half-century in age, these two music titans have far more in common than meets the eye, beginning with their ability to pull in multimillion-dollar paychecks every night on the road.
The Stones are wrapping up their brief Zip Code tour, but they’ve already pulled in enough cash to guarantee a spot among the top tours of the year even if they don’t play another show in 2015. They grossed $80.7 million on a mere 10 stadium dates in the first half of the year, tops in North America, with an average primary ticket price of $178.44, according to Pollstar.
Swift, meanwhile, grossed $46.5 million in the first half this year on a similarly small handful of shows, and should surpass the Stones’ annual total before the end of the summer as her 1989 World Tour continues. With more than 80 shows planned for 2015 in total, she seems likely to gross over $200 million on the year from ticket sales alone.
Over the past 12 months in total, the Stones took home $57.5 million and Swift totaled $80 million, a number that's sure to grow. They've both been taking advantage of unprecedented industry tailwinds. Pollstar recorded global box office reports of 57 million tickets sold for a total gross of $3.4 billion in the first half of the year, up 5.8% over the same period last year. The results are even more astounding in North America, where the top 100 tours generated $1.43 billion, up 39% from a year ago.
“There's been a huge expansion of concert business,” says Pollstar chief Gary Bongiovanni. “There are a lot of different factors.”
Among them: an improved economy in North America and rising incomes in places from South America to Asia, all of which means more people around the world who can shell out $100 for a concert ticket. Swift and the Stones are two of the only acts who can draw enough fans to fill a football stadium on their own, charge high enough ticket prices to easily offset production cost, and benefit from the economies of scale that come along with putting 60,000 people in a building at once.
Katy Perry earned $135 million over the past year, along with a spot on the cover of FORBES, largely because of this phenomenon. Said Perry: “I was able to triple my gross over what I did last tour.”
Swift may well do the same in the coming year.
The Rolling Stones' Buffalo show was the last American date of their Zip Code tour, the highest... [+]
The crowds for the Rolling Stones show in Buffalo began to accumulate somewhere west of Schenectady, at least from my vantage point. That’s when the Amtrak train conductor started advising passengers headed to the show to share taxi cabs.
“If you see Mick,” he exclaimed as we exited the train, “tell him Marty says hello!”
Between then and our arrival at the concert, I found myself in a group that included a thirtysomething ballerina from New York, a middle-aged art dealer from France, and a sunburned, tattooed man who appeared to be in his late 40s.
After we hopped into a cab, I discovered that they’d all been to a wide range of Stones shows beforehand. The Frenchman informed me he’d first seen them in Paris twenty years ago. The ballerina told me she’d been twice, once earlier this year in Pittsburgh, and another time during the 1970s (while in her mother’s womb) and nobody seemed to mind when she asked if we could stop at Rite Aid on the way.
We were becoming concert friends, a concept that has undergone quite an evolution between the age of Woodstock and today, but one that is alive and well nevertheless. Despite the occasional complaints over the effects of music's vast buffet--from an endless array of streaming tracks to a growing number of festivals where consumers can graze rather than pick a favorite--the groupies of yesteryear have morphed into the superfans of today.
This new breed isn't just anonymous a horde hiding behind Twitter and Instagram handles. Before the Taylor Swift show in New Jersey last Friday, concertgoers waited in line with shirts bearing the names of previous tours they’d attended, just as the Stones fans did in Buffalo. They traveled in groups, often sporting matching costumes; during the concert, Swift herself said she was beginning to recognize her fans' faces.
Even the opening acts at both concerts seemed to have cohesive groups of fans who’d shown up mostly just for them. In Buffalo, there were fans who cheered so hard for St. Paul and the Broken Bones it appeared they might not have anything left for the Stones; in New Jersey, the windshield of one red Mustang convertible sported a quote not from Swift, but opener Shawn Mendes.
People have been declaring the “death of the rock star” for decades—a simple Google search for the term yields over 100,000 hits (88 million results without quotes). And though there’s certainly less electric-guitar driven music on mainstream radio these days, acts like Swift are well aware of their stadium sellout predecessors and frequently pay homage.
Over the course of her nearly three-hour set, Swift wailed on an electric guitar a few times, about as much as Mick Jagger did; both singers probably pranced multiple miles across the stage over the course of each evening. Swift’s between-songs patter was more extensive than Jagger’s, but he had the best line of either show: after drawing boos from the Buffalo crowd when he said he was staying in the Brady suite, he elicited a delighted roar when he complained that the pillows were deflated.
And so, as the Stones forge ahead into the twilight of their latest tour, Swift sits among the unlikely stadium successors following along the trail they helped blaze. As I contemplated this while waiting for the train home from Buffalo, I remembered my French concert friend—after the Stones' show, I emailed him to ask how the crowd compared to the one in Paris two decades ago. He responded in French:
A Buffalo, ce que l'on gagne en confort de vue et d'écoute, on le perd en ambiance et en animation ... A Longchamps, la foule étaient massée contre les barrières placées devant la scène ... la chaleur, la pression de la foule faisaient plus d'effet sur les cris, les hurlements et les mouvements des centaines de fans qui étaient arrivés des heures avant le début du concert."
In other words, what the crowd in Buffalo gained in comfort, it lost in ambiance and animation. In Paris, fans strained against the barriers in front of the stage--and the heat and pressure of the crowd heightened the screams, the shouts and the movements of hundreds of fans who had arrived hours before the start of the concert. That last part reminded me of a concert I'd seen recently: Taylor Swift in New Jersey.
My train eventually pulled into the station, and much to my surprise, I was greeted by a familiar face—Marty, the conductor from my inbound train.
He grinned. “Did you tell Mick I said hello?”
For more about the business of entertainment, check out my Jay Z biography and my latest one, Michael Jackson, Inc. You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook.
