What’s one of the hottest tickets out there right now? Lady Gaga, at least according to the barometer of the secondary ticket market, which — no matter what your stance is on ticket reselling — gives an indicator of how fans value an artist. While Internet pundits prattled on about Gaga’s troubled album launch, her audience voted with their dollars. The verdict is clear: artRAVE: The ARTPOP Ball is one of the hottest tours of 2014.
Secondary ticketing service StubHub’s Popular Artists ranking — shared exclusively with Billboard-indicates the increase in keyword searches on StubHub for artists in the week after their tours were announced. Tour awareness is critical, because if fans don’t know an artist is coming to their town, they’re not going. And Gaga’s artRAVE tour announcement definitely made some noise in early December. Gaga is in the lead according to StubHub’s popularity metric, with a 900% increase in searches for that week. Following Gaga as “most anticipated” acts are George Strait (up 700%), One Direction (up 400%), Miley Cyrus (up 345%) and Billy Joel (up 154%).
Given StubHub’s status as the leading secondary-market destination, this data has weight. But for a ticket to be hot on the resale market, logic would hold that it has to have been sold in the first place (though some brokers find ways around this), and artRAVE is indeed selling well on the primary market. A source at tour producer Live Nation says more than 330,000 tickets have been sold for the 28 shows in the United States and Canada, and the tour doesn’t even begin until mid-May. That’s an average of nearly 12,000 tickets per night, and that’s robust business.
While the Billboard Boxscore chart uses box-office data submitted after dates have been played, StubHub’s list of top-selling acts for the year provides insight into advance demand. The five top sellers in terms of revenue on StubHub so far this year are, in order, One Direction, Strait, Justin Timberlake, Joel and Luke Bryan. When 2014 comes to a close, it’s a safe bet that all five acts will be near the top of the Boxscore tally on a revenue-per-show basis.
As of February, Strait’s final concert, set for June 7 at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, is both the most anticipated (searches) and the most popular (revenue) for the year. The show, promoted by TMG/AEG Live, sold out at more than 100,000 tickets in less than an hour in December.
The secondary-market debate centers on primary stakeholders’ desire to share in resale revenue, and it won’t be settled anytime soon. The secondary market thrives because consumers demand it, to the tune of one-ticket-per-second on StubHub, which had huge increases in concert ticket sales (61%) and revenue (63%) in 2013. Fans have learned that “sold out” doesn’t mean tickets aren’t available. In the case of Strait, a fan’s “must see” also means it’s a “must pay,” as two tickets to Strait’s AT&T show top out on StubHub at $16,282.