BTS top August touring chart as The Weeknd sets attendance record
BTS finished August as the world's highest-grossing touring act, with $171.7 million in reported revenue from 801,000 tickets across 12 shows.
The figures, reported to Billboard Boxscore, Billboard's tracking system for concert ticket sales reported by promoters, put the group at No. 1 on the monthly Top Tours chart for August, according to Billboard. That is an average of more than 66,000 tickets per night.
Close behind, The Weeknd ranked No. 2 with $146.7 million and 995,000 tickets. It is the second month in a row that both acts have reported more than $100 million in a single month, only the third time in Boxscore history that two artists have done so at once.
Both totals sit near the top of the all-time monthly lists. BTS's $171.7 million is the second-biggest one-month gross on record, behind Beyoncé's $179.3 million in August 2023. The Weeknd set the biggest one-month attendance figure on record, passing Harry Styles's 967,000 in June 2023 and his own 892,000 from July.
The routing helps explain the numbers. BTS played six double-headers at North American stadiums, all organised as two-night stands. That run included $32.7 million and 158,000 tickets at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on Aug. 1-2.
The Weeknd's month centred on a five-night stay at Wembley Stadium in London, which grossed $58.2 million from 368,000 tickets. That engagement finished No. 1 on Top Boxscores, the chart that ranks individual venues and multi-night runs rather than whole tours.
The longer tours behind the month are large in their own right. BTS's Arirang World Tour has now passed $500 million in reported grosses since it began on April 9 in Goyang, South Korea. The Weeknd's After Hours Til Dawn Tour, which began in July 2022, has passed $1 billion through shows in Lisbon on Sept. 5-6.
Usher and Chris Brown's co-headline The R&B Tour took No. 3 on the August Top Tours chart, with $91.8 million from 465,000 tickets. Month on month, BTS's gross rose 67% from July, while The Weeknd's rose 18%.
What makes this stand out is the concentration at the top. Two stadium tours selling at this scale in the same month is rare. The wider live market is busy too, with Pollstar reporting more than $6 billion in grosses and 47,453,010 tickets sold in the third quarter, a new quarterly attendance record, according to Pollstar.
