A stadium tour takes a show out of arenas and into football and baseball grounds, for crowds of tens of thousands a night, giant screens and production on a scale that needs its own fleet of lorries.
The template is usually traced to The Beatles at Shea Stadium in New York on 15 August 1965, where about 55,600 fans set a record for a rock concert. The set lasted roughly half an hour, and the screaming was so loud that even amplifiers built specially for the tour lost the battle; Paul McCartney later remarked that nobody could have noticed a wrong note. Six decades on, the numbers belong to a different universe. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour closed in Vancouver in December 2024 after 149 shows, with an estimated gross of 2.2 billion dollars according to Pollstar, the highest of any tour on record at the time and nearly twice the runner-up.