The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sixty’ Confirmed As Their Most Successful European Tour
The tour grossed $120 million and played to total audiences of 712,000, reports Billboard Boxscore.
The Rolling Stones’ recent Sixty tour of Europe grossed $120 million and played to total audiences of 712,000, reports Billboard Boxscore. The 14-date run – the third time in six years that the band have played that exact number of shows on a European itinerary – was announced in March and took place between June 1 and August 3.
The biggest engagement on the tour was, of course, the Stones’ return to London’s Hyde Park, because it featured two shows on consecutive weekends, playing to a total of 130,000 people and grossing $22.4 million. But the show at Olympiastadion in Munich on June 5 was also highly notable for breaking the $10 million grossing plateau. Several more topped the $9 million mark, including the opening night in Madrid (June 1), Amsterdam (July 7), and Vienna (July 15). The tour, almost uniformly acclaimed in the media in each country it visited, featured the band’s first-ever live performance of the 1966 track “Out Of Time.”
The average audience across each of the 14 dates was 51,000 per show, and the average gross $8.6 million. By those metrics, Sixty is thus the band’s most successful European tour ever, ahead of the 2017 and 2018 legs of the No Filter tour, which averaged just under $8.6m and $8.4m, respectively. By the measurement of total grosses, the recent schedule was behind the European leg of the Licks tour in 2003 – hardly surprising as that run’s total $129.7m gross was generated by a total of 46 dates.
Taking a deeper dive into its archives, Billboard Boxscore reports that the Stones’ total European tour grosses dating back to the Urban Jungle leg of the Steel Wheels tour, in 1990, are now at $904.2 million and 10.1 million tickets. Their total worldwide box office takings, from the first leg of that tour in 1989 to the present day, are $2.6 billion and a mind-boggling 28 million tickets.
Listen to the best of the Rolling Stones on Apple Music and Spotify.