Re: 39. AUGUST 2018-DECEMBER 2019: MORE TOURING AND RUMOURS ABOUT MUSIC TO COME

by **Soulmonster** Mon Oct 14, 2024 2:30 pm

FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE OF THE NOT IN THIS LIFE TIME TOURING IN 2016-2019

I mean, playing on this tour when you're playing in front of a hundred thousand people and you just see this stadium that is packed, it's overwhelming at times when you're looking around going, "How did this happen?" [laughs] For me it's still like... it's amazing.

StageLeft Podcast, June 1, 2017

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EARLY DOUBTS OF FINANCIAL SUCCESS

In the beginning of the tour there were reported doubts regarding some of the financial decisions of the tour, with the Wall Street Journal writing that "Live Nation Entertainment may have overestimated the appetite for this summer’s blockbuster 25-date Guns N’ Roses reunion tour" [Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2016]. The newspaper pointed to the band's decision to play cities in smaller markets resulting in venues that were not sold out [Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2016]. Live Nation would counter this:

Guns N Roses’ Not in This Lifetime Tour is an unqualified success. Not only is it the #1 rock tour of the summer, it will be one of the top grossing tours of 2016 and one of the most successful reunion tours of all time. At six shows into the tour, it has already grossed more than $100,000,000 in ticket sales. Live Nation expects to surpass 1 million tickets sold and we congratulate the band on this monumental achievement.

Fortune Magazine, July 8, 2016

THE NORTH AMERICAN TOUR OF 2016

In September the data were in: Guns N' Roses had been the highest selling act in this period, grossing $116.8 million during the North American leg of its Not in This Lifetime Tour, and playing for more than 1 million fans [Billboard, September 8, 2016].

THE SOUTH AMERICAN TOUR OF 2016

Also the South American tour was a success, grossing more than $56 million.

Guns N' Roses: South American Leg Of 'Not In This Lifetime' Tour Grosses More Than $56 Million

According to data reported to Billboard Boxscore, thirteen concerts on the South American leg of Guns N' Roses' "Not In This Lifetime" tour yielded a total gross of $56.545 million and more than 565,000 tickets sold.

105,000 tickets were sold to the band's November 4 and November 5 shows in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with another 93,600 fans attending the group's November 11 and November 12 gigs in São Paulo, Brazil. The October 29 concert at Santiago, Chile's Estadio Nacional drew 62,375 people.

Billboard/Blabbermouth, February 1, 2017

NEW ZEALAND AND AUSTRALIA IN 2017

And for Australia and New Zealand, the band sold more than 350,000 tickets, a number that surprised Paul Dainty, CEO of TEG Dainty.

Guns N' Roses Sold Over 350,000 Tickets In Australia And New Zealand

Guns N' Roses sold a whopping 353,000 tickets during its recent tour of Australia and New Zealand.

The band also became the first international act to sell out the 74,000-capacity MCG in Melbourne. In addition, 85,000 people saw the band perform over two nights in Sydney.

Paul Dainty, CEO of TEG Dainty, said that he was surprised GN'R sold so many tickets this time around.

"Guns N' Roses has a huge fan base in Australia, but I would say it's now bigger than ever after this fabulous tour," he said. "Every night the band delivered its trademark sound and performance. I can't speak highly enough of their professionalism and passion. We would love to see them back soon."

Blabbermouth, March 6, 2017

Guns N’ Roses leads the latest slate of Hot Tours (see list below) with box-office grosses reported from stadiums in Australia and New Zealand during a three-week sweep through both countries in February. With eight performances in seven cities during the trek, the band added $38 million in sold ticket revenue to the Not In This Lifetime… Tour’s overall gross that now reaches $230 million since its April 2016 launch. (Note: This does not include revenue yet to be reported from seven Asian markets during the first quarter.)

The trek began on Feb. 2 at Westpac Stadium in Wellington, the first of two New Zealand cities on the schedule. The venue hosted a sellout crowd – as did Auckland’s Western Springs Stadium two days later – to open the run. The first Australian performance was in Brisbane on Feb. 7 at the QSAC Stadium that held a crowd of 39,459. Sydney was the second stop in the country and the only market to offer two shows to fans. ANZ Stadium sold a total of 84,277 tickets for concerts on Feb. 10 and 11. The $9.2 million gross at the Sydney venue is the top grosser Down Under and the fourth-highest overall since the tour began a year ago.

The three stadiums that have grossed more than Sydney also hosted the tour for two shows, but they each surpassed the $10 million mark in ticket sales. MetLife Stadium in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area is tops with $11.6 million last July followed by double show stadium runs during the band’s trek through Latin America in November. Estadio River Plate in Buenos Aires logged sales just over $11 million and Allianz Parque in São Paulo grossed $10.7 million.

Blabbermouth, April 26, 2017

BREAKING RECORDS IN 2017

With the successful touring, Guns N' Roses made it to Forbes' Celebrity 100 list of the worlds top-earning entertainers:

After three decades, six studio albums and seven tours, Guns N’ Roses has made Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list of the world’s top-earning entertainers for the first time. The American band, which landed at No. 12, earned $84 million in the past 12 months, pre-taxes and management fees. That cash came courtesty of the five-continent Never In This Lifetime Tour, reuniting classic members Axl Rose, Slash and Duff McKagan for the first time since 1993.

Forbes, June 12, 2017

By mid-2017, the band had grossed $151.5 million and was the top tour of 2017 and was the only group to have sold more than 1 million tickets [Variety, July 14, 2017].

The 2017 touring was also among the winners at Billboard's annual Touring Awards, winning the "Top Tour/Top Draw" category in front of U2 and Coldplay [Blabbermouth, November 16, 2017]. The band was among the top-runners in the category "Top Boxscore", but lost to U2 [ Billboard, November 15, 2017].

THE 2017 EUROPEAN SUMMER TOUR

The summer tour drew in $112 million from 19 shows and by then it was estimated that the touring since 2016 had resulted in revenues of close to $400 million [Billboard/Blabbermouth, October 18, 2017.

JULY 28-SEPTEMBER 8: THIRD NORTH AMERICAN LEG

The third leg in North America topped the list of highest-earning tours in that period, before Paul McCartney and Roger Waters, with a a total revenues of 55 millions [Billboard, October 5, 2017].

END OF 2017

At the end of the year, Pollstar reported that the Not In This Lifetime tour had grossed a total of more than $109 million from the Americas and more than $292.5 million from worldwide-touring with more than 2.68 million tickets sold [Pollstar, December 26, 2017]. For comparison, in 2016 the world-wide had a total gross of $188.4 million [Pollstar, December 26, 2017].

Billboard reported in early 2018 that the total gross sales of the NITL tour was $475 million with 4.3 million people attending the 123 headlining shows that spanned 5 continents [Billboard, January 4, 2018].

In June of 2018, Ken Fermaglich, rock agent at United Talent Agency, would describe the initial skepticism to Guns N' Roses as a touring entity but how well it had worked out and how professional the operation had been:

The experience people are having right now, from a consumer perspective but also from a business perspective, is really good. Whatever happened in the past is past. I asked people early on in this project to suspend their opinions from the past and try to focus on the here and now and the future, because that’s how we’re looking at it.

It’s a whole new day for the band and we believe in their ability to do incredible things and we’re seeing it come to life. Luckily, our business partners have done an amazing job, and I give credit to a lot of them. [Many] lived through problems 20 years ago and took all of that, parked it and said, “OK, show me what you can do today,” and the band has delivered.

Pollstar, June 19, 2018

FEBRUARY 2018: DOUG GOLDSTEIN IS NOT IMPRESSED

Despite the impressive financial numbers, Doug Goldstein would claim they could have done five times better if he had been in charge:

Yeah, I understand it's huge, successful, but it could have been way bigger if I would have been involved. And I would have done it for free. I don't care. I'm at that point, I don't care. They don't want my involvement and I'll discuss that with you a second. But when they originally discussed the announcement, right, "Getting back together," and like Blues Brothers, "Put the band back together." There was a one paragraph announcement that went out. Now, in my world, I would have hang-glided naked over Giants Stadium with a flare in my ass saying, "We're back!" "You know, our management says we're back." And maybe, just maybe, Slash and Duff would have joined me, maybe, who knows? But I mean, it was just, it went without fanfare. In every city that they're playing, nobody's even aware of their playing. You know, and the thing I'm most proud of Mark, in In the 2 1/2 years Use Your Illusion tour, I defy you to find one empty seat. [?], because I wasn't interested in maximizing the dollars to milk it out of that one, I'm worried about the next city. If you can't get a ticket, you're going to be first in line on the next tour. You know, why are they having such international success? Gee, I don't know. Yeah, they wrote the music, but the fact that my degrees in international marketing, when everybody else is sleeping I'm writing marketing reports and talking to people in Tel Aviv, Australia, South America. So they're not even aware of some of the things that I did for them financially, improving their label deal from a 15% royalty because Niven, whatever, I mean, it's irrelevant. He did some things that were a little unscrupulous, but I had to renegotiate with David Geffen. It actually turned ugly, I won't go into it, but suffice to say, after a number of months - Eddie Rosenblatt is a wonderful, sweet man, president, and David Berman, who's one of my favorite people on the planet, head of business affairs - they allowed me the opportunity to improve that deal to 34 points, more than doubling the royalty. At the time it was the highest royalty in the history of music, they were four points higher than Michael Jackson. Metallica has a better deal now because they use this.... In California they have something called the seven-year statute for any written contract, even marriage, after seven years it becomes null and void. So they contested the seven-year statute and ended up getting a 50/50 deal. But at the time, you know, they got that deal. And oddly enough, the only person who recognized it and thanked me was Izzy Stradlin, who was out of the band. He'd get these massive royalty checks and call me and go, "Dude, thanks, I can buy motorcycles now." [...] Where's the television coverage? [...] I could have increased it by five times. No question. I mean, that's what I did for them when I was their manager.

Talking Metal Podcast, February 16, 2018

END OF 2018

Guns N' Roses' "Not In This Lifetime" is now believed to be the second-highest-grossing tour of all time, having generated an estimated $562 million since it began two and a half years ago.

According to Pollstar, "Not In This Lifetime" topped $82 million in sales during 2018 alone, having grossed an average of $3.7 million per show over the course of the 24-date run.

At least four other tours have topped $500 million in sales: U2's "360" ($735 million), The Rolling Stones' "A Bigger Bang" ($558 million), Ed Sheeran's "Divide" ($555 million) and Coldplay's "A Head Full Of Dreams" ($523 million) tours.

Sheeran's "Divide" tour resumes in 2019, and with 45 headlining stadium dates already booked, the British singer will likely overtake U2 and claim the title of highest-grossing tour of all time.

Pollstar/Blabbermouth, December 17, 2018

In early 2019 it was announced that the Not IN Tis Lifetime tour would be honored with Ticketmaster's Touring Milestone Award:

When you look at the tours that wrapped this past year, it's incredible to see the caliber of artists that were on the road. These artists are unmatched in their ability to transport an audience to another place through their music, performance and production. This Touring Milestone Award is intended to recognize their commitment to their fans, to their art, and to the live experience.

Ticketmaster, March 15, 2019

END OF 2019

After the fall tour of 2019, and more than three years of touring and 158 concerts, the band had in total grossed $584.2 million from5,371,891 tickets [Billboard, November 22, 2019]. The tour was the third highest-grossing tour in the history of Billboard Boxscore [Billboard, November 22, 2019]. The band broke $10 million on five different concerts throughout the run: London, England; East Rutherford, N.J., USA; Tallinn Estonia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Sao Paolo, Brazil; and eclipsed 100,000 tickets on four occasions: London, England; Mexico City, Mexico; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and East Rutherford, N.J: USA [Billboard, November 22, 2019].