Will Adele Have the Biggest Concerts on Earth?

Adele‘s 10-night August residency in Munich, which opened Friday night (Aug. 2), could be the biggest concert engagement ever, both in terms of attendance and ticket sales. It almost certainly represents the biggest bet anyone has placed in the live music business this year.  

The shows, promoted by Live Nation Germany and the Austrian Leutgeb Entertainment Group, are held in a custom-built venue that holds 74,000, and the production is reported to have cost more than $100 million, including construction cost. Just the 220-meter-wide screen, said to be the biggest in the world, is said to have cost dozens of millions of dollars. And that’s before the string section, fireworks, and the logistics involved in Adele World, which includes a Ferris wheel, a biergarten, and merchandise operation the size of a large boutique. 

The engagement, which runs two days a week throughout August, could break the Billboard Boxscore attendance record for a concert engagement, currently held by Coldplay, which drew 627,000 fans to 10 shows in Buenos Aires in 2022. It could also break the box office record of almost $110 million, held by U2 for its first 17 shows at the Sphere, in 2023. (Adele has not generally reported concert grosses to Billboard Boxscore, so the records may stand anyway.) 

Adele, who has been performing the Weekends with Adele residency at the Colosseum Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, has not played in continental Europe since 2016 and has no concerts booked there, so the shows in Munich are a destination event. She had no plans to play anywhere this summer, until Klaus Leutgeb presented her manager, Jonathan Dickins, with the idea for the residency. 

Concert residencies are becoming more popular, but they are mostly an Anglo-American phenomenon. In this case, Munich is a relatively small city by international standards, with a population of about 1.5 million in a metro area a bit less than four times that. (By comparison, Los Angeles has 3.9 million in a metro area of 13.2 million.) That implies that most concertgoers are coming from outside the city or the country. (Anecdotally, Billboard met fans from all over Germany at the show, plus a few each from the Netherlands, the UK and Ireland.)  

All that tourism will bring an enormous amount of money to Munich. The city’s top economic official, Clemens Baumgärtner, has said Adele’s residency will bring in 560 million Euros ($614 million). The city is an ideal place to hold a residency, given its relative proximity to Austria, Italy and Switzerland; it’s easy to get anywhere in Germany by train and anywhere in Europe by plane.  

The promoters told the German music trade publication Musik Woche that 95 percent of the tickets had been sold. (Live Nation Germany did not respond to questions about sales, and the shows are not sold out, although the first show looked close to capacity.) Even if just 85 percent of tickets are sold, this engagement would break Coldplay’s attendance record. Tickets were available at an array of prices, from 79 Euros ($87) to more than a thousand Euros for high-end VIP packages, with some tickets available for 35 Euros ($38) the day of the show; at 85 percent capacity, an average price of 160 Euros ($176) would make it the highest-grossing engagement as well. (Some tickets seem to be available for less than face value on the secondary market, and a half dozen concertgoers were trying to sell extras before the first show, but the promoters apparently sold those initially.)