This article lists the most-attended concerts of all time. The oldest 100,000-crowd concert reported to Billboard Boxscore is Grateful Dead's gig at the Raceway Park, Englishtown, New Jersey on September 3, 1977. The concert was attended by 107,019 people, which remains the largest ticketed concert in the United States to date. Frank Sinatra, Tina Turner, and Paul McCartney broke the record respectively in Maracanã Stadium. With an audience of over 184,000 people on April 21, 1990, McCartney's record was broken by a Japanese rock band, Glay, which held a concert with an audience of 200,000 people on July 31, 1999, in Chiba, Japan (Makuhari Parking Lot). GLAY held the record for 6 years. Italian singer Vasco Rossi surpassed the record with his solo concert on July 1, 2017 with a total of 225,173 tickets sold at Modena Park. The concert was a celebration of his 40 years of career.
Although the attendance numbers of free concerts are known to be exaggerations, [1] several concerts have been reported to have a million audience or more. Both Jean-Michel Jarre's concert in Moscow 1997 and Rod Stewart's concert in Copacabana 1994 have been reported to attract audiences of more than 3.5 million people. Jean-Michel Jarre has attracted a live audience of more than a million spectators on five occasions, three times in Paris, 1979, 1990 and 1995, once in Houston, 1986, and once in Moscow, 1997. He is the only artist ever to have done so.
The current attendance record for a free concert within a public event is now held by Melanie C who performed on a float, during of 2019 Global Pride Tour, in the streets of Sao Paulo in front of 3.7 million spectators. [2] [3] [4] In 2024, Madonna's closing performance of The Celebration Tour in Rio de Janeiro, which was free to attend, attracted over 1.6 million people. [5] It became the all-time most attended standalone concert for any artist performing for free. [6]
* | Indicates the concert was the most-attended of all time up to that point |
‡ | Indicates standalone free concert |
The following are the most-attended single-artist's ticketed concerts (excluding music festivals) with attendance of 100,000 people or more.
The following are free concerts with reported attendance of one million people or more. The first ever was by French artist Jean-Michel Jarre in Paris in 1979, which created the Guinness Book entry. It also includes multi-artist festivals which may not be directly comparable with single-artist concerts. Attendance numbers for many of the kinds of events listed here rely on estimations from the promoters and are known to be exaggerations. [1]
Copacabana is a bairro (neighbourhood) located in the South Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is most prominently known for its 4 km (2.5 miles) balneario beach, which is one of the most famous in the world.
Jean-Michel André Jarre is a French composer, performer and record producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and new-age genres, and is known for organising outdoor spectacles featuring his music, accompanied by vast laser displays, large projections and fireworks.
Madonna Louise Ciccone is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. Regarded as the "Queen of Pop", she has been widely recognized for her continual reinvention and versatility in music production, songwriting and visual presentation. Madonna's works, which incorporate social, political, sexual, and religious themes, have generated both controversy and critical acclaim. A prominent cultural figure spanning both the 20th and 21st centuries, she remains one of the most "well-documented figures of the modern age", with a broad array of scholarly reviews, literature, and art works about her, as well as an academic mini subdiscipline devoted to her called Madonna studies.
Oxygène is the third studio album by French electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre. It was first released in France in December 1976 by Disques Motors, and distributed internationally in 1977 by Polydor Records. Jarre recorded the album in a makeshift studio that he set up in his apartment in Paris, using a variety of analog and digital synthesizers, and other electronic instruments and effects.
A concert is a live music performance in front of an audience. The performance may be carried by a single musician, sometimes then called a recital, or by a musical ensemble, such as an orchestra, choir, or band. Concerts are held in a wide variety and size of settings, from private houses and small nightclubs, dedicated concert halls, amphitheatres and parks, to large multipurpose buildings, such as arenas and stadiums. Indoor concerts held in the largest venues are sometimes called arena concerts or amphitheatre concerts. Informal names for a concert include show and gig.
Équinoxe is the fourth studio album by French electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre, released in December 1978 on the Dreyfus record label, licensed to Polydor Records for its worldwide distribution in 1979. The album featured two singles: "Équinoxe Part 4" and "Équinoxe Part 5", the latter having more success reaching No. 45 on the UK Singles Chart. It reached number 11 on the UK Album Chart and number 126 on the US Billboard 200 chart.
Rendez-vous Houston: A City in Concert was a live performance by musician Jean Michel Jarre amidst the skyscrapers of downtown Houston on the evening of April 5, 1986, coinciding with the release of the Rendez-Vous album. The concert celebrated the 150th anniversary of Houston, Texas and NASA's 25th anniversary. For a period of time, it held a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest outdoor "rock concert" in history, with a estimated of 1.5 million in attendance is the second entry of Jarre in the book. Rendez-vous Houston also celebrated the astronauts of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which had happened only two and a half months earlier. One of Jarre's friends, astronaut Ron McNair, had been killed in the disaster. Ron was originally going to play the saxophone from space during the track "Last Rendez-Vous"; his substitute for the concert was Houston native Kirk Whalum.
Rendez-Vous is the eighth studio album by electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre released on Disques Dreyfus, licensed to Polydor, in 1986. The album art was created by long-time collaborator Michel Granger.
The Concerts in China was a concert tour by Jean Michel Jarre in 1981. It marked the opening of post-Mao Zedong China to live Western music. Five concerts were held in the two biggest cities on October 21 and 22 in Beijing, and on October 26, 27 and 29 in Shanghai. The five concerts were filmed and recorded for later commercial releases.
Guy Harley Oseary is an Israeli-American talent manager and writer. His clients include Madonna, Amy Schumer and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whom he has managed since 2021.
Jean-Michel André Jarre is a French composer, performer and music producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, synthpop, ambient and new-age genres, and an organiser of outdoor spectacles of his music featuring lights, laser displays, and fireworks.
The Celebration Tour was the twelfth concert tour by American singer Madonna. It began on October 14, 2023, at the O2 Arena in London, and ended on May 4, 2024, with a free concert on Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana Beach. Originally set to kick off on July 15, 2023, in Vancouver, the tour was postponed and pushed back to October after Madonna developed a "serious bacterial infection" in late June, which led to a multiple-day stay at the intensive care unit. As her first retrospective tour, it was based entirely on her back catalogue and 40-year old career.
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