Bad Bunny Makes History as Top Touring Act for 2022: The Year in Charts

Things, for a while, have been unprecedented. Following an 18-month quiet period for concert venues worldwide, doors slowly opened, first in the U.S. and increasingly so around the globe. This made for an excepted review of touring in 2021, but the full return of live music presents a much fuller picture this year. With the 2022 year-end Boxscore recap, precedents continue to fade as Bad Bunny finishes as the year’s top touring act (No. 1 on Top Tours) with total gross of $373.5 million from 1.8 million tickets across 65 shows.

Explore All of Billboard’s 2022 Year-End Charts

Bad Bunny is the first Latin act, and first act who doesn’t perform in English, to finish atop Billboard’s year-end Top Tours chart. Beyond the historic nature of his win for genre and language, he is the only artist to mount separate $100-million tours in the same year.

Further, while Boxscore charts often favor older acts with deeper histories on the road, like 2020 and 2021 champs Elton John and The Rolling Stones, Bad Bunny’s win this year is a testament to the growing power of contemporary stadium acts. In fact, the 28-year-old is just the third artist to simultaneously crown the year-end Top Tours and overall Top Artists charts, following Taylor Swift in 2015 and One Direction in 2014.

Bad Bunny’s year in touring breaks down into several parts. First, he played two hometown stadium shows at San Juan’s Hiram Bithorn Stadium, earning $6.5 million on Dec. 10-11, 2021. That was followed by El Ultimo Tour Del Mundo, an arena run named after his 2020 album that broke ground as the first all-Spanish-language set to top the weekly Billboard 200 chart. On that trek, he earned $116.8 million from 35 shows, enough to set a record for the highest-grossing Latin tour in Boxscore history.

Billboard’s Year-End Boxscore charts are based on figures reported to Billboard Boxscore for engagements that played between Nov. 1, 2021-Oct. 31, 2022. 

That tour broke local records in Inglewood, Calif., Miami, Houston, Seattle, and more, setting the stage for an even bigger fall in 2022. After releasing Un Verano Sin Ti and spending most the summer at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, Bad Bunny played three Puerto Rico shows for a $4 million gross, and then properly embarked on World’s Hottest Tour, living up to its name at each stop.

The trek leveled Bad Bunny to stadiums and took in $232.5 million in North America, plus another $13.8 million from its first four Latin American shows. After setting arena records throughout the U.S. in the spring, he set revenue records in 12 of the 15 domestic markets he played in the fall. While Daddy Yankee’s La Ultima Vuelta World Tour quickly stole Bunny’s all-time Latin tour record from earlier this year, World’s Hottest Tour re-sets the pace as the first pan-American stadium tour of its size.

All of that combines to $373.5 million during the twelve-month tracking period, amounting to a record-setting, historic No. 1 finish, eclipsing Elton John and Ed Sheeran at Nos. 2-3, each of whom was a previous year-end victor.

These men lead the most eye-popping Top Tours chart ever. Five acts grossed more than $200 million, beating the previous high of four in 2018, and 16 acts generated more than $100 million in ticket sales, nearly doubling the previous high of nine in 2017 and 2018.

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