Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia Tour Up 1,500% From Pre-Pandemic Touring

A tour two years in the making, Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia Tour kicked off in February and wrapped its U.S. & Canada leg on April 1, earning $40.1 million and selling 394,000 tickets, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. The tour was promoted by Live Nation in support of her Future Nostalgia album, which was released on March 27, 2020.

Business has been strong and consistent, topping 11,000 tickets in 27 of 28 cities. Milwaukee’s scaled-down capacity at Fiserv Forum is the only exception, and still, that was sold out at 6,312 tickets.

March 1 was the tour’s highest grossing night, with $2.1 million at New York’s famed Madison Square Garden. The next night won top honors for attendance, moving 16,068 tickets in March 2 at Washington, D.C.’s Capital One Arena. But Lipa’s two-night stint at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif. (the only two-night engagement on this leg) was the biggest overall Boxscore of the run, earning $3.2 million from 30,270 tickets on March 22-23.

These numbers are much bigger than the figures Lipa was generating on her last touring cycle. In support of her debut self-titled album, the British-Albanian singer-songwriter hit clubs and theaters in 2017-18, averaging $141,000 and 4,434 tickets per show.

But even those totals include a couple European shows, where Lipa had established her stardom earlier than in North America. Removing those from the equation, her U.S. shows averaged $88,000 and 3,000 tickets. That means that the seven-figure grosses and five-figure attendance tallies of the Future Nostalgia Tour represent a 346% increase in tickets sold and, combined with the boosted confidence of a $102 average ticket, a 1,479% boom in per-show gross.

That kind of transition from one tour to the next is rare. Contemporary arena stars such as Bad Bunny and Billie Eilish moved more traditionally from large clubs to theaters to arenas, even if they did so at breakneck speed. Same goes for (relatively) new arena pop stars including Halsey, Lorde and Khalid.

Still, it isn’t unprecedented. Ariana Grande saw nightly grosses blast by 693% between 2013’s The Listening Sessions ($67,000) and 2015’s The Honeymoon Tour ($539,000). Further, the average take between 2009’s The Fame Ball ($48,000) and the same year’s The Monster Ball ($1.07 million) ballooned by more than 2,000% for Lady Gaga.

In the time since her 2017 shows, Lipa hit the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time with “New Rules,” collaborated with Calvin Harris and Silk City, and won two Grammy awards including best new artist. Then, in October 2019, she released “Don’t Start Now,” followed by its parent album Future Nostalgia, hitting the top five of the Hot 100 and Billboard 200, respectively. After performing for 5 million fans on the Studio 2054 livestream, Future Nostalgia won the following year’s Grammy for best pop vocal album and spawned more hit singles in “Break Your Heart,” “Love Again” and “Levitating,” the last of which was named the No. 1 Hot 100 song of 2021.

All said, Lipa’s four-digit-percentage jump from club act to arena headliner is easy to explain. It was also, in part, forced. The Future Nostalgia Tour was originally announced in December 2019 and scheduled to run throughout 2020. As with many other planned tours, that didn’t happen because concert venues around the world went dark for about a year and a half due to COVID-19.

Still, Lipa’s consistent presence on the charts with Future Nostalgia (it is No. 26 on the Billboard 200 dated April 9 in its 104^th week on the chart) kept tickets selling even when the actual dates hung in the balance, postponed a few times over. The nearly two-year delay of the tour may have actually been an advantage, letting the album’s legs stretch and Lipa’s stature rise.

The Future Nostalgia Tour will resume on April 15 in Manchester, England, before stretching throughout Europe and then to South America and Oceania (plus two re-scheduled Canadian dates in July, originally planned for the North American leg). Lipa’s (relatively limited) history in Europe indicates that the entire run could approach $100 million by the end of the year.

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