Madonna Is the Highest-Grossing Female Artist on Tour of All-Time
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Long known as the “Queen of Pop,” Madonna has also been described as the “Queen of Concerts,” and it’s easy to see why. Just as she has constantly reinvented herself as a performer over her 40-year career, she has also evolved the rock concert concept into innovative, engaging works of performance art.
In doing so, she has become the highest-grossing female musician in history in terms of concert revenue, grossing $1.4 billion and 11.7 million ticket sales as of July 2022, according to Pollstar. She was the first woman to gross more than $1 billion in concert revenue, and one of only three women to ever do so, along with Celine Dion and Beyonce.
“I can’t wait to put a show together and have a moment with each and every one of you on the stage to celebrate the last four decades of my journey; I don’t take any of this for granted,” Madonna, 64, said in January in anticipation of her upcoming Celebration Tour, which has been postponed as she recovers from a serious bacterial infection that required hospitalization.
The retrospective Celebration Tour will look back on the past 40 years of Madonna’s career. Planned for 84 shows in cities across North America and Europe, it will be the twelfth concert tour of her career, continuing a tradition of live shows with extensive choreography, innovative technology, and a high level of theatricality.
Madonna’s First Tours
Following her first two albums, Madonna (1983) and Like a Virgin (1984), Madonna launched her inaugural tour in April 1985. Dubbed The Virgin Tour, Madonna wanted it to be “loud, and brazen, and a reflection of my street-style and DGAF attitude,” according to Madonna: An Intimate Biography by J. Randy Taraborrelli.
Influenced by Michael Jackson and Prince shows, Madonna wanted a tour in which the audience felt the same energy she did while performing, according to Taraborrelli. Grossing $5 million, the concert was a financial success and was particularly notable for the throngs of dedicated fans wearing Madonna-inspired clothing, jewelry, and accessories.
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During her Who’s That Girl World Tour two years later, Madonna added extensive technology to her show, including large video screens, multimedia projectors, and a flight of stairs ascending to a large central platform, according to Mark Bego’s book Madonna: Blonde Ambition. She took aerobics classes to prepare for the show’s extensive choreography.
“Madonna transformed the concept of a concert tour being focused on the songs,” Bego wrote. “She turned her Who’s That Girl tour into a ubiquitous multimedia blitz technique by including songs, dancing, choreography, videos, big screens, backdrops—not to mention the subtle preaching and messages—that made singing a secondary quality for concert goers.”
One concert alone during the Who’s That Girl tour attracted 130,000 people, the highest attendance for a concert by a female artist at the time. Held on August 29, 1987, at the Parc de Sceaux in Paris, it still holds the record for largest concert audience in French history.
Becoming More Ambitious
In 1990, Madonna held the Blond Ambition World Tour, and it was indeed an ambitious undertaking. With complete control over “virtually every aspect of the tour,” according to Taraborrelli, the concert was broken into five thematic acts, with costumes by famous fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier and promiscuous dancing that drew the ire of critics.
Pope John Paul II famously called the tour “one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity,” due to its sexual content and use of Catholic imagery, echoing a similar controversy from her “Like a Prayer” video that led to Pepsi withdrawing as the tour’s sponsor. The tour was also famous for the debut of Madonna’s iconic “cone bra,” which Gaultier designed.
Despite (and, arguably, partially thanks to) its controversial nature, the tour was a huge commercial and critical success, grossing more than $62 million and cementing Madonna’s reputation as one of the world’s most bankable touring acts. Rolling Stone declared it the “greatest concert of the 1990s,” according to Life with My Sister Madonna by Christopher Ciccone.
Following her Girlie Show Tour in 1993, Madonna took a break from touring, continuing to release studio albums while also having children and appearing in several films. She didn’t tour again until the Drowned World Tour in 2001, which grossed over $76 million but left some audiences and critics dissatisfied due to its emphasis on new songs rather than her 1980s hits.
Still Re-Inventing
For her ninth concert tour in 2004, Madonna returned the focus to her classic hits rather than new material, but the shows still reflected her passion for innovation and originality. Called the Re-Invention Tour, it was once again broken into several thematic acts, one of which saw Madonna dressed as Marie Antoinette while performing her hit song “Vogue.”
The Re-Invention Tour was Madonna’s first to earn more than $100 million, a mark that every subsequent tour has cleared. Her Confession Tour in 2006 grossed $195 million, while her Sticky & Sweet Tour in 2008 earned $408 million. It was the second highest-grossing tour ever at the time (behind the Rolling Stones) and is still the highest-grossing tour by a female performer.
Madonna’s Celebration Tour will be her first since 2019’s Madame X Tour, which drew criticism (and even a class-action lawsuit by one fan) due to her late show starts. However, even after 40 years of performing, Madonna still strives to innovate, using augmented reality to dance alongside four digital versions of herself at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards.
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