While Lady Gaga’s halftime performance at the recent Super Bowl has been heralded as the best ever by many, new data released by the NFL says that it was the most-watched live music event ever. In addition to the 117 million people who watched the old fashioned way in front of their TVs, another 33 million plus watched it on smaller screens. For Lady Gaga, the exposure driven by her high-wire performance is helping her mount one of biggest bounce backs in recent touring history. The result is that Joanne, her fall tour that went on sale last week, is setting record demand that could make it one of the top-grossing tours of all time.
Prior the halftime show, Lady Gaga performed a three-show ‘Dive Bar Tour.’ Sponsored by Bud Light and live streamed on Facebook, the stint was seen live by around 1,000 people, and was perhaps most useful as tune up for the 30 million fans that streamed the Super Bowl halftime show. One of the three shows took place at New York City’s The Bitter End, a 230-person club with a deep history that peaked during her years growing up in Manhattan. Tickets for the three shows were not made available in any public on sale, and any secondary market tickets floating around Craigslist would have cost thousands of dollars. For Joanne, the price tag isn’t quite as steep, with tickets currently averaging $300 on TicketIQ. Yet at those prices, Gaga’s tour will likely rank as one of the top two most expensive tours for 2017, alongside U2’s Joshua Tree Tour, a 33-date anniversary trek that will play in football stadiums across the country starting in May.
Most acts that play major stadium and arena tours spend years steadily building up to that size. For Gaga, the path has been much less predictable, and far more interesting. Her first tour, The Fame Ball tour in 2009, was billed as ‘half tour, half art installation’ and played to under 100,000 people in the US, mostly at smaller venues like the House of Blues. Just two years later, the Monster Ball Tour exploded into arenas and grossed $227 million and was followed by an injury-shortened Born this Way Ball tour that grossed $183 million. Many Gaga haters regarded the 18 shows that were cancelled due to a broken hip and torn labrum injury as the beginning of the end. In the years that followed, Gaga retreated from the big arena spotlight to focus on smaller efforts ranging from Artpop, for which she collaborated with artists Jeff Koons, to seven shows in 2014 closing down the iconic Roseland Ballroom. While critical review for her Cheek to Cheek tour with Tony Bennett were strong, for many it confirmed the whispers of her pop culture obsolescence.
As a point of trajectory comparison, Taylor Swift’s first commercial tour was Fearless, which grossed $63 million, and featured Kelli Pickler as a warm up act. Her next two tours, the Speak Now tour and Red tour, grossed $123 and $150 million respectively. It wasn’t until her 2015, 1989 tour that she cracked the $200 million mark. At over $250 million in gross sales, 1989 will be a hard act for Swift to beat. Two years ago, the notion that Lady Gaga could top it seemed even more far fetched.
Regardless of where gross revenue ends up for Joanne, the Super Bowl performance has already increased revenue for the artist and her label. According to USA Today, downloads were up 1,000% in the day after the game, and as of last week, she had moved from 61 on the Billboard 100 to number one. She’s also already added more shows to major markets like New York’s Citi field and Boston’s Fenway Park and depending on how big Gaga wants to go, more shows could be announced, especially internationally. If she goes for the moon, it could put her in company with Madonna’s MDNA tour, which grossed over $300 million and was launched following the Super Bowl Halftime show in 2012. Super Bowl XLVI took place in Indianapolis between the New York Giants and New England Patriots. That year, the Patriots lost to the Giants, almost as dramatically as they beat the Falcons this year. While 2017’s Tom Brady-led comeback is unquestionably the greatest in Super Bowl history, for Gaga, her ‘free’ show in Houston appears to have been foundation for her own comeback—one that might also be labeled as the greatest ever.