50,000 screaming fans is nothing in the mega concert era

“Adele could be the beginning of something," says Kirk Sommer, senior partner and global co-head of music at William Morris Endeavor, who represents Adele along with the Killers, Billie Eilish and Sam Smith. When a concert experience is one-of-a-kind, he says, it naturally whips up intense demand. “I definitely think we’ll see more of these ‘event-ized’ shows."

The concert business is going big—with over-the-top productions becoming the new normal for many of music’s elite acts. This year, Sphere, the new $2 billion venue in Las Vegas, hosted residencies-on-steroids by U2, Phish, Dead & Company and the Eagles, deploying an immersive 160,000-square-foot interior video screen. A second Sphere, in Abu Dhabi, is in the cards. This May, Madonna gave a free show in Rio de Janeiro for an estimated 1.6 million fans—“the largest concert ever for a stand-alone show from any artist," according to her promoter, Live Nation Entertainment. The Weeknd, Travis Scott, George Strait and the Rolling Stones have all done massive shows in recent years. Then there’s Taylor Swift’s mania-inducing Eras Tour.

Even the routine arena and stadium runs of music stars are supersize, with larger crowds and more numerous shows. Coldplay—which did 10 nights in Buenos Aires in 2022—will now do 10 at Wembley Stadium in London next summer. Shakira just upgraded her upcoming North American arena tour to stadiums.

Concert executives say the boom in mega-concerts is a byproduct of a proliferation of niche superstars—acts with huge followings that lack traditional household-name status. “There are more arena and stadium acts than ever—it’s astounding," says Jarred Arfa, executive vice president and head of global music at Independent Artist Group, which represents Billy Joel and Metallica.

Even if not everyone is plugged into the music of Zach Bryan (country)—or, for that matter, Bad Bunny (Latin), Blackpink (K-pop) or Billy Strings (bluegrass)—these acts have enough of a following to pack arenas and stadiums. One reason is that “artists are breaking a lot faster," says Rich Schaefer, president of global touring at AEG Presents, the world’s second-biggest concert promoter after Live Nation. With streaming and social media, new stars like Chappell Roan can achieve massive scale rapidly, outpacing the size of their own venues. “Zach Bryan’s first-ever show in Tampa was in a stadium—sold out," Schaefer says.

Here’s what’s happening as a result: Theater acts are quickly jumping to arenas; arena acts are entering stadiums; and the Taylor Swifts and Beyoncés of the world—the last vestiges of Michael Jackson-level monoculture—are playing super-concerts. With so many people around the planet able to click on a Taylor Swift song on Spotify, the record business has globalized over the past few generations, making the biggest stars even more popular than before. So instead of playing a couple nights at, say, Los Angeles’s 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium, Swift now gets to play six.

Despite all the hand-wringing over this year’s string of overly ambitious tours seeing tepid sales and getting canceled (JLo, Black Keys), touring executives say that’s mostly the market normalizing following the irrational ebullience of the post-pandemic boom. The bigger picture, they say, is that music’s top acts are scaling up their concert engagements, not retrenching their businesses.

The number of shows at the world’s top 10 stadiums by grosses rose more than 70% between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis of Billboard Boxscore data. By contrast, the number of shows at the top 10 venues with capacities of 5,000 to 10,000—which are a large part of the market, whereas stadiums are few in number—remained about the same over that period. It’s true there are a tad fewer stadium shows in 2024 than in 2023—executives expected a weaker year given last year’s frenzy—but there’s no question there are many more stadium shows compared with five years ago. For its part, Live Nation has seen a 70% increase in “large-format shows" in 2022-2024 compared with 2015-2019, the company says.

Several factors help explain why supersize concerts are flourishing.

Now that concertgoers have so many entertainment options, top artists want to deliver even more specialness with their shows. While stadium concerts can cost $2 to $3 million or higher—roughly triple an arena show—they allow artists (along with their managers, agents and concert promoters) to make more money on extra sales. One-off shows and long residencies, meanwhile, give artists an unusual degree of control and consistency; they no longer have to deal with the vagaries of, say, fitting their complex stage production into the unique contours of each and every stadium they hit on the road. Such shows also cap costs, since you’re not lugging your team around the world.

Then there’s the fan side of the equation: Social media—Instagram, X, TikTok—has heightened both fans’ fear of missing out and their yearning to show they were there. For some, hanging out with 80,000 fans provides a sense of community and spectacle at a time when everyone’s anxiously glued to their social-media feeds and genuine moments of shared culture—like the “Barbie" movie—are rare.

“Concerts have gotten bigger because those are the shared experiences," says Jonathan Daniel, co-founder of artist-management firm Crush Music, whose clients include Fall Out Boy, Weezer and Green Day, which recently played for around 75,000 people at Wembley.

Behind the scenes, concert-industry infrastructure around the world has improved dramatically in recent decades. Putting on any kind of large event entails risk and proper safety precautions are paramount: Travis Scott’s 2021 Astroworld Festival in Houston was a disaster, leading to 10 deaths from a crowd surge. (A grand jury last year found Scott not criminally liable for the deaths.) But, generally speaking, diving into non-Western markets used to be a pretty risky proposition, and that’s not the case as much.

Take Latin America, long a desirable market due to the fervor of South American music fans and events like Rock in Rio that have brought over headliners like Prince and Guns N’ Roses. It’s long been difficult to stage shows in the region: Suitable venues are fewer; staging costs are higher; it’s harder to move equipment from country to country; local laws might require local partners; and the risks of something going wrong, at least in the past, were perceived to be higher, according to Dave Brooks, senior director for live music and touring for Billboard. Today, Live Nation has partners in the region that they either own or can depend on. Especially in locales like Brazil, a massive, “event-ized" concert—The Weeknd’s one-off mega-concert at Estádio MorumBIS in São Paulo last month, for example—helps amortize the show’s relatively higher costs.

When Madonna finished her recent “Celebration Tour" with a final, free show on the Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro in May, Live Nation’s president of global touring, Arthur Fogel, was on site. He took a moment to stand up on the stage and marvel at the size of the event. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God—the potential for mayhem,’" he says. Way back in 1990, Fogel, a four-decade veteran of the business who’s worked with Oasis, U2 and Beyoncé, helped the late David Bowie perform in Brazil. The difference between then and now—in the ability to put on shows, to do real business—“is unbelievable," he says.

Write to Neil Shah at Neil.Shah@wsj.com