Taylor Swift Leads Australia’s ‘Hottest 100 Events’ For 2024
She didn’t clean up at the Grammy Awards, though as far as Australians were concerned, the year 2024 very much belonged to Taylor Swift.
Newly-revealed insights from Tixel reveals that Swift was indeed the hottest ticket in (any) town last year.
The U.S. pop mega-star’s The Eras Tour stopped by Australia in February 2024 for seven stadium shows, three at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and four Sydney’s Accor Stadium – shifting about 620,000 total tickets.
Swift comes in at No. 1 on Australia’s “Hottest 100” live events tally for 2024, published this week and informed by the ticket resale platform’s extensive waitlist data.
Those Eras Tour shows sold out, well, swiftly.
Matt Gudinski, chairman of Mushroom Group, whose concerts business Frontier Touring produced TayTay’s run in these parts, told this reporter that appetite was so great, 20 more tickets could have been shifted for each ticket sold. Even the prime minister Anthony Albanese wanted one.
Swift is a wanted woman; there simply wasn’t enough time.
Meanwhile, Coldplay comes in at No. 2 on the live events list with the British act’s record-smashing Music of the Spheres tour, which sold an estimated 700,000 tickets across Australia and New Zealand, while Olivia Rodrigo’s arena tour completed the podium at No. 3.
Homegrown music was overshadowed — and outmuscled — by tunes from the United States and United Kingdom on the ARIA year-end charts for 2024 (led, of course, by Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department). That wasn’t the case on the live scene.
Australian acts accounted for 22% of the spots on the list, second only to the American artists with 33%.
With his national tour in 2024, Dom Dolla set a new touring mark for electronic music artists by selling more than 170,000 tickets. The trek, produced by Untitled Group, saw Dom land at No. 6, the only Australian artist in the top 10.
All told, British artists headlined one-fifth of the top 100 live events in Australia last year, and a long tail of performers from Germany, Canada, Ireland, France, NZ made their presences felt.
In other takeaways from the Tixel data, pop, electronic and rock, respectively, got the most bums on seats and hands in the air.
Dom Dolla performing in Sydney, 2024. Pic by Shevin Dissanayake
Also, “Girl Power” reigned. Where gender was clear to define, only one in four performers were women, Tixel reports, though women accounted for half the total number of waitlisted fans.
“We definitely felt the swell around pop artists and electronic music last year so we’re not surprised to see that reflected in the data. Some massive acts swept through our stadiums and arenas, and we know that those under 30, who go out the most, love electronic music and its various sub-genres,” comments Zac Leigh, co-founder and CEO of Tixel.
“As we reflect on our list and triple j’s, it’s clear that the whole live music industry needs to collaborate on better supporting not just the high-flying sell out events and promoters, but also up-and-coming Aussie talent, smaller venues, and independent promoters and festivals.”
Tixel joins forces with Bolster for “Front Row Center“, an annual exploration of event ticketing in Australia. In its third and most recent Ticketing State Of Play report, published last September, its editors found that live music fans still love going to the show, even though the cost of living crisis is still “biting hard.”
More than half of the 2,700 respondents (55%) said a ticket price that’s $5-$10 cheaper can often determine whether or not they make the purchase, a figure that’s “especially pronounced” with Gen Z, with almost two-thirds saying this is a “deal breaker.”
Click here for Tixel’s Hottest 100 Events For 2024.
Top 10 performers for 2024:
1. Taylor Swift
2. Coldplay
3. Olivia Rodrigo
4. Fred again…
5. SZA
6. Dom Dolla
7. Hozier
8. Tate McRae
9. Noah Kahan
10. Matt Rife