[Keeping Tempo With Music Biz] — Stadium Residencies: Coming Soon To Your Town – If You’re Lucky, Op-Ed by Tradable Bits’ Geoff Robins
By the end of 2025 Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Coldplay, Oasis, The Weeknd, and Morgan Wallen will have cumulatively performed 512 stadium concerts in just 104 global cities – forever changing touring.
Liberace, Elvis, Sinatra: The Birth of the Residency
The residency model has existed for decades and is only now rising as a powerful alternative to traditional roadshow tours. Las Vegas gave birth to residencies in the 1940s when the Last Frontier Hotel booked Liberace as a strategic move to create a consistent, long-term draw for tourists. He was flashy, theatrical, and extravagant, perfectly fitting the Vegas aesthetic. The move proved to be highly lucrative as big name talent kept people in town longer, increasing gambling, dining, and hotel revenue. Liberace’s successful residency paved the way for future long-term contracts with Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.
By the 1980s Vegas residencies were viewed as artist retirement plans. Liberace, Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., by now all in their 60s, could forgo grueling road life, hunker down in luxurious hotels, play a few shows a week, and get big paydays from casinos who continued to rely on iconic names to draw visitors.
The Turning Point for Residencies: AEG and Live Nation
While younger talent like Wayne Newton and Diana Ross got into the Vegas residency game in the 1980s, it wouldn’t be until the 2000s when AEG modernized the model with Celine Dion, who played more than 1,100 shows between 2003 and 2018 at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, a venue built specifically for her. Her first residency, “A New Day,” premiered in March 2003 and ran for 717 shows. The residency was originally planned for three years but ran for an additional two years due to its success. It grossed over $385 million, making it the highest-grossing residency in Vegas history, a record that remains today. Today, top-tier residencies are the weekly standard in the city.
Parallel to this were Garth Brooks’ stadium dates, which took a slightly different approach to the residency in that he’d play back-to-back dates in a single city throughout the nation. Brooks mastered the art of supply and demand by playing as many shows as his fans wanted – as long as fans were still buying tickets, he’d continue adding dates in that city. Because of this he’s often credited as the creator of the modern stadium residency model. Brooks’ method had another benefit in that it reduced the resale market’s influence because there was no need to buy tickets on the secondary market when you could purchase them directly via the primary market.
Adele adopted a similar version of the model in more recent years with her “Adele Live 2016” tour when she played 58 nights across 25 cities. Twenty two of those cities hosted multiple shows with New York hosting six and Los Angeles hosting an impressive eight. While this was an arena tour, it validated the residency model and paved the way for larger venues.
Residencies experienced a distinct turning point in 2024 as top artists from all genres migrated towards the model. Shepherded in by Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Coldplay, and more recently Oasis, The Weeknd and Morgan Wallen, live touring saw an expansion of the residency concept that took them to stadiums. By the end of 2025, these six tours will have played 513 stadium concerts in only 104 selected cities.
The Appeal of Residencies for Artists, Host Cities, and Fans
For artists, crews, promoters and labels, touring is a massive undertaking, and jumping from city to city, week after week is challenging physically, mentally, and socially. The residency model reduces the risk of burn-out that traditional city-to-city touring causes. Notably, you get more time in one space to find some normalcy. Residencies also offer more controlled environments with fewer variables, opening up creative freedom as shows can be more highly customized to the specific venues rather than a “one size fits all” production. From a business perspective, residencies are significantly more cost-effective with fewer load in/out days, fewer travel movements by artists and crews, better negotiated rates on the millions of dollars spent on out of pocket expenses, more efficient spending on show promotion, and more.
Host cities, too, see massive upsides with residencies. Economic impact driven by fan travel, accommodations, dining, and shopping can be akin to hosting a Super Bowl. Taylor Swift’s six-night Eras Tour in Los Angeles generated $320 million dollars due to an increase of local employment that created 3,300 jobs and raised local earnings by $160 million.
For fans, residencies have a unique appeal. Many fans are seeking that special concert experience. Maybe it’s getting to experience another city’s culture, meeting new friends, seeing a show in an iconic venue like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Wembley Stadium in London, or Camp Nou in Barcelona, or simply having an excuse to travel. For fans, traveling to shows is replacing traditional notions of family summer vacations.
Residencies’ Impact on the Business
Touring model changes bring business model changes. Rather than an artist going to fans in their hometowns, artists need to convince fans to travel to them, which impacts every aspect of promotions. Promoters adjust their approach in order to sell out stadiums night after night, typically relying on data to steer efforts. A smart data strategy can understand geographical popularity, ticket pricing strategies, and addressable market. Here are a few ways Tradable Bits is helping the music industry navigate the new landscape.
- ACQUIRE. It’s one thing to understand if an act is going to sell out an arena at 15,000 tickets. It’s completely another thing to understand how an act is going to sell 180,000 tickets in a single market. Research no longer means calling up the indie record store to see if people are buying the album but includes complexities like understanding core markets, feeder markets, propensity to travel, sell patterns and pricing opportunity, among others. Similar challenges exist when you get into marketing the events, hitting multiple markets and the right people with a limited budget requires insight. To address this, promoters have started utilizing a CRM/CDP to automatically digest fan data through multiple sources. These systems capture waitlist signups, purchases, email subscriptions, transfers, and attendance, and house it in a usable format to easily access fan profiles, segmentation, analytics, and more. Armed with this real time centralized information allows you to truly look at an addressable market that isn’t siloed by platforms or CSV files.
- ANALYZE. With this centralization, the opportunity is unlocked to pull learnings from the data. The CRM/CDP allows them to define variables like affinity to artist, geographic profiling propensity to buy tickets, and pricing opportunities. Armed with these insights, they group fans with targeted segmentation and build custom marketing funnels to reach audiences. Today’s technology allows you to do this level of analysis quickly, easily, and at scale.
- ACTIVATE. Now the data gets to work through opt-in SMS, EMAIL and Advertising campaigns. Direct-to-consumer techniques are not only cost-effective but also trackable to give promoters the insight on what is and what isn’t working. Finally an answer to the John Wanamaker statement: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half.” With the collection of data, a new opportunity emerges: real-time activation and communication to fans. With this, you can enhance the in-venue experience by communicating upgrade opportunities, surprise & delight seat filling, and rewarding top fans with experiences because you now know who they are. With activation, not only are you reaching the artist’s true fans, but you also have the opportunity to reward them with personalized opportunities and experiences.
The rise of stadium residencies is a seismic shift in the live music industry. As more artists, promoters, and venues embrace the model, the greater the change in how concerts are planned, marketed, and experienced. Access to data and more data-driven decision making today will lead to a different future for touring – one that is smarter, more targeted, more efficient and more immersive than before.
The stadium residency model is here to stay. Let’s hope it’s coming to a city near you.
Written by Geoff Robins, Vice President, Product and Marketing, Tradable Bits, and former Senior Vice President, Marketing, Live Nation Canada.
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