Shows ≠ Cities
Why Is the Number of Shows Not Equal to the Number of Cities?
This post is a part of a series digging into the stories revealed by the data of The Top 100 Tours of 2017.
Find the list here and an overview of the other stories here.
A Closer Look
Q: Why Is the Number of Shows Not Equal to the Number of Cities?
The easy version: artist on tour now sometime stop a bit longer in cities where they're popular. So instead of doing one show in New York, they might do three. This is not very difficult to grasp (Drake performed 8x in the O2 in London in 2017). But to get the terminology right, we have to get a little technical first.
92% of acts did 'repeat performances' of this kind in 2017. This is known as a 'run of shows' sometimes and means that an act performs more than one show at the same venue in the same city, on consecutive days (or close enough).
Case Study: Garth Brooks' World Tour
American – Country – active on/off since 1984
number one in country
A Lesson in Concert Series
The king of the concert series has to be Garth Brooks.
He famously exhausts the demand in each city he goes to after returning from his 14 year long hiatus, which means sets of shows up to five, six, seven performances per city are common; up to an astounding eleven shows in a row in Minneapolis.
