RUFUS DU SOL have ended the Inhale / Exhale World Tour with a number no electronic act has reached before. Billboard puts the run at $158 million in ticket sales and 1.7 million people across four continents, which makes it the highest-grossing tour in the genre's history and the first past nine figures.
The shape of the run matters as much as the total. It lasted roughly 18 months and covered 98 dates: 54 in the United States and Canada, 21 in Europe, 13 in Oceania and 10 in Latin America. The Australian trio of Tyrone Lindqvist, Jon George and James Hunt have been building toward stadium scale for a decade, and the spread shows a band that filled rooms in four markets rather than one that made its money in a single territory.
The closing North American leg was where the money concentrated. Those 31 dates grossed $71.8 million and sold 693,000 tickets, which is close to half the tour's total gross from under a third of its shows. The final night, at the Rogers Centre in Toronto on 5 September, took nearly $5 million on its own in front of a sold-out crowd of 43,500.
EDM.com, reporting the figures, reached for the comparison that makes the scale land: the same band played a 350-capacity club in Toronto in 2014. Ending the tour in the same city twelve years later at a stadium that holds well over a hundred times as many people is a tidy piece of symmetry, and the band marked it on Instagram with a line about what a way to end the tour.
The tour takes its name from the group's fifth album, which was nominated for Best Dance/Electronic Album at the Grammys. That is the commercial logic behind the run: a record cycle stretched across a year and a half and four continents rather than a summer of festival headline slots, which is the model most acts at this level still work to.
The figure arrives in a year when the electronic business has been measuring itself carefully. Luminate's midyear report put global streaming growth at 10 percent, while at the other end of the scale dance music veterans opened a new downtown Los Angeles venue betting on small-room clubbing. A $158 million stadium tour and a bet on a club that holds a few hundred are the two halves of the same genre.
The facts
- The Inhale / Exhale World Tour grossed $158 million, the highest ever for an electronic tour.
- It sold 1.7 million tickets across four continents, Billboard reports.
- The run covered 98 dates over about 18 months.
- Dates split 54 in the US and Canada, 21 in Europe, 13 in Oceania and 10 in Latin America.
- The final North American leg grossed $71.8 million and sold 693,000 tickets over 31 dates.
- The tour ended at the Rogers Centre in Toronto on 5 September in front of 43,500 people.
- That final show took nearly $5 million on its own.
- RUFUS DU SOL are Tyrone Lindqvist, Jon George and James Hunt.
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