Billboard recently released their Country Update for this past year, a compilation of all of Billboard’s data regarding country music for 2023. In it, they released the statistics on the biggest tours of the year, and it’s no surprise who was on top.
Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At A Time tour was the top grossing country tour of the year, bringing in a whopping $260 million dollars in gross revenue across 44 stops. Over 1.3 million people attended a Wallen show in 2023, coming out to an average of over 30,000 per show.
Interestingly, Wallen didn’t have the highest total attendance. That honor went to Luke Combs, who saw over 1.4 million attendees across two less shows than Wallen. His gross revenues came in at $133 million, good for second place.
The remainder of the top five was rounded out with throwback artists, with George Strait, Shania Twain, and Eric Church finishing out the list. Incredibly, Strait finished just $30 million short of Combs, despite playing only 11 shows to his 42.
The top two placements of Wallen and Combs reflects the pair’s friendly battle to be the top artist in country music. Wallen has to this point controlled the airplay and sales numbers, posting the number one streamed song, album, and artist from Billboard.
Combs, meanwhile, has seen more success at the award shows. Luke has taken home four CMA awards in the last three years, while Wallen has notable been snubbed to this point in his career.
Earlier this year the pair became the first country artists since 1981 to simultaneously occupy the top two spots on the Billboard Hot 100.
The data shows these two are the biggest names in the genre right now, and at least one of them is aware of it. Earlier this year Luke went on the Full Send Podcast, and when asked who the number one country artist in the world was right now, he said:
“It’s me or Wallen for sure.”
It’s safe to say he was right on the money.
Check out the full data from Billboard here:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/bulletins.billboard.com/country/country_update_2023_1124.pdf