20 of the Most-Attended Rock Tours Ever

Bigger doesn’t always mean better, but it sure can be impressive when it comes to tour attendance.

For those with enough star power and popularity, performing live becomes something borderline uncontrollable, with tens of thousands of people showing up for each show.

“Our concerts do have a lot in common with sporting events,” Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone in the mid ’90s, then on the road with the Stones on their Voodoo Lounge Tour. “I mean, they’re held in the same places. And they have this kind of feeling.”

READ MORE: 30 of the Highest-Grossing Rock Tours Ever

The demand for some artists is sometimes so great, it becomes unprecedented. Take Tina Turner, for example, whose 1987-88 Break Every Rule Tour wound up the highest-grossing female tour of the 1980s.

“It took five encores to finally drive her from the stage, kicking and screaming, just like she had entered it,” an article in The Spokesman-Review noted at the time.

And sometimes, embarking on a new tour is a risk one must be willing to take.

“I think I’ll just be excited to see just how that first audience responds, and how we all do,” Roger Waters said in a 2010 interview just before launching his The Wall Live Tour, which ended up holding the record for highest-grossing tour for a solo musician at the time it wrapped in 2013. “It’s funny, even when it’s a work in progress, when somebody comes in to the editing suite where we work, and you show them something, you see it with fresh eyes.  You know it’s funny, that thing of a third party coming in to the working space, and you see it through their eyes and you understand more about it. Well obviously when you suddenly see it through 16,000 new pairs of eyes, and ears, and hearts, I’m sure we’ll get a different experience, because they’re there.That will be a moment.”

Below we’re taking a look at 20 of the Most-Attended Rock Tours Ever. Were you at any of them?