Guns N’ Roses End ‘Not In This Lifetime’ Tour With $584 Million From 5 Million Tickets
It's a profitable enterprise to be Guns N' Roses in 2019. The band is ending the year — and wrapping its highly-profitable, multi-year "Not in This Lifetime" tour — with $584.2 million grossed from 5,371,891 tickets sold.
That's from the whole shebang. The amounts come from the totals across six continents' worth of concerts on the comeback trek that started back in 2016, as Billboard pointed out on Friday (Nov. 22).
All in all, the run wraps as the No. 3 highest-grossing tour in Billboard's Boxscore history. The numbers in North America alone account for $258.5 million and 2.3 million tickets of that total. (They made a still-impressive $166.1 million in Europe.) On Guns N' Roses "Not in This Lifetime" tour, the band staged 158 shows in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, as well as 31 European gigs, 15 in Asia, 15 in South America, eight dates in Australia and a single show in South Africa.
Not that anyone doubted the campaign would be a moneymaker. Over two years ago, the tour had already grossed $230 million. By 2018, the "Not in This Lifetime" adventure had grown to be the fourth most extensive tour of all-time. Talk about a large take-home for the reunited Axl Rose, Slash and the guys.
Because, before 2015, it seemed nearly unfathomable that the two marquee musicians would ever reunite under the Guns N' Roses banner. Of course, that all changed after the band updated their website in December of that year, followed by the announcement that the classic lineup would reunite.
It certainly paid off. Compared to 2012-14's pre-reunion "Appetite for Democracy" tour, the per-show gross swelled from $617,000 on that trek to a whopping $3.7 million per night during "Not in This Lifetime."
Looks like longtime listeners who were holding out hope all those years for a classic-lineup Guns N' Roses tour had the money, honey. Maybe that lasting fan power is why the group's "Sweet Child O' Mine" clip recently became the first '80s music video to reach a billion views on YouTube.
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