John Mayer has been one of the most consistent touring artists of the 21st century, launching 11 solo headline runs, plus co-headline jaunts with everyone from Sheryl Crow to Dave Chappelle. Touring arenas and amphitheaters over the last two decades, Mayer has kept fans on their toes with his stage partners, summer stints with Dead & Company, and now more than ever, with his musical arrangements. Just one year after wrapping his last trek, he’s back in arenas with The Solo Tour, on stage by himself playing his greatest hits, solo acoustic.
According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the first leg of The Solo Tour earned $39.3 million and sold 251,000 tickets across 19 shows in March and April.
Mayer’s solo acoustic run was less extensive – and therefore less lucrative – than last year’s Sob Rock Tour, which ran for 32 shows and earned $51.8 million, scoring the No. 38 spot on Billboard’s year-end Top Tours ranking. This is perhaps to be expected when comparing solo concerts against performances with full arrangements performed by a full band. But while Mayer’s routing anticipated a shorter battery life than his typical national tour, business was stronger than ever.
On average, The Solo Tour earned $2.1 million and sold 13,234 tickets per show. The latter number surpasses last year’s 11,963 to become the second biggest per-show attendance count of Mayer’s career, just missing 2017’s The Search for Everything Tour (13,349). The former is the biggest per-show gross of his career, up 28% from last year’s Sob Rock Tour ($1.6 million).
Of course, with fewer shows, Mayer could focus on the cities that historically generated his biggest grosses, keeping his averages high. The lowest performing shows on last year’s tour were ditched for the acoustic shows, removing Albany, Charlotte, N.C. and Las Vegas from his routing. But his solo route also eschewed typically huge markets such as San Francisco and the whole of Texas.
Comparing shows market-by-market on Mayer’s 2022 and 2023 runs, The Solo Tour still over-performed. While he downsized from two shows to one in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Seattle, those cities maintained strong numbers, with Seattle dipping just 19% in total gross, despite playing half the shows.
Mayer played three shows at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., in 2022, earning $4.7 million. He played just one date on The Solo Tour, but still managed a $3 million gross, off just 37% despite cutting his potential audience by 66%.
In markets with a one show-to-one show comparison, business was uniformly up. In Pittsburgh, Mayer’s gross improved from $1.3 million to $1.8 million, with attendance up from 11,073 to 13,265. At Denver’s Ball Arena, he jumped from $1.8 million to $2.3 million, and from 11,775 tickets to 12,840.
When most artists scale their production down, they also scale their venue selections accordingly. But Mayer was rightfully confident to stay in arenas despite the solo acoustic arrangements, perhaps boosted by his long-standing reputation as a virtuoso guitarist and Grammy-winning songwriter. There’s also fellow troubadour Ed Sheeran’s own record-breaking business, often simply backed by his guitar and loop pedal. Twenty years of artistic branding and have naturally led him to his own blockbuster acoustic tour.
Still, Mayer might have underestimated the tour’s potential upon its initial announcement in January. Two weeks after launching, he announced a second North American leg of The Solo Tour, re-starting in September. He’ll will return to many of the same venues from his Spring leg, and re-introduce some of the markets he eschewed during the tour’s initial run. Plus, he’s announced nine additional solo acoustic shows in Europe slated for March 2024.
The biggest tours of Mayer’s career in total volume are 2019’s simply-titled John Mayer 2019 World Tour ($66.1 million) and 2017’s The Search for Everything World Tour (761,000 tickets). With 29 shows on the books, it’s unlikely he’ll set a new personal attendance record, as he’d need to average about 17,500 tickets per show to topple his 57-date run from 2017.
But it should be quite easy for The Solo Tour to become the highest grossing run of Mayer’s career, needing to maintain a six-figure average of $924,000 each night. Even accounting for a potential dip in European grosses, typical for Mayer and most American acts, he will likely out-do himself before he even sets sail across the Atlantic.
In all, Mayer has grossed $374.4 million and sold 6.2 million tickets across 645 reported concerts, dating back to a June 2001 gig at the State Theatre in Falls Church, Va. That show sold 508 tickets and earned $5,306, amounting to less than 0.01% of the lowest gross on The Solo Tour.
