In a 2009 interview Dylan gave Rolling Stone an interesting perspective on the Never Ending Tour when he said “These days, people are lucky to have a job. While he’s making a good living touring, Dylan likely hasn’t made it onto Billboard’s list of top tour earners, and he likely has no aspirations to get there.
Unlike Fleetwood Mac and One Direction, however, Dylan is not profit maximizing and plays much smaller venues that average around 5,000 seats. Since kicking off his Never Ending Tour in 1988, Dylan has played close to 3,000 shows. While One Direction gross sales over the last three years are the text book for the science of monetizing a tour, the boy band has nothing on Dylan’s stamina. At an average price of $323 Bob Dylan tickets are the second most expensive of any upcoming tour. For Stevie Wonder, it’s been seven years since his last tour, and Stevie Wonder tickets for his upcoming Songs in the Key Of Life tour are the third most expensive over the next six months, behind only Fleetwood Mac and Bob Dylan. Those include Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, John Mellencamp, as well as the grandfather of the endless tour, Bob Dylan. Over the next six months, many of the biggest and most expensive tours are for acts in their 60s and 70s. The race against Mother Nature is in fact driving the 2014-15 concert market well beyond Fleetwood Mac. For 'On Withe The Show', Fleetwood Mac is playing in many of the same venues as last year, and it appears that they're taking a page out of One Direction’s touring playbook. One Direction tickets for their current 'Where We Are Tour' are significantly less expensive than last year's tour, however, that has more to do with the stadium scale of this tour compared to the last tour. In 2013, One Direction’s ‘Take Me Home’ tour was the most expensive. At an average price of $366, ‘On With the Show’ is in fact the most expensive tour in the next six months by over $100.
Given the fact that eight songs written and sung by McVie are on the band's greatest hits album, it’s no surprise that fans are coming back for more less than a year after the last tour ended. Despite having toured non-stop over the last two years, fans' enthusiasm remains undeterred. While their 2013 tour, "Fleetwood Mac Live" had 69 stops, this year's ‘On With The Show’ tour has a relatively light 39 shows. Last year, without McVie, the band ranked 10th in Billboard's top music moneymakers with earnings of $19.1 million.
At the time, she was 55, and while she may have overcome her performance anxiety since then, it’s more likely that the draw of touring was simply too lucrative for her to continue to stay away. McVie originally stopped touring with the band as a result of the grind that touring entails as well as her age.
In addition to being the most expensive tour for the next six months, it’s also evidence of how hard it is to turn down the payday that touring offers in the post-album world. With the announcement that McVie would be rejoining the band for their upcoming tour, fans responded en force, driving up demand for Fleetwood Mac tickets to levels well above the band's 2013 tour. It’s been 15 years since Christine McVie left Fleetwood Mac and while the band has continued to tour during that time, for many fans it wasn't the same without McVie.
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