When the British band Coldplay will arrive at the end of the week for four nights at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium, Finns will be able to watch a concert production tuned to its peak. The band’s Music of the Spheres tour is traveling around the world for the third year, and it is one of the most profitable of all time and the concert projects that sold the most tickets.
Prior to this summer’s concerts, the tour had already become the third highest-grossing tour of all time, with approximately $811 million in ticket sales collected over 132 concerts.
The concert occupancy rate has been around one hundred percent, and by February 2024, 7.66 million tickets for the tour had been sold.
These numbers are already partly out of date because there have been new concerts since the beginning of June. studies however, have not yet arrived from Music Business to the next Pollstar company.
Tour arrives in Helsinki from Düsseldorf, where Coldplay performed three concerts. The Helsinki concerts already started to be built on July 20, when the band just held their first Düsseldorf concert. Likewise, the dismantling will take a long time in Helsinki after the concerts, until August 4.
The tour moves forward with the power of 61 trucks, and depending on the day, hundreds of workers build concert venues. At most, there are 350 local workers on the construction side and 250-300 on the artist side, the marketing manager of the concert organizer Live Nation Maid Lindroos tells.
from Helsinki the tour continues through Germany, Austria and Ireland in October-November to Australia and New Zealand – and according to Coldplay’s website, there are still tickets available for the New Zealand concerts, unlike any other concert on the tour.
During this summer and autumn there will be a total of 43 concerts, i.e. after three years of touring, the total number of concerts will be 175, or 177 if the festival appearances at Rock in Rio and Glastonbury are included.
The tour the concerts are smoothly polished entities, which, however, have also been left with room for variation. The individual concert is divided into four “acts”, which tell a story connected to the planets, moons and stars and the return home, Harmony of the Spheres – in relation to the theme of the album, i.e. the harmony of the spheres.
The most changes in the song list have been seen during the tour at the end of the second, third and fourth acts.
The band has also announced that they will release a new album related to the Music of the Spheres project in October Moon Music. When it comes out, the tour is still in progress, and it remains to be seen how the new album will affect the song selections at the concerts. Its first single, released in June Feels Like I’m Falling in Love has already been heard in the concerts of the tour.
In March 2023, Coldplay’s tour visited São Paulo, Brazil. The LED boards, lasers and other light technology, as well as the PA system, are said to use about half as much energy on this tour as before.
Coldplay has wanted to draw attention to the environmental effects of touring with its giant tour, and has succeeded in significantly reducing its carbon footprint compared to its previous stadium tour. The group’s goal was at least a 50 percent reduction, but based on measurements certified by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the reduction has been even more, a total of 59 percent.
This has been achieved in many ways. The most environmentally friendly options have been chosen for travel, freight and presentation technology. The electricity required by the concerts is produced with solar power and biofuels and stored from electric car batteries in modified concert-optimized batteries that BMW produced for the tour.
In addition, concert audiences generate electricity by dancing and pedaling bicycle generators. Solar and kinetic energy have produced an average of 17 kilowatt hours of electricity per concert, the band said in June. This energy is used to perform the two songs heard at the beginning of the fourth act of the concerts on one of the three stages in use, i.e. the C stage.
Coldplay’s environmental awareness can also be seen in the LED wristbands distributed to the concert audience: they are made of earth-friendly materials and the same wristbands are reused in different concerts of the tour. The band reports that in the first year of the tour, audience members returned an average of 86 percent of wristbands after concerts.