On Billboard Declaring Beyoncé’s Tour the “Biggest” in Country History

Last week, one of the big headlines in country music was how Beyoncé’s recently concluded “Cowboy Carter Tour” was the “Biggest Country Tour in Billboard Boxscore History.” Grossing $407.6 million with 1.6 million tickets sold, Beyoncé eclipsed any and all other country music tours over the last 40+ years that the metric has been calculated.

First, even for Beyoncé detractors, or people who give no credence to the idea that anything on her Cowboy Carter album is country, you can’t help but tip your hat to Beyoncé for what is obviously an incredibly successful tour. $407 million made in just 32 shows is a major feat, and doesn’t happen without wild popularity, and rave reviews of the tour.

But of course, there is an important list of caveats to this record-breaking feat.

As Saving Country Music and others have pointed out, aside from a very strong debut for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album when it was released on March 29th, it ultimately performed poorly commercially, floundering in sales and streams after its initial release. As critics raved over the album and Beyoncé even secured Grammy Awards for Best Country Album and Album of the Year, sales and streaming numbers were lackluster for an artist of her size.

However, as we often see in music, Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter Tour” helped boost the sales of the Cowboy Carter album. Where 28 weeks after the release, the album had fallen completely out of the Billboard 200 despite all the positive press, Cowboy Carter sat at #109 on the Billboard 200 at the conclusion of her tour, though sales/streams fell 20% the next week, and will likely continue to fall in the tour’s aftermath.

The complete lack of promotion, and not coinciding the tour with the album release was always one of Cowboy Carter‘s biggest mistakes. If nothing else, the story of the “Cowboy Carter Tour” should be a lesson to all performers how important touring is behind a new album title, no matter if you’re a superstar like Beyoncé, or a smaller, up-and-coming act. Even in the age of Tik-Tok, touring is still a tried and true way to gain attention for your music.

But in the media’s obsequious reporting on Beyoncé’s incredible touring feat via Billboard’s Boxscore metric, much is being lost in the nuance of how she achieved it.

First, Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter Tour” was not the biggest tour in country music history when it comes to attendance, and it’s not even close—even if you take it as a “country” tour, which of course is debatable at best. The distinction for the biggest country tour ever was Morgan Wallen’s “One Night At At Time World Tour,” which sold 3.1 million tickets to Beyoncé’s 1.6 million, so nearly double the attendance.

For Beyoncé, it’s not the amount of tickets sold that has her setting the “country” Boxscore record. It’s the amount of money she made, or the tour’s gross receipts. As Billboard explains,

“The Cowboy Carter Tour consolidated the routing of Beyoncé’s previous tours to just seven American markets, plus London and Paris. In fewer cities, she played more shows, extending to four nights in Atlanta, five in Los Angeles and New York, and six in London. It’s rare for an artist to play so many shows at a single stadium on a single tour, and with more dates, she was able to sell more tickets and push higher grosses.”

Compare this with Morgan Wallen’s “One Night At At Time World Tour” where he performed 87 shows to Beyoncé’s 32, including 51 stadiums in 10 separate countries on three continents. However, Wallen only grossed an estimated $300 million. So the obvious discrepancy here is in ticket prices. If Morgan Wallen made $300 million off of 3.1 million tickets, that sets the average ticket price at $96.77. For Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour, the average ticket price would be $254.38.

Beyoncé, who is worth an estimate $800 million, was charging her fans over 2 1/2 times the amount Morgan Wallen was charging his fans, while only performing in nine cities compared to 51, meaning Beyoncé made her fans travel more and farther to see her. Does this make this Billboard Boxscore record illegitimate? Of course not. But it does add some necessary context to how Beyoncé got there.

Another important stat is how this wasn’t Beyoncé’s highest-grossing tour. That distinction goes to her 2023 “Renaissance World Tour,” which grossed $579.8 million over 56 dates. This means that Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter Tour” gross was down 30% from her previous tour, though obviously, with fewer dates.

But no matter how you regard the numbers, the question many country fans are asking is why Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter Tour” is being considered in Billboard’s Boxscore charts for country at all? At this point, Saving Country Music readers are tired of hearing this same old refrain, but it remains true nonetheless: Beyoncé herself said about Cowboy Carter, “This ain’t a country album.” Instead, the album was meant to “bend and blend genres” (Beyoncé’s own words).

But whether anyone could consider Beyoncé’s recent tour as being country is an even more difficult argument to make. After all, Beyoncé has an entire catalog of self-described pop, hip-hop, and R&B songs that she is also expected to perform on tour. You would assume that if she was on a “country” tour, the majority of the songs she would have to perform would be country.

Looking over the set list for the tour, the songs featured throughout the tour range at about 55%-59% material from Cowboy Carter, with the rest coming from Beyoncé’s back catalog. But of course, many, if not most of those songs from Cowboy Carter aren’t country. And that’s not just the opinion of Saving Country Music. That’s the opinion of Beyoncé. Not only did she famously state, “This ain’t a country album,” Beyoncé verified she didn’t believe all the songs on the album were country by how she approached the Grammy Awards.

Though many love to make a big deal about how Beyoncé submitted Cowboy Carter to the Best Country Album category with the Grammy Awards (and eventually won), she also submitted the song “Bodyguard” to Best Pop Solo Performance, the song “Levii’s Jeans” to Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, the song “Spaghetti” to Best Melodic Rap Performance, and the song “Ya Ya” to Best Americana Performance.

In other words, in Beyoncé’s own estimate, these songs weren’t country. They belonged in other genres. Again, her whole artistic intent with the album was to bend and blend genres. All four of these songs also were a significant part of the Cowboy Carter Tour set list. This means that even in the most gracious interpretations of the material performed on The Cowboy Carter Tour, the majority of the songs were simply not country.

But even if you take all of this statistical data and cast it aside, we all know that The Cowboy Carter Tour wasn’t a country affair. The artist, the fans, the songs, the venues, the locations, none of it was tied to the country music industry or culture. These were not country fans contributing to this musical economic activity. They were Beyoncé fans, and were much more aligned to pop, hip-hop, and R&B music.

Everybody knows this, including the chart managers at Billboard. But as we’ve seen throughout the Cowboy Carter saga, it’s almost as if everyone is forced to engage in cognitive dissonance to show fealty to Beyoncé and her fan base. This is how all of these institutions are quickly becoming irrelevant, whether it’s Billboard, the Grammy Awards, or popular music as an industry. With its country charts, Billboard continues to fail to actually represent the activity and interest of country music and its fans.

Fans of Beyoncé might feel like they’re winning some victory by Billboard declaring a 3-month, 9-city, 32-date tour that draconiously overcharged consumers as the “biggest” in country music history. But history has a way of setting the record straight over time, especially in country music.

At some point in the future, Beyoncé herself will say in an interview, a documentary, or an autobiography that while she appreciated all the accolades in the country realm for Cowboy Carter, her artistic intent was misunderstood. Neither the album, nor the tour were ever meant to be considered country. They were meant to confound the notions of genre, and “bend and blend” the genres that an artist like Beyoncé finds confining.

That is why despite deserving praise for the big financial haul Beyoncé pulled in via the Cowboy Carter Tour, this shouldn’t supersede the records that actual country artists set, and only works to undermine the credibility of all the metrics Billboard publishes.

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