Most tickets sold by a female touring artist

Published by the trade magazine Pollstar (founded 1981) on 25 July 2022, “Top Touring Artists of the Pollstar Era - Tickets Sold” ranked Madonna (USA, b. Madonna Ciccone) 21st overall with a female record 11,672,443 tickets sold for her live shows.

This figure includes the 3.5 million fans who witnessed the “Queen of Pop” on her 85-date Sticky & Sweet Tour in 2008–09 – the highest-grossing music tour by a female artist at $411 million (£252.9 million), according to Pollstar.

Celine Dion (10,906,984) was the only other female artist with ticket sales in excess of 10 million in the Pollstar era. (U2 were top of the rankings with 26,178,043 tickets sold.)

In the same July 2022 edition, Pollstar revealed that Madonna had accumulated a box-office gross of $1,389,746,222 (£1,157,136,058) for her touring career, placing her fifth overall behind The Rolling Stones (ranked No.1 with a gross of $2,165,280,638), U2, Elton John and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band. For their "Tickets Sold" and “Boxoffice Grosses” charts, Pollstar used touring data collected between July 1980 and July 2022.