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Listening to your favorite musician at home is fun right? But there’s nothing quite like the electrifying buzz of a sold-out arena tour witnessing ‘Cruel Summer’ or ‘Watermelon Sugar’ for the first time.
If there's one thing that the 2020s has delivered, it’s a wave of record-breaking tours by some of the world’s most influential musicians, performing in venues across the globe. Whether you’re a Bad Bunny stan, a proud ‘Styler’, or a die-hard ‘Swiftie’, there’s no doubt that you’ve experienced a rollercoaster of emotions witnessing your favorite artist live.
To discover which music tours have the happiest crowds, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of 20,000 Instagram selfies taken by fans at stadiums of the 10 highest-grossing tours of the last 4 years.
Using AI facial recognition technology, we analyzed the emotions expressed in crowd selfies. We were able to determine the overall sentiment for each music tour and rank them from happiest to least. Spoiler alert: Swifties might be surprised.
From light up flamingos, giant beach balls and neon pink shopping trolleys – it can only mean one thing. P!nk's ‘Summer Carnival Tour’ is in town. According to our study, P!nk clinched the top spot on the happiness ranking list, with a whopping 57% of all fan selfies at her tour showing smiling faces. The ‘So What’ singer has had a stellar start to 2024, with her fourth number 1 album and being named one of the greatest performers of her generation. P!nk received the lowest number of ‘angry’ selfies at 1%, similarly the lowest ‘sad’ selfies across all posts shared, at 4%. So, let’s raise a glass to P!nk and her undeniable stage presence.
In second place, not far behind, is Ed Sheeran’s 'Mathematics Tour’ with 50% of selfies including happy faces. The singer-songwriter who has found himself a staple on wedding playlists was named the most played artist in 2023. From surprise guests to intrinsic looping pedals, fans are spoilt with treats throughout his performances. There’s no denying the crowd think he’s pretty “perfect”, with smiles all round. Only a small per cent of the crowd showed feelings of ‘anger’ (1%) and ‘confusion’ (0.8%), whilst Sheeran’s musical skills calmed 17% of the crowd according to selfies.
“Alexa, play ‘As It Was by Harry Styles” - for many, that’s as close as we’re getting to seeing the star live. But for the lucky fans who witnessed ‘Love On Tour’ firsthand, their selfies say it all. 23 months of glitter, feather bowers, and happy faces places him as the third happiest music tour, with 49% of selfies including ‘happiness’. Harry Styles fans are watermelon sugar high on life, with only 2% of fan selfies including faces of anger, and 10% of sadness.
It’s time to enter the realm of sparkles, sequins, and cowboy hats, of course it’s the Swiftie-sphere. It’s not all a “Love Story” for Swift’s crowds however, who are busy exchanging friendship bracelets not smiles. Shockingly, the renowned Era’s Tour has ranked dead last on the happiness ranking. 25% of selfies taken at Taylor’s sold-out tour include smiling/happy faces, which is the lowest out of all 10. Of all the tours analyzed, Swifties were also the saddest, as the highest number of ‘sad’ selfies were captured (15%), as well as the most ‘angry’ selfies (3%). Whether it’s VIP tent envy or pure adrenaline-fueled emotions – Miss Americana has her crowds feeling all of the feels.
In second place we have The Weeknd’s ‘After Hours til Dawn Tour’, with 27% of selfies including smiles. Light up wristbands, giant robots, flames and a big inflatable moon – what's not to like? The Canadian stars latest 64-date tour marathon even scored second top for angriest fans (2.5%), just behind Taylor Swift. Fans clearly aren’t blinded by his performance, as the ‘After Hours til Dawn Tour’ had the highest amount of selfies showcasing ‘fear’ (9%).
Rounding off the top 3 ‘least happy’ music tours is Bad Bunny, and his ‘World’s Hottest Tour’. If you were one of the individuals who paid circa $800 for a floor ticket – then you may be disappointed. The crowds clearly aren’t delivering on smiles, as 41% of selfies included happiness. The Puerto Rican superstar was crowned Spotify’s most streamed artist two years ago, but his crown for entertaining fans? Well, 11% of selfies showed feelings of ‘sadness’ - so he may be waiting a while for that title.
These performers have undoubtedly become some of the biggest celebrities of our time, captivating our hearts and dominating our TikTok feeds around the clock. If you're in need of a musical pick-me-up, you'll know which tickets to grab next time, and which tunes to enjoy in the comfort of your bedroom.
We used Wikipedia’s list of official highest-grossing music tours 2020-24 and collected Instagram location pages for each tour. We then collected around 2,000 fan photos from these feeds, totaling over 20,000 selfies.
We then anaylzed the images with Amazon Rekognition API. This tool is a facial emotion recognition tool that scans faces and calculates various metrics regarding facial expressions – sad, angry, confused, disgusted, calm, and fear.
With this data, we were able to rank the highest earning music tours from happiest to least happy based on faces appearing in Instagram photos tagged at each tour.Data was collected June 2024.
Feel free to use the data or visuals on this page for non-commercial purposes. Please be sure to include proper attribution linking back to this page to give credit to the authors.
