The Red Hot Chili Peppers wrapped their multi-year, multi-continent tour with the biggest business of their multi-decade career. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the Unlimited Love Tour sold 3.4 million tickets over 86 shows.
Among rock tours, it finishes as the third best-selling trek this decade, only behind Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour and Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour.
Though not eligible for Boxscore reporting, the Red Hot Chili Peppers closed out this touring cycle with a performance tonight (Aug. 11) at the LA28 handover celebration at the Closing Ceremony of 2024 Olympics, where Paris passes the torch to the Chili Peppers’ hometown of Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Boxscore totals only include grosses for ticketed headline shows, whereas the Olympics performance is part of a larger televised event.
The Unlimited Love Tour supported its namesake album, which was released in April 2022, as well as Return of the Dream Canteen, which followed in October of that year. Both sets led the Top Rock Albums chart, and the former crowned the all-genre Billboard 200.
The Unlimited Love Tour kicked off on June 4, 2022 with a performance at Estadio de La Cartuja in Sevilla, Spain. That show launched a 12-show leg in Europe that sold 659,000 tickets. Next was 19 shows in the U.S. and Canada, adding 807,000 tickets. That remains the highest-grossing and best-selling leg of the tour.
What followed was a parade of shows in Asia, Latin America, and Oceania, plus returns to Europe and North America before closing on July 30 in Maryland Heights, Mo. While the first stateside run claimed top honors for cumulative gross and attendance, the Chili Peppers’ string of eight shows in Australia and New Zealand (January-February 2023) boasted the best per-show ticket sales, averaging 47,326. Those dates were helped by the presence of Post Malone, joining while on his Twelve Carat Tour.
As for individual engagements, the biggest was a double-header at England’s London Stadium on June 25-26, 2022. Those two combined for 142,000 tickets sold. Among one-night-stands, it’s the Nov. 10, 2023 concert at Estadio do Morumbi in Sao Paulo, where the band played to 71,000 fans.
These final figures represent an entirely new peak in the Chili Peppers’ career. Though the band had dabbled with stadium shows before, this was its first full tour in the top-capacity venues. The tour’s 3.4 million attendance total is about 3.5x the group’s previous best, when the By the Way World Tour sold 979,000 in 2002-03. On average, the tour paced 39,761 tickets per show, up from 14,291 on the 1995-96 One Hot Minute Tour.
Dating back to a 1985 Halloween show at New York’s The Ritz, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have sold 8.6 million tickets over 498 reported shows.