Red Hot Chili Peppers Conclude Unlimited Love Tour, Selling 3.4 Million Tickets

The Red Hot Chili Peppers wrapped up their expansive multi-year, multi-continent tour, hitting new milestones in their long career. According to data shared with Billboard Boxscore, the Unlimited Love Tour sold an impressive 3.4 million tickets across 86 shows.

In the realm of rock tours, this achievement nabs them the third spot for best-selling tours of the decade, trailing only behind Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres World Tour and Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour.

Although not eligible for Boxscore reporting, the Red Hot Chili Peppers concluded this tour cycle with a final performance on August 11 at the LA28 handover celebration during the Closing Ceremony of the 2024 Olympics. This event, where Paris handed the torch to Los Angeles, the Chili Peppers’ hometown, for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, is part of a larger televised event and thus not counted in the Boxscore totals.

The Unlimited Love Tour promoted the album of the same name, released in April 2022, and followed it with Return of the Dream Canteen in October. Both albums topped the Top Rock Albums chart, with Unlimited Love even reaching the summit of the all-genre Billboard 200.

The tour kicked off on June 4, 2022, at Estadio de La Cartuja in Sevilla, Spain, marking the beginning of a 12-show leg in Europe that sold 659,000 tickets. The subsequent 19 shows in the U.S. and Canada garnered 807,000 tickets, making it the highest-grossing segment of the tour.

Following the North American leg, the tour moved through Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and made additional stops in Europe and North America before concluding on July 30 in Maryland Heights, Mo. While the first stateside leg topped in cumulative gross and attendance, the eight shows in Australia and New Zealand in early 2023 had the highest average per-show ticket sales, averaging 47,326 tickets, boosted by Post Malone joining the tour.

Among all the engagements, the highlight was a double-header at London Stadium on June 25-26, 2022, selling a combined total of 142,000 tickets. For single shows, the standout was November 10, 2023, at Estadio do Morumbi in Sao Paulo, where the band played to 71,000 fans.

These extraordinary numbers mark a new pinnacle in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ career. While they’ve occasionally performed stadium shows in the past, this was their first full tour in top-capacity venues. The 3.4 million attendance total is about 3.5 times higher than their previous best during the By the Way World Tour, which sold 979,000 tickets in 2002-03. The Unlimited Love Tour averaged 39,761 tickets per show, significantly higher than the 14,291 average on the 1995-96 One Hot Minute Tour.

Since their debut performance back in 1985 at New York’s The Ritz, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have sold 8.6 million tickets across 498 reported shows.

Source: Billboard Boxscore