Cirque du Soleil “Michael Jackson: The Immortal” outshines Madonna

by **Admin** Wed Jan 02, 2013 7:21 pm

Cirque du Soleil outshines Madonna
By CLAIRE ATKINSON

January 2, 2013

Madonna who?

The 54-year-old songbird may have finished 2012 with the highest-grossing concert tour of the year, but she couldn’t hold a candle to Guy Laliberté, the fire-eating Canadian who is the force behind Cirque du Soleil.

Cirque tours last year sold 3.7 million tickets globally, according to concert-tracking firm Pollstar, which said Madonna’s 88-show tour sold 2.1 million tickets.

Laliberté’s Cirque du Soleil and its various shows notched eight positions in Pollstar’s Top 50 — double the number of its shows on the list last year.

Each of the eight shows is listed separately — but when combined, the Montreal-based extravaganza even out-grossed Madonna — $407.9 million to $296.1 million — and everyone knows it’s hard to out-gross Madonna.

Cirque’s top-selling show was “Michael Jackson: The Immortal,” which finished No. 6 in the Pollstar ranking with $140 million in tickets sold, just behind Lady Gaga and above Kenny Chesney/Tim McGraw.

The average Cirque ticket price was $104.44, Pollstar said.

The Rolling Stones finished 2012 with the highest average ticket price: $529.51. Eric Church’s average ticket price of $39.63 was the lowest in the Top 50.

Gary Bongiovanni, who runs Pollstar, says one of the biggest trends of 2012 was the continued embrace of the secondary ticketing market — ticket resales — by artists.

“Many artists are now becoming willing partners in trying to maximize their own incomes by directly feeding part of the inventory to StubHub, Viagogo, or others,” Bongiovanni said. “That’s one way to jack up the ticket price without the artist having to defend it to fans. Certainly not all artists do this . . . some still have scruples.”

The average ticket price for a concert fell 60 cents this year to $85.93, but Pollstar points out that’s still well above 2009’s average price of $73.83

http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/business/cirque_du_soleil_outshines_madonna_L6xdwS8OTkkZJJxVZqW1BK#axzz2GrZNafaU