Latest news with #stadiumtour
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Ed Sheeran Announces 2026 Australian & New Zealand Loop Tour Dates
Ed Sheeran might still be in the midst of his current run of tour dates, but the English musician is already making big plans for 2026, starting with return visits to Australia and New Zealand. Sheeran announced a new run of tour dates on Tuesday (July 22), with the eleven-show visit to Oceania set to take place from January to March 2026. 'Starting a brand new tour next year called the LOOP tour,' Sheeran wrote on Instagram. 'New stage, new tricks, new set up, new songs and all the classics added in.' More from Billboard Shakira & The Weeknd to Headline 2025 Global Citizen Festival in Central Park The Who Kick Off Farewell Tour in Italy, Perform First Show Since Zak Starkey Sacking Tool Announce First Hawaii Concert in Nearly 15 Years The tour will see the musician performing at stadiums across the New Zealand cities of Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. Sheeran will then head west for Australian stadium dates in Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne, before wrapping up with a show at South Australia's Adelaide Oval. The tour comes just shy of two months before the release of Sheeran's eighth album, Play, which is scheduled to arrive on Sept. 12. That release date occurs just days after Sheeran wraps up his current +–=÷× Tour (also dubbed the Mathematics Tour), which closes with three dates in Düsseldorf, Germany – almost three-and-a-half years after he first began the trek. Sheeran's Australian and New Zealand return will mark his first visit to the countries since February and March 2023. That tour also saw Sheeran break attendance records at the Melbourne Cricket Ground where, across two performances, he played to 217,500 fans. The two shows each broke the previous attendance record set by Sheeran collaborator Eminem, who played to 80,708 fans at the venue in 2019. News of the upcoming run of tour dates has been expected for some time, with Sheeran taking to his private Teddy's Vinyl Breakfast Instagram account in May to respond to fans asking about his 2026 plans. 'Oz/NZ top of next year, then Latam, then USA,' Sheeran responded at the time. Ed Sheeran – 2026 New Zealand & Australian Loop Tour Dates Jan. 16 – Go Media Stadium, Auckland, NZJan. 21 – Sky Stadium, Wellington, NZJan. 24 – Apollo Projects Stadium, Christchurch, NZJan. 31 – Optus Stadium, Perth, WAFeb. 13 – Accor Stadium, Sydney, NSWFeb. 14 – Accor Stadium, Sydney, NSWFeb. 20 – Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane, QLDFeb. 21 – Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane, QLDFeb. 26 – Marvel Stadium, Melbourne, VICFeb. 27 – Marvel Stadium, Melbourne, VICMar. 5 – Adelaide Oval, Adelaide, SA Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart Solve the daily Crossword
National Post
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- National Post
Raymond J. de Souza: Memories of Live Aid and a different era
Article content Yet it was as a cultural phenomenon that Live Aid seems from an entirely different era. Would it be possible today to assemble a cast of musicians sufficiently well known across the generations to attract the viewers that Live Aid did in 1985? The stadium show itself no longer has the cultural power it did in the 1980s, when it was a staple of summertime. Article content Taylor Swift's recent tour, concluded in Canada, attracted such attention partly because it was so unusual — a pop star selling out massive stadium after massive stadium. It happens, but not like the 1980s, when Springsteen and Jackson and others packed football stadiums night after night, summer after summer — and it didn't require debt financing for the fans to attend. Article content Perhaps Swift marks a return to popular live music. A new outdoor concert facility — capacity 50,000 — opened on the old Toronto Downsview airport site last month. Coldplay did four shows there, part of their multi-year Music of the Spheres tour that has now sold more tickets than any other tour in history. Article content Article content But Swift and Coldplay are more likely exceptional. Which is a shame, because the joyous exuberance of the stadium tour is not replicable in the privatized music listening environment of the digital world. Article content Article content In 1985 the Sony Walkman was still relatively new, launched only in 1979, and had not yet reached its peak. Still running on audio cassettes, the Walkman was a cultural earthquake, converting music from an ambient communal experience to a singular, even private, one. Article content It was still possible in the early 1990s to walk around a university campus and to hear the current anthems wafting out of open windows; now everyone is wearing earbuds and no one hears each other's music. Something was lost when parents and children — and brothers and sisters — fought over what was on the radio or the home stereo. The first act to play the new Downsview site was Stray Kids. It's a K-pop group I have never heard of. To be fair, I don't know any K-pop groups. To be honest, I had to look up what K-pop is. Article content Article content The stadium and arena tour is not entirely dead. Springsteen is still performing and Elton John's farewell tour went on so long he may still revive it. Article content In 2019, Princeton economist Alan Krueger, chairman of the council of economic advisers under Barack Obama, wrote a fun book called Rockonomics on the music industry. Pre-digital, artists could earn well from sales of recorded music. Streaming killed that off, similar to declining sales in printed media. The big money now is in live concerts. According to Krueger's research, even McCartney, who dominated the world of records with his long list of No. 1 songs, now earns 80 per cent of his income from live concerts. Article content
Yahoo
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
NEWS OF THE WEEK: Lana Del Rey responds to negative review of Irish concert
The Video Games hitmaker has received mixed reviews over her stadium tour in the U.K. and Ireland with fans expressing their disappointment with the short set list given the cost of the tickets. Following her show at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin last week, a journalist for The Irish Times questioned whether the "bizarre" show was "value for money' and if Del Rey was better suited to a smaller venue. "Of the 14 songs Del Rey performs, five are from her unreleased new country album and another two are covers," reads the publication's review on Instagram.
Telegraph
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Lana Del Rey is unpredictable and chaotic – in a good way
These days, pop music campaigns tend to be hyper-meticulous, planned down to the last social media post. Not if you're Lana Del Rey. A chronicler of heartland heartache, purveyor of 'sad girl' pop songs furnished with the trappings of 20th-century America, she enjoys some of the biggest streaming numbers in the business, and since her 2011 breakthrough Video Games, she's become a generational songwriting talent. A stadium tour seems appropriate, then, except that she is Lana Del Rey: unpredictable, capricious, a little chaotic. You never know when she will release an album, appear on stage, or leave it. These attributes make her UK tour a fascinating if strange experience. Across a 14-year career, her live appearances in the UK average out to less than once a year, so it's not surprising she has sold out a short stadium run culminating in two nights at Wembley Stadium. In Cardiff, she emerged shyly from a pale blue cottage to a stage festooned with lights, candles, vines, even a lily pond: the lush vegetation of the bayou transplanted to Wales, more fairytale film set than pop show – as you might expect from someone who makes incredibly cinematic music. To her right, five string players performed under an arbour, as if at a wedding. Many of the crowd, so young they would have been in nappies when Video Games came out, wore white dresses. Del Rey, who recently got married to Louisiana alligator tour guide Jeremy Dufrene, ran to embrace him in the wings after the first song, overcome by emotion, 'They're good tears!' she insisted. 'It's just a long way to come.' This was only her second ever stadium show. A compelling vulnerability remained all night. Del Rey deals in emotional rather than physical energy, and her music doesn't always lend itself to stadium singalongs: particularly when the set-list is preoccupied with country music instead of her usual alt-pop fare. She opened with two tracks from her upcoming 10th album – originally a country music record titled Lasso, now renamed and postponed into obscurity – including recent single Henry, come on, and a cover of Stand By Your Man, dedicated to Dufrene. The audience were here for the hits, for songs that have inspired the shimmering pop of Addison Rae and the southern gothic elegies of Ethel Cain. Del Rey obliged with a scant sprinkle that included Born To Die and Summertime Sadness. Yet, rather disappointingly, two of the tracks you'd be most interested to see her perform – Norman F---ing Rockwell and Arcadia – were instead handed over to her hologram, beamed down from a bedroom window. Nevertheless, the hits nudged the show towards stadium-sized energy, and Del Rey remains a captivating performer. Consider the billowing drama of Chemtrails Over The Country Club, the breathtaking instrumentation on 2023 single Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, the strummed immediacy of unreleased song 57.5 (named for her millions of monthly listeners on Spotify), and the final blare of strobe lighting on Ultraviolence that felt like car headlights pulling up to a house. These moments were wrested from a dense, if endearingly ambitious show, stuffed with ghostly holograms, Allen Ginsberg recitals, and confused metaphors about houses burning down – precious detail lost in the vast stadium space. Stadium sets generally demand at least two hours of hits and deep cuts. Instead, after scarcely 90 minutes and a closing cover of Take Me Home, Country Roads, Del Rey danced back into her blue cottage, turning to smile before she shut the door on the stadium and returned to domestic bliss – doing things her way, once again.
BBC News
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Shakira: Behind the scenes on tour, as she speaks out for immigrants in the US
Deep in the bowels of Miami's Hard Rock Stadium, a note is taped to the door of Shakira's production office. "Please come back later... unless you're actually on fire."The handwritten pink scrawl suggests a level of stress that is entirely understandable for the team putting on the biggest stadium tour of the 64 sold out shows across North and South America, Shakira has played to more than two million fans."I've worked for over a year, polishing every single detail of the show, so this is really an amazing reward," the star tells BBC are no frayed nerves or screaming matches backstage before the Miami show... and no-one's on vibe is calm and professional. Dancers stretch in the corridors, seamstresses sew crystals onto catsuits, and guitar techs check and re-check their around long enough and you discover a few surprising tour facts."We travel with two washing machines and two tumble dryers, which we plumb in [at] every venue," says head of wardrobe Hannah Kinkade, who has a mere 300 costumes to care for. Every outfit has to be refreshed before a new show, she says, because "Shakira dances really hard and the dancers do as well."The male dancers scuff their shoes so badly that we have to repaint them every morning."Birmingham-born stage manager Kevin Rowe shows us around the dark corridors beneath the stage, where the crew have stashed secret reserves of Gatorade and iced coffee to help them survive the sticky Miami heat.'It either gets very hot or very wet,' he says of working on an outdoor show. 'But that's the trade-off of living in the underworld.' At about 2:30pm, the band start their sound check. Shortly after 3pm, Shakira herself arrives with her non-deceitful hips, flanked by a police escort, and joins the team on in flared silver jeans and a white vest top, she can't help dancing as she assesses tonight's venue."I came here for the Beyoncé concert and that was flawless, so you'd better make me sound like that," she jokes to the is it a joke?Shakira delivers the quip with a wink, but there's one thing everyone acknowledges backstage: The boss is a perfectionist."When she's on, she's on," says chief dancer Darina Littleton. "When she comes in, she's ready, her character's on, she's full out.""She knows what she wants, and if she can't figure it out she'll get there one way or another," says musical director Tim Mitchell, who's been playing with Shakira since the 1990s (he even wrote the pan pipe riff on Whenever, Wherever)."She's very particular about every aspect of the show: Sound, visual, lighting, the wristbands, every single thing. It's incredible. I don't know how she does it." The obsession pays off. Shakira's concert is two-and-a-half hours of musical drama - a non-stop parade of bilingual hits, 13 costume changes and non-stop performs a Lebanese-inspired belly dance during Ojos Asi; a tribal knife routine to introduce Whenever, Wherever; thrashes a Flying-V guitar during Objection (Tango); and has the audience howling and braying through an electrifying version of She tour is titled Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran (Women No Longer Cry) after Shakira's latest album, which was inspired by some of the most intense heartbreak and personal upheaval she'd ever 11-year relationship with footballer Gerard Piqué fell apart, at the same time as her father had emergency brain surgery, and Spanish authorities accused her of €14.5m (£12.7m) tax fraud (she settled the case out of court)."Many of you know that the past years haven't been the easiest for me," she says on stage. "But who doesn't have a fall here and there, right?"What I've learned is that a fall isn't the end, but the beginning of an even better journey."More specifically, the turbulence of her early 40s prompted a creative outburst that put Shakira back in the cultural conversation after seven years of musical 2023, Bzrp Music Sessions Vol 53, a collaboration with Argentine producer Bizarrap, was full of barbs directed at Piqué and his new girlfriend ("you traded a Rolex for a Casio") and won song of the year at the Latin continued the theme on a string of hit singles like the sarcastic Te Felicito (I Congratulate You) and TQG (Te Quedó Grande - I'm Too Good for You), a duet with fellow Colombian star Karol G, which has racked up 1.3 billion streams on Spotify."She's so inspiring to women," says one fan, wearing furry she-wolf ears, shortly before the show. "She's done it all. She is power." Shakira's commitment to the show is such that she wants our interview to take place after she comes off stage. So shortly after midnight, she appears from her dressing room, somehow looking fresher than a field of daisies."I warn you, I might not make a lot of sense right now," she laughs. "I'm still recovering."It was really hot today and humid. So whenever it's like that, or there's altitude, it's very challenging... but totally worth it."What happens when she's tired or ill?"To put together a show of this size, and to make it happen every night, it doesn't matter if you're sad or if you had a bad day or if you're sick or you're coughing - you just have to do your best and miraculously make it happen."And the adrenalin actually doesn't let me feel the exhaustion, or how demanding it can be. It carries you through." Learning from Leonard Cohen Playing in Miami was particularly meaningful, she says, because it's the city she moved to as a teenager, hoping to break into the Western pop that point, she was already a star in Colombia, but she knew international success meant singing in English. The only problem was, she had never learned it."I was only 19 when I moved to the US, like many other Colombian immigrants who come to this country looking for a better future," she says."And I remember I was surrounded by Spanish-English dictionaries and synonym dictionaries - because back in the day I didn't really have Google or chat GPT to [help]. So it was all very precarious."And then I got into poetry and started reading a little bit of a Leonard Cohen and Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, trying to understand how the English language works within songwriting. I think that's how I got good at it."Lately, she's been reflecting on those experiences, her acceptance in America, and how that contrasts with the Trump administration's attitude to the Grammy for best Latin pop album earlier this year, she addressed the situation directly."I want to dedicate this award to all my immigrant brothers and sisters in this country. You are loved, you are worth it, and I will always fight with you," she does it feel, I ask, to be an immigrant in the US today?"It means living in constant fear," she says. "And it's painful to see."Now, more than ever, we have to remain united. Now, more than ever, we have to raise our voices and make it very clear that a country can change its immigration policies, but the treatment of all people must always be humane." It's a powerful statement – spoken partially in Spanish as Shakira addresses her Latin American fans connection underpins the success of her tour - fans have grown up with Shakira and see themselves reflected in Miami, the audience spans generations – with mothers and daughters singing in unison to 90s hits like Pies Descalzos, Sueños Blancos and bouncing around to a celebratory Waka Waka (This Time for Africa).That's why the emotional high point of the show comes during Acróstico – the tender ballad Shakira wrote for her children, promising them she'd stay strong amid the split from Piqué.As she performs, Sasha (12) and Milan (10) appear on the video screens, duetting with their mum."My heart melts every time I see them on that screen and I hear their little voices," says the star."They're just everything to me. They're my engine and the reason why I'm alive. So having them every night on stage, it's just such a precious moment." This is the first time the boys have been old enough to see their mum perform in concert, and she confesses they have "mixed emotions" about it."When I have a show, they're kind of stressed out because they want everything to come out perfect for me," she says. "They're always worried, like, 'Mom, how did it go? Did you fall? Are you OK?'"And I try to show them that there's no perfect show. It's OK to make a mistake."The question for UK fans is, will the tour come to Europe?"You have to stay tuned. Wait and see," Shakira teases."We can't say dates yet, but we're close to announcing. I really want to share this show with my fans from all over the world."
