These are the top 10 most in-demand concerts coming to Philly in 2024

Amid the dreariness of January, it can be difficult to remember that the sun will come out in a couple of months, bringing with it the start of summer concert season.

Eight of the top 10 most anticipated Philadelphia-area concerts this year will be held at outdoor venues, according to StubHub data on concerts with the highest total ticket sales on the secondary-market site.

Topping the list is the Rolling Stones, the iconic rock band that last played in Philadelphia in 2019 (and first played here in 1965). The continued excitement around the tour comes as little surprise given that the band’s superfans crashed the website of AARP, the tour’s sponsor, when tickets went on sale in November.

It even beat out ticket sales for three shows that were rescheduled from last summer — country star Morgan Wallen’s May concert and Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s two August shows. Those concerts were postponed a year due to Wallen’s vocal cord injury and Springsteen’s flare-up of peptic ulcer disease.

Only one top 10 concert was scheduled before May: Madonna’s show at Wells Fargo Thursday, which was rescheduled from December after the singer suffered a serious bacterial infection.

Here are the hottest concerts coming to Philadelphia and Camden, and how much consumers have paid on average for tickets to these shows through the popular reseller:

After back-to-back record-breaking years for the concert industry, and as tour-related costs such as trucks and fuel remain higher than they were pre-pandemic, experts say they see no signs of ticket prices getting any cheaper any time soon.

“2024 is really going to be the year of us seeing extended monetization of the superfan,” said Jeff Apruzzese, director of the music industry program at Drexel University and former bassist for Passion Pit. ”Depending on who the artist is, they [superfans] might not care if it’s exceeding the bandwidth of what they can financially afford. They’re going to figure out a way to get in that room to see that artist.”

Across North America, the following acts are commanding the highest median resale prices for tickets to their concerts this year, according to recent data from Gametime, another secondary-market site:

Of the artists on that list, four have stops in Philadelphia: Olivia Rodrigo on July 19; Bad Bunny on April 19; Morgan Wallen on May 11; and Andrea Bocelli on Feb 21. On the resale market this week, tickets to Bocelli’s forthcoming show at the Wells Fargo Center started around $120, while Bad Bunny’s started at just under $300. For Wallen’s and Rodrigo’s shows, however, fans couldn’t find tickets for under $400 apiece. All those costs are also before fees.

Those four in-demand shows are great examples of the kind of artists that attract people whom Apruzzese calls “superfans.”

“Those different fan communities all share such different demographics,” he said. “Morgan Wallen fans probably don’t coalesce with Olivia’s fans,” in the same way there’s likely to be little overlap between fans of classical opera singer Bocelli and fans of Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny.

Members of these rabid fan bases are willing to pay top dollar, and as long as artists can command that kind of loyalty, tickets will continue to cost all concertgoers, Apruzzese said.

When he recently watched Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie with his daughter, a 4-year-old Swiftie, he was reminded of what superfans look like and why they sometimes have no ceiling on what they’re willing to spend on a single concert.

“When the camera pans to audience members and they’re literally crying because they are so emotional — it is such an emotional release to be in the room with their favorite artist — that is the superfan right there,” Apruzzese said. “That is the point when someone is like, ‘I don’t care if it costs me $5,000, I’ve been waiting my whole life to be in this room, this means everything to me.’ "