From Taylor Swift to Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen, here are the 10 best concerts we saw this year

Women with stadium-size shows ruled the concert world in 2023.

This summer, the South Philly sports complex was the venue for artists commanding mass audiences in a year when, on a grand scale, the live music business boomed. Indie artists scuffled, but worldwide ticket sales for the Top 100 tours were up 46% according to Pollstar, which monitors the concert industry. Total ticket sales were up 18%.

Some of the biggest tours of the year are on my list of the best concerts I saw in Philadelphia in 2023. So are some of the smallest. It’s a personal list, subjected at times to FOMO-inducing scheduling conflicts. I have a feeling, for instance, that Janelle Monae’s “The Age of Pleasure” tour would have made it if Citizens Bank Park didn’t host Pink’s “Summer Carnival” that same night.

Talking about pop music in 2023 has to start with Taylor Swift. It’s mandatory!

Of course, the “Berks County Woman,” as my colleague Emily Bloch referred to Time’s Person of the Year, has been plenty popular for the first 17 years of her career. But this year, she became ubiquitous.

That’s thanks to the ingenious “Eras Tour,” an epic production that satisfied the post-pandemic demand by giving Swifties nine Taylors to choose from — why not pick them all? — and kept them on their toes with two surprise songs per night.

“Eras” showed how confident Swift has grown onstage as she out-Springsteened Springsteen in a 3-hour-15-minute endurance test that gave fans more than they could have reasonably hoped for. That goes for the over 200,000 people inside the Linc over three nights and — even more impressively — the ticketless thousands who stood outside singing along to every word.

» READ MORE: Review: Taylor Swift kicks off historic 3-night Eras Tour run in South Philly with a dazzling 3-hour spectacle

Beyoncé’s sticky summer night in South Philly transformed the Eagles’ stadium into a space that celebrated dance music culture and its Black gay creators. It wasn’t a mere greatest hits tour. Instead, the sequined, bedazzled, and diverse crowd was treated to an evening in which the superstar came off as an indomitable force, a Queen Bey who ruled by championing self-acceptance while reminding her subjects that she truly is “one of one.”

» READ MORE: The culture shifting superstar's sold out 2 1/2 hour spectacular at the Linc was her first solo show in South Philly in seven years.

Springsteen’s scheduled Philly dates were fraught with drama. In March, the three shows before his Philly date were called off due to illness, so it was uncertain whether this show would even happen. But it did. That illness presumably turned out to be the peptic ulcer disease that caused the last-minute postponement of his August Citizens Bank Park shows until next summer.

In retrospect, that makes carping about not-varied-enough set lists seem silly. Was this show Springsteen at his most amazingly maximalist? No, it was only a 2-hour-45-minute rock and roll meditation on mortality that made the “Badlands” mantra that “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” hit home as hard as ever.

There were so many outsize tours this summer that by the time Pink’s “Summer Carnival” arrived for a two-night stand, spectacle fatigue was setting in. But the artist born Alecia Moore’s dazzlingly acrobatic, if not downright dangerous, high wire act was a cure for that. It’s the force of her personality, though, that made the show go.

It was a stellar summer at the Fairmount Park amphitheater. Lauryn Hill and the Fugees reunited, and Questlove and the Soulquarians backed the Isley Brothers at the biggest ever Roots Picnic (which with Made in America canceled, was Philly’s biggest music fest). Philly rapper Chill Moody curated a 50th anniversary of hip-hop series, including a rock-rap mash-up with Low Cut Connie; and Tyler Childers, Willie Nelson, and boygenius all put on standout shows. Looking forward to next year.

The best small club rock and roll show I saw all year, with Mekons leader and irrepressible showman Jon Langford bringing the Chicago country punk Wacos to town behind their The Men That God Forgot. Talk about your “Teenage Kicks:” I stood too close to the stage and almost got smacked in the head by bass player Alan Doughty’s boot on several occasions.

An inspired bill. The great Mexican American rock band Los Lobos, whose 1980s border crossing songs “One Time One Night” and “Will the Wolf Survive?” are more timely now than ever, played with their octogenarian blues guitar hero and joined together on Howlin’ Wolf’s “300 Pounds of Joy.”

Speaking of joy, Canadian songwriter Russell’s show with her all-woman Rainbow Coalition overflowed with it on her “The Returner” tour, drawing on funk, folk, soul, and global rhythms. Russell played clarinet, banjo, and guitar as she looked “Demons” in the eye and moved forward toward the light.

This wedding band from Agadez in Niger are practitioners of Saharan rock, the trance-inducing desert blues genre that artists like Tinariwen and Bombino have brought to America. A mesmerizing evening in Fishtown.

I waited almost 30 years for this one. The riot-grrl pioneers led by Kathleen Hanna’s previous show in Philadelphia was on the rooftop of a Drexel parking garage in 1994. The influential band whose “Revolution Girl Style Now!” call to action still resonates didn’t disappoint with a spiky set that double-dared a multigenerational crowd to “do what you want … be who you will.”