In the face of tough economic times and not very many big-ticket shows, the concert industry actually did better this summer than it did in 2007! Well, if you only look at one measure of the industry, anyway.
Billboard reports that overall concert grosses from May 1 to Labor Day were $1 billion, which is up 5% from $948.5 million in 2007. Hooray! More money! But lurking underneath those higher numbers is a slightly more troubling statistic—overall attendance was actually
down 4% year-to-year, from 19.5 million tickets sold in 2007 to 18.7 million sold this year. (And that doesn't even count the number of people who didn't go to shows that they'd already bought tickets for because the price of gas was too high.) So basically that difference was made up by higher ticket prices, which will probably only be driven upward as a result of these sorta-happy numbers and ever-weakening
consumer confidence. The No. 1 ticket last summer: Kenny Chesney, thanks to his filling the "concert-as-party" void left by the lack of a Jimmy Buffett summer jaunt. The 10 highest-grossing tours are after the jump—how many did you attend?
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Idolator
The Police will go on one more North American tour this summer and that's it, no more shows, they swear, no matter how desperate for one more round of 
