List of most-attended concerts

This article lists the most-attended concerts of all time. The oldest 100,000-crowd concert reported to Billboard Boxscore is Grateful Dead's gig at the Raceway Park, Englishtown, New Jersey on September 3, 1977. The concert was attended by 107,019 people. Internationally, 40 paid concerts have surpassed the initial record set by Grateful Dead. Frank Sinatra, Tina Turner, and Paul McCartney broke the record respectively in Maracanã Stadium. With an audience of over 184,000 people on April 21, 1990, McCartney's record was broken by a Japanese rock band, Glay, which held a concert with an audience of 200,000 people on July 31, 1999, in Chiba, Japan (Makuhari Parking Lot). GLAY held the record for 6 years. Italian singer Vasco Rossi surpassed the record with his solo concert on July 1, 2017 with a total of 225,173 tickets sold at Modena Park. The concert was a celebration of his 40 years of career.

Although the attendance numbers of free concerts are known to be exaggerations,^[1] several concerts have been reported to have a million audience or more. Both Jean-Michel Jarre's concert in Moscow 1997 and Rod Stewart's concert in Copacabana 1994 have been reported to attract audiences of more than 3.5 million people. Jean-Michel Jarre has attracted a live audience of more than a million spectators on five occasions, three times in Paris, 1979, 1990 and 1995, once in Houston, 1986, and once in Moscow, 1997. He is the only artist ever to have done so.

Both Jean-Michel Jarre's concert in Moscow 1997 and Rod Stewart's concert in Copacabana 1994 have been reported to attract audiences of more than 3.5 million people. Metallica played Moscow in 1991 in front of 1.6 million people. (Although Metallica is generally credited with this show, they were the supporting act for ACDC)^{[citation needed]}. In the 21st century, Madonna's closing performance of The Celebration Tour in Rio de Janeiro, which was free to attend, attracted over 1.6 million people.^[2] It became the all-time most attended standalone concert for any artist performing for free.^[3]