The tour behind Rüfüs Du Sol‘s 2024 album Inhale/Exhale was already big, with the 46-show 2025 worldwide trek selling 727,000 tickets and earning $64 million, numbers that made it the highest-grossing electronic tour of all time.
This summer it gets even bigger, with a swirl of 31 North American headlining performances, including five shows at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles; four shows at Madison Square Garden in New York; headlining shows at Chicago’s Wrigley Stadium, San Diego’s Petco Park, Toronto’s Rogers Centre and The Gorge in Washington; and headlining festival slots at Bonnaroo at Outside Lands. According to CAA, many of these shows are already sold out.
Related
Behind Rüfüs Du Sol’s Ride to the Highest Grossing Electronic Tour of All Time: ‘We’re Really Driven to Make the Music We Want’
New Levels Strike Global Partnership With Virgin Music Group, Signs Hooligan Hefs & More
Bad Bunny's Australia Debut Sets Attendance Benchmark in Sydney
“From the very first chords I ever heard Rüfüs Du Sol play, I thought this was possible,” says the group’s longtime agent at CAA Alex Becket, who first heard the Australian live electronic trio play at the 350-capacity San Francisco club Popscene in 2013, the same year the group released its first album, Atlas. “That’s a true story. You have those existential moments in life where you’re struck by a feeling and a belief, and you can see years into the future.”
Thirteen years after that fateful performance, CAA — which books the group worldwide except for Europe and the United Kingdom, where they’re represented by The Team — reports that over 550,000 tickets have already been sold across this North American run, which begins on June 5 and wraps in early September. And that helps Becket earn the title of Billboard‘s Executive of the Week.
Here, Becket, talks about how the group built their live business to this point, and how he helped make this historic tour a reality. “That band has checked all the boxes from playing in small clubs all the way up to this current stadium level,” he says.
When Inhale/Exhale came out, did you immediately see an opportunity to tour on this scale? When did it click into place for you that this was possible?
I’ve had the great fortune of working with the band since 2013, and from the first moment I heard them, I heard and felt something different, and I felt the sky was the limit. Our whole team here always saw the potential for these guys to become a stadium band.
Having that vision, how did you build to this point?
It’ll be a minute before another Rüfüs Du Sol comes along, because dance music has become so big globally as an industry that now, the pattern is that artists build into these big, sort of spectacular one-off events or one-off weekends. They go to a market, play two or three nights, get the fan base to travel and make it more of a destination, build a big production locally and the expense is passed on to the promoter. There’s not as much appetite for an artist to go out and hit the road five days a week like a rock band.
Related
Rüfüs Du Sol Make History With Highest-Selling Electronic Tour of All Time
So it’s made a difference that they’re really an album cycle band, which is not typically the case in the electronic scene?
It’s counter to the general trend in music. Years ago, I heard [Spotify founder] Daniel Ek talk about the attention economy, how albums seem to be a relic from the past and how if you want to be on top of the charts, it’s more about catering to the attention economy and constantly engaging with your fans. So people release albums in this waterfall style, where it’s just a single every six weeks for six months, and then you have a finished album at the end, but you’ve really just been doing this series of releases.
I like to compare the global dance music touring pattern to global bird migrations, in terms of where you need to be at what time of year. For the normal DJ, if you miss a summer in Ibiza, or a winter in Tulum, or a March in Miami, whatever it might be, you risk losing a step. Rüfüs is quite to the contrary. Being a live band first is the biggest distinction, and they’ve toured in a more traditional rock and roll way, where they take a year or two to write a record, come back, hit the road nonstop for two years and then let the cycle repeat. That’s more traditional logic, to starve the market a bit, to increase demand, and then every time we’ve come back, it’s just kind of compounded and come back bigger.
Is that compounding how you knew you could put on a tour of this scale in 2025 and 2026?
The 2025 tour, which ended up being the highest-grossing electronic music tour of all time, was highly ambitious out of the gate. We announced 48 or 50 shows at one time. I don’t think anyone in dance music had really done that, save for maybe some domestic U.S. dubstep acts that hit the road for six weeks and play five nights a week.
Short of somebody like that, the scale of doing a global tour on four continents and announcing an entire year’s worth of shows at one time, I think was unprecedented. The sheer scale of it set us up for becoming an industry leader in terms of the size of that tour and how the sales ended up. It wasn’t done in a vacuum, though. That band has checked all the boxes from playing in small clubs all the way up to this current stadium level.
This summer, Rüfüs is playing four shows at Madison Square Garden and a night at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Did the success of the 2025 leg, which included a stadium show at the Rose Bowl, make this level of touring in 2026 possible?
Wrigley we knew about once we knew we were headlining Lollapalooza 2025. Chicago was being left out of the headline touring in 2025, and we felt like Wrigley is such an iconic venue and a cool, iconic follow-up. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I didn’t realize that an electronic artist had never played Wrigley before.
We’ve been growing into stadiums since our return from the pandemic. For a lot of people, some of the most iconic Rüfüs shows and most iconic post-pandemic shows were when we did three nights at BMO Stadium in L.A. [in November of 2021]. That was our first foray into a soccer stadium venue size. We weren’t the first concerts there, but it felt like we broke the seal off that building, and we’ve been able to duplicate that in other markets. Now we’ve taken this next step with baseball and football stadiums. The Rose Bowl was of course a crowning achievement last year, and this summer we’re also going to Folsom Field in Boulder.
Related
Billboard’s Dance Power Players 2026: Executive List Revealed
When you’re able to toggle back and forth between headlining festival plays and massive hard ticket shows, how do you make the decisions of where and what to play?
Speaking to the U.S., historically the way we’ve toured is releasing a new record, coming to a territory and playing the A markets, establishing a headline history and then using that success to go to festival buyers and solicit festival offers. Like, “We just sold out The Fonda or The Wiltern, bring us back for a festival on the following play.” Then we come back on the same cycle for a second show and use the festivals as anchors to headline B markets and bring the show to more markets. This is also how we’ve been able to build a headline business in 40 markets nationally, as opposed to just sticking to the top 10 or 15, which is so easy to do.
It’s in a place now where everybody wants them, so we’re able to be strategic and choose the ones that make the most sense. It’s worked out really nicely on this cycle, where we’ve been able to fit festivals in perfectly with the broader tour.
What, if anything, does it mean for electronic music at large to have the highest-grossing electronic tour of all time not be 20 years ago, but happening currently?
I just think it’s so cool. A high tide lifts all the boats. It seems like every other day there’s some new amazing accomplishment or accolade happening for a dance artist, and it just seems like the whole genre has never been hotter.
When we were vetting that accomplishment of best-selling electronic music tour of all time,we pretty much knew we had it as soon as the 2025 tour went on sale. But we spent the better part of the year doing our research and asking around and making sure it was indeed the case before making a statement like that. People would be like, “Oh come on, what about Daft Punk?” It’s like, Daft Punk are the kings, but they last toured in 2007 and they were playing 5,000 capacity venues. Daft Punk could come back today and do a stadium tour, but when you look at a comparison like that, it’s such an indicator of the growth of the whole genre.
Hence then, the article about how rufus du sol achieved the highest grossing electronic tour of all time was published today ( ) and is available on billboard ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( How Rüfüs Du Sol Achieved the Highest-Grossing Electronic Tour of All Time )
Also on site :
- Kristen Stewart Tapped to Play '80s Feminist Icon
- Iranian football players celebrated in Tehran
- Russian oil supplies to India surge – media