Fenway Park is not only popular for baseball, but music concerts as well AP Photo/Winslow Townson
What should one do with a 40,000 seat venue, which may sit empty for half the summer. The answer seems kind of obvious, and MLB teams this summer used their venues to hold summer concerts to help pad their revenue streams. Thanks to a couple of big name concerts held in MLB ball parks a few MLB teams made a ton of dough from holding music concerts.
The best thing about holding a concert in a MLB stadium, is the team does not have to share that revenue with the other 29 baseball clubs. For team’s that own their stadiums outright they can make tons of loot, and not have to work all that hard for it.
The new trend is to essentially rent the stadium to the music promoter. Under a deal like this, used this summer by the Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, and Philadelphia Phillies, the act gets a large portion of the actual ticket sales. The team makes money on a surcharge per ticket, parking and of course concessions. The typical surcharge is around five bucks per ticket, but when we are talking about sold out crowds of more that 40,000 music fans, it adds up fast.
For example the Mets held three Paul McCartney concerts at their new Citi Field this summer. With a top end ticket going for 275 dollars the three dates grossed 12.8 million dollars and over 108,000 people attended. Of course under this kind of agreement much of the 12.8 million went to McCartney himself, but the Mets were able to make a nice profit at the concession stand.
According to Aramark, the Mets Concession Company the concert goers spent nearly as much on concession that a baseball crowd would. This essentially gave the Mets three additional sold out ball games, with revenue they do not have to share with any one else.
For the Phillies, who featured two Elton John/Billy Joel concert that brought in 89,690 fans, having these concerts at Citizen Bank Park added 11.8 million dollars in revenue.
The Red Sox on the other hand held a record five concerts at their ball park. Two McCartney shows grossed around 7.7 million dollars and had 58,626 fans in attendance. They also held two Dave Matthews Band shows and a Phish show that grossed around 6.5 million.
The Elton John/Billy Joel tour also held dates in Chicago at Wrigley Field and in the ballpark in Washington DC. The Chicago dates earned 11.1 million in revenue, but the Nationals would not release the quantity of revenue generated for the DC date.
What we do know is all these parks are looking to book more shows in coming years, and it seems a great way for teams to build additional revenue.
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