U2girl said:
I know it's hard to make comparisons as they didn't play the same countries and venues on these tours and the tours weren't equally long, but anyway: which tour had the biggest demand for U2?
Just looking at some of the raw numbers such as average attendance, speed of sellout, etc, it appears that Vertigo is definitely the more in demand tour in just about every place outside of North America with the exception of Japan.
Every show in Vertigo Europe was soldout within hours of going on sale. On the ZOO TV Outside Broadcast portion of the European tour, 20% of the shows failed to completely sellout. Demand in South America, Australia, and Europe is far from being exhausted on the VERTIGO TOUR. The band could sellout many more shows in these area's.
On the Joshua Tree tour in Europe, many of the shows were in Arena's with a number of stadiums as well. The concert in Switzerland on the Joshua Tree did not sellout.
In North America, you would probably still have to see that the Joshua Tree tour and ZOO TV had stronger demand overall than the Vertigo Tour. Both Joshua Tree and ZOO TV had rapid sellouts of stadiums. While there were a few places they did not sellout, most shows did. Its difficult to estimate how a Vertigo Stadium tour would have done in North America, but it best it would only be equal to what happened on ZOO TV and the Joshua Tree.
I'd say demand on Vertigo for North America is 80% to 100% of what demand was for Joshua Tree and ZOO TV. Outside North America, demand for Vertigo is definitely ahead of what it was for the Joshua Tree and ZOO TV. So overall, Vertigo is U2's most in demand tour of all time!
Of course, this is a different market from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The population while it may not be any larger in Europe, certainly has a higher percentage of rock music fans than they did 15 to 20 years ago. The population in North America is significantly larger, and of course there are a higher percentage of popular music fans today than there was back then. Despite this, the cost of going to see the biggest band in the world has gone up dramatically. In nominal terms, fans are paying 5 times as much, adjusted for inflation it is 3 times more expensive to see U2 in concert now than it was back then. So I'd see these factors cancel each other out, and were back to looking at the volume of attendance and the number of sellouts and the speed of sellouts. Here again, Vertigo wins out.