SAN DIEGO — Good news, bad news? The median price for concert tickets declined in 2025, even if you wouldn’t know it by looking at the tallies for the year’s highest-grossing tours by, respectively, Beyonce, Oasis, Coldplay, Kendrick Lamar and Shakira.

That’s good news for music fans in San Diego and across the nation, but not by much, since this year’s median price of $132.62 per ticket is just 1.6% less than last year’s all-time record high of $136.45.

Concurrently, many bands and solo artists who played in mid-size arenas, theaters and clubs experienced decreased revenues and attendance this year, with venues that seat 750 or fewer people seeing a 5.3% revenue decline from 2024 — and an 18.6% drop over the past three years — according to Pollstar magazine. There was also a 4.7% decline, Pollstar reports, for concerts in arenas and smaller stadiums with capacities between 15,001 and 30,000.

But it was a very profitable year for the 10 biggest tours of 2025, most of which played at large stadiums — and for country-music troubadour Zach Bryan. His Sept. 27 concert at Michigan Stadium at the University of Michigan drew an audience of 112,408, the largest in U.S. history for a single ticketed concert. (Bryan’s 2026 U.S. tour will include two summer dates at San Diego’s Snapdragon Stadium.)

In 2025, Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter” tour — which had an average ticket price of $255 — earned a staggering $407 million for 32 stadium shows. Close behind were Oasis ($405 million), Coldplay ($390 million), the Kendrick Lamar/SZA double-header ($358 million), Shakira ($320 million), the Weeknd ($306 million), Chris Brown ($298 million), Imagine Dragons ($249 million), Lady Gaga ($208 million) and Post Malone ($197 million).

The tour by Imagine Dragons did not include any U.S. dates. Of the other nine top-grossing tours of 2025, only two came to San Diego — Shakira at Snapdragon Stadium and Chris Brown at Petco Park.

Same old story?

Sadly, the omission of San Diego tour stops for major tours is nothing new.

In 1997, I wrote a Union-Tribune article with the headline: Many pop acts bypass San Diego for ‘hotter towns’.

“Despite being the sixth- or seventh-largest city in the country, San Diego’s concert attendance is much closer to the bottom half of the top 50 national markets,” Bill Silva, then the city’s preeminent concert promoter, told the Union-Tribune at the time.

Nick Masters, the then-chairman of concert powerhouse Live Nation Southern California, was even more blunt in the same article.

“Quite honestly, San Diego has a ‘B-market’ status in the concert industry because it sits so close to Los Angeles,” Masters said. “I think a lot of bands and fans want it (San Diego) to be that large market, but I don’t think it is. It’s a smaller market.”

That continues to be the case today. Tours by many major bands and solo artists too often still skip San Diego in favor of doing one or multiple dates at Anaheim’s 19,578-capacity Honda Center, Los Angeles’ 20,000-capacity Crypto.com Arena, or both. Another concert option in Los Angeles is the 17,500-seat Kia Forum.

Each of those L.A. venues is significantly larger than San Diego’s Viejas Arena, which seats slightly less than 13,000 for concerts, and Pechanga Arena which seats 14,000. This suggests that the proposed plans to replace Pechanga Arena with a new 16,000-capacity venue could prove too small to draw the biggest concert tours here with any regularity. If a major act can make $1 million more per night by playing for thousands more people in bigger venues to our north, why bother to come here?

An array of venues

Happily, at least four comparatively smaller new concert venues have opened in San Diego in the past four years. They include: The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park; UC San Diego’s Epstein Family Amphitheatre; The Sound in Del Mar; and the 7,500-capacity FrontWave Arena in Oceanside.

The four complement the host of other venues here, which range from such intimate venues as the Casbah and Soda Bar to the 19,400-capacity North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre, which typically offers shows from spring to fall.

No matter the size, these were some of my favorite 2025 concerts that were held in San Diego and, in two notable instances, Palm Desert. Most of the descriptions are taken from my reviews of these performances.

Robert Plant & Saving Grace, featuring Suzi Dian, Nov. 23, Harrah’s Resort Southern California

At 77, former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant is reaching new artistic heights with Saving Grace, his genre-blurring, one-woman, four-man band.

At this stunning, pitch-perfect concert, they deftly drew from — and ingeniously reconfigured — an array of Celtic, rock, blues, gospel, country, psychedelia and Northern African music traditions. And when they turned to several classics from the Zeppelin songbook, they gave them a such fresh and imaginative spins that they sounded both weathered and brand new at the same time.

Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Billy Strings, Sierra Hull, May 15, North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre

Considering that Wille Nelson is 92 and Bob Dylan turned 84 a week after this concert, a casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that — in the autumn of their years — one or both of these storied American music giants might be preparing to go gently into that good night.

Think again.

Nelson persevered in the face of an apparent cold on a cool, breezy night, while Dylan’s performance was simply (and complexly) revelatory. It included Dylan’s first-ever performance of Ricky Nelson’s 1972 gem, “Garden Party,” the only song Dylan has done in concert by another songwriter whose lyrics make direct reference to Dylan himself.

Alison Krauss & Union Station, July 12, The Shell

Three years after she performed at The Shell with Robert Plant, bluegrass-and-beyond queen Alison Krauss returned to the same venue on her first tour in a decade with her ace band, Union Station.

As a bonus, Vista-bred multi-instrumental wizard Stuart Duncan was a newly added member of the group, whose exquisite ensemble work was matched by its luminous singing. Especially memorable was dobro master Jerry Douglas’ stunning solo versions of Paul Simon’s “American Song” and Chick Corea’s “Spain.”

Rhiannon Giddens & The Old Time Revue, June 19, Observatory North Park

American roots-music champion Rhiannon Giddens seemingly knows no limits, as befits a Pulitzer Prize-winning opera composer who played banjo and viola on Beyonce’s Grammy Album of the Year-winning “Cowboy Carter” album.

For her 2025 tour, Giddens reunited with Justin Robinson, the fiddler with whom she founded the band Carolina Chocolate Drops in 2005. Together with their four-piece Old Time Revue, which featured former Joan Baez musical director Dirk Powell, Giddens and Robinson paid homage to African-American string music traditions from Appalachia, Cajun waltzes, backwoods hoedowns, rusic folk ballads, bluesy laments and more with deep feeling and infectious spirit.

The Who, Oct. 1, Palm Desert’s Acrisure Arena

The final concert on The Who’s U.S. farewell tour came 33 years after the pioneering English rock band’s first farewell tour in 1983. Yet, while Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey are now both in their 80s. they sounded thoroughly engaged and impassioned from start to finish of their 22-song performance.

Their repertoire mixed stirring renditions of such classics as “My Generation,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Love, Reign O’er Me” with similarly memorable versions of such lesser-heard gems as “Long Live Rock,” “Another Tricky Day” and the concert-concluding “Tea & Theatre.”

Paul McCartney, Sept. 29, Acrisure Arena

The Who may be retiring, but — just two days before their final U.S. farewell tour show in the same Palm Desert arena — Paul McCartney officially opened his latest U.S. concert trek.

The former Beatle and veteran solo star delivered a 33-song set that clocked in at nearly three hours. At 83, McCartney is four years older than President Donald Trump and 14 years older than the new pope. But this improbably slim-and-trim music icon delivered an often-joyous celebration of music that was equally potent and poignant.

Cynthia Erivo, with the San Diego Symphony, Aug. 17, The Shell

Grammy, Emmy and Tony Award-winning singer and actress Cynthia Erivo curiously opted not to include a single song here from her excellent new album, “I Forgive You.” But no matter.

She easily enthralled the capacity audience with her glorious voice whether singing Broadway standards or classics from the songbooks of Prince, Etta James, Nina Simone, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Roberta Flack and, especially, Aretha Franklin, that she handily — and thrillingly — made her own.

Anderson .Paak and The Freed Radicals, Janelle Monáe, Gary Clark, Jr., Jason Mraz, Leon Thomas and Daniel Caesar, May 15/16, Wonderfront Music & Arts Festival

The unseasonably cool and wet weather may have put a damper on attendance, but the third edition of the Wonderfront festival heated up quickly with some particularly memorable performances.

Gary Clark Jr., Leon Thomas, Daniel Caesar and San Diego’s Jason Mraz all delivered strong sets. Even better was Anderson .Paak, who sang, rapped and drummed up a storm, and Janelle Monáe, who at times channeled the electrifying stage presence of the late Prince better than just about anyone since Prince himself.

Shemekia Copeland, Jan. 11, Humphreys Backstage Live

Coming just a few weeks before the 2025 Grammy Awards — at which she was a triple-nominee — Oceanside-based vocal dynamo Shemekia Copeland sizzled and soared throughout her 14-song set.

It served as a galvanizing celebration of blues, soul, gospel and the other timeless American music styles at which she excels. Accompanied by a first-rate band, Copeland owned every word she sang through the sheer force of her conviction.

DK Harrell, May 11, Gator by the Bay

Just 25, Louisiana-bred guitarist and singer DK Harrell is a vibrant young blues star on the rise. In front of an enthusiastic festival audience, he exuded the fire and charisma of a young B.B. King — his avowed idol — then added some show-stopping moves all his own.

Geese, Oct. 31, Quartyard

The wryly titled “Getting Killed” is the fourth album in seven years by this young New York band — and one of this year’s standout rock releases.

Their outdoor Halloween-night performance here was a suitably festive affair that included winning group originals, a medley of three 1970 chestnuts by the Stooges — “Down on the Street,” “Loose” and “TV Eye” — and a climactic encore of Velvet Underground’s “I'm Waiting for the Man” that surely would have won over its composer, the late (and notoriously difficult-to-please) Lou Reed.

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