The most loved, watched and listened to live gigs of all time
From
festivals such as Coachella to Super Bowl halftime shows, legendary concerts at world-renowned venues to
charity performances like Live Aid, certain live performances are simply unforgettable and go down in history as some of the greatest live shows ever.
TicketSource have analysed 50 of the biggest live performances in history to reveal the most loved, watched and listened to performances of all time.
The World’s Top Three Most Popular Live Performances
1. Often lauded as the greatest live performance of all time, Queen’s show-stopping Live Aid performance can now officially be claimed as the world’s favourite live performance. Queen stole the show at Live Aid, performing their biggest hits, including “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Radio Ga Ga”, “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions”, to an audience of 1.9 million people across the globe. The 2018 biographical movie Bohemian Rhapsody, which told the story of Freddie Mercury’s life, recaptured the attention of the world to Queen’s Live Aid performance, making it the most popular live performance to date.
2. One of the sexiest Super Bowl Halftime Shows in history, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira’s 2020 performance featured a medley of their top hits, with guest appearances including Bad Bunny and J Balvin. The performance took place at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida and received five Primetime Emmy nominations, winning Best TV Musical Performance.
3. The world seems to love a Super Bowl Halftime performance, with Lady Gaga’s 2017 Halftime Show ranking the third most popular live performance of all time. Lady Gaga performed a medley of hits from her album Joanne at the NRG Stadium in Houston, receiving praise for her artistry, acknowledgement of the LGBT community and political undertones, landing Gaga 6 Primetime Emmy award nominations.
The World’s Most Popular Live Performances (1-25)
The World’s Most Popular Live Performances (26-50)
The Top Three Most Listened to Live Performances on Spotify
We all love to watch the spectacle of a live performance, but which live performance does the world favour listening to? Only fifteen of the fifty most popular live performances are featured on Spotify.
On average, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York is the most listened to live performance, with an average of 55,799,756 listens. This also came in the top ten most-loved live performances so it’s no surprise that it’s played so much on Spotify.
Next up is the Queen of pop, Beyonce, with her legendary Homecoming: The Live Album. This has received a massive 672 million plays to date.
In third place is Johnny Cash’s live album from Folsom Prison. After his 1955 hit “Folsom Prison Blues”, Cash performed and recorded two shows at Folsom State Prison in California which to date have been listened to over 212,673,000 times on Spotify.
*For average Spotify plays, we took the average number of times that each song in the performance has been played on SpotifyThe Most Listened-to Live Performances on Spotify
Methodology
We started by sourcing a list of some of the biggest live performances in history from a variety of listicles, analysing the number of annual Google searches for each, using
Google Ads’ Keyword Planner.
We then ranked the top 50 most searched performances based on the number of searches, as well as the number of
YouTube views and annual searches on YouTube (sourced from
Ahrefs), giving each performance a normalised score out of 100 for each of the three factors, before taking an average overall score.
When looking at Spotify plays, we analysed the total number of album streams overall as well as the average number of plays per track in the album.
