Over 34k events, MoUs and record-breaking gigs: BookMyShow’s year in live entertainment

Ticketing platform BookMyShow has released its annual wrap-up of the year gone by. It listed tickets for 34,086 live entertainment events in 2025, up from 30,687 in 2024, and 26,359 in 2023. That, however, is a slowdown in growth from 14% to 11%, which was perhaps expected after a post-pandemic boom. Importantly, it represents only those events listed on their platform. 

Live entertainment includes not just music concerts but also sports, comedy and theatre events, of course, but this was a landmark year for gigs with the highest number of performances by international acts until date, starting off with Coldplay’s record-breaking India tour in January, which was produced and promoted by BookMyShow. The company also brought down Cigarettes After Sex, Ed Sheeran, Guns N’ Roses, Post Malone and Travis Scott for shows across the country and staged the third edition of Lollapalooza India in Mumbai, which was headlined by Green Day and Shawn Mendes, during 2025. 

Music tourism continued to grow, as 562,032 fans travelled to another city for concerts, compared to 477,393 in 2024 and 411,002 in 2023. Those stats are of particular significance to the company, which has been particularly vocal about the contribution of the ‘concert economy’ to the nation’s coffers, and has inked MoUs with the tourism departments of Assam, Telangana, Gujarat and Delhi to improve infrastructure, boost employment and increase revenues for local transport, accommodation and F&B business.

The company also highlighted the Tier-II cities that witnessed the highest growth in the consumption of live entertainment. This year, those were Visakhapatnam (409%) in Andhra Pradesh, Vadodara (230%) and Rajkot (159%) in Gujarat, Indore (214%) in Madhya Pradesh, and Shillong (213%) in Meghalaya. Shillong also figured in the 2024 list along with Kanpur and Gandhinagar, while Lucknow, Bhubaneswar and Nagpur were the hot spots of 2023.