LOS ANGELES — The anniversary tour ends where the industry lives. Jay-Z's JAŸ-Z30 concert series is scheduled to conclude with two Los Angeles performances on October 23 and 24, the final dates of a run built around 30 years of Reasonable Doubt and 25 years of The Blueprint.
The series opened with the biggest box-office report by a rapper in history: three Yankee Stadium shows in New York on July 10-12 grossed $42,290,766 from 136,934 tickets, according to Touring Data — about $14.1 million and 45,645 tickets a night. The second night set a record for the most-attended U.S. concert by a solo artist, and opening night was the highest-grossing concert of his career.
From New York, the tour crossed the Atlantic for London shows on September 4 and 5, then Paris on September 23, before returning to the United States for this week's Los Angeles finale. The routing made the series less a conventional tour than a sequence of stadium events in four of the world's music capitals.
The Los Angeles shows land in the same week as reports linking Jay-Z to the Super Bowl LXI halftime show, also set for Los Angeles in February. Whether or not that booking is confirmed, the JAŸ-Z30 finale gives the city the last word on the anniversary run — two nights to close a tour that rewrote the rap box-office record book.
