The 10 Best Concerts of 2024 (According to People Who Were There)

Concert reviews from critics are fine, but the best measure of a show is what the crowd says walking out. These ten concerts from 2024 were the ones people wouldn't shut up about for weeks afterward, based on fan consensus across social media, Reddit, and conversations with people who were actually in the room.

Beyonce's Renaissance World Tour stop at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles was a technical marvel. The staging, a rotating platform with video installations that changed every song, was the most ambitious concert production since her own Coachella performance. Three and a half hours of near-perfect execution.

Fred Again.. at Madison Square Garden proved that electronic music can fill arenas without losing intimacy. His set built from quiet bedroom-producer moments to full-venue euphoria, with the crowd singing along to sampled voice notes from strangers. It felt like a collective emotional release disguised as a DJ set.

Kendrick Lamar's Big Steppers Tour date at the Crypto.com Arena was a theatrical experience. Staged like a Shakespearean drama with multiple acts and a full-scale house set design, it was the most conceptually ambitious hip-hop tour in years. The performance of Mother I Sober reportedly left sections of the audience in tears.

Tyler the Creator's Camp Flog Gnaw festival in November delivered again. The Chromakopia tour preview set introduced new material in a festival context, with production values that rivaled arena headliners. Tyler's curation, mixing established acts with emerging artists, remains the festival's secret weapon.

The best sound in almost any arena is at the front-of-house desk, dead centre and roughly two-thirds back, because that is where the engineer is mixing. The rail gets you the performer and a wall of unmixed stage volume. Bring earplugs either way. Loop Experience run about £25, Etymotic's ER20XS about £20, and custom moulds from an audiologist £150 to £200, worth it if you go to more than a handful of shows a year.

Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood touring as The Smile delivered stripped-down intensity that proved you don't need spectacle to captivate. Other standouts included Andre 3000 playing live flute, Olivia Rodrigo's Guts tour, SZA's marathon festival sets, Charli XCX's Brat tour, and Mitski at Radio City Music Hall.

Getting into these rooms is the hard part, and the market turned slightly less hostile in 2024. The US Justice Department sued Live Nation in May seeking a breakup of the Ticketmaster business. The Federal Trade Commission then finalised its rule on hidden fees in December 2024, in force from May 2025, forcing sellers to show the total price up front instead of revealing it at checkout.

Skip the resale giants. Twickets in the UK and CashorTrade in the US are fan-to-fan platforms capped at or near face value, and both fill up in the final 48 hours as people's plans collapse. Setting alerts on those two beats refreshing StubHub, where the same seat routinely lists at three times what it originally cost.

The venue that changed the maths is the Sphere in Las Vegas: 17,600 seats inside a wraparound 16K LED interior, with Dead & Company and Phish both taking residencies through 2024. It costs a fortune to play and a fortune to attend, and it has quietly made the residency rather than the tour the destination format for any act that can fill a room for 20 nights.

https://www.setlist.fm/stats/concerts/2024