## The Twenty Four Seven Tour: The Final Number
The Twenty Four Seven Tour, supporting the album of the same name released in 1999, was Tina Turner’s last major concert tour before the brief 50th Anniversary return in 2008-2009. It ran through 2000 and set a record that puts everything in quantitative perspective: the tour grossed over $120 million, making it the highest-grossing tour of the year 2000 for any artist of any gender.
The year 2000. She was sixty years old. She had been performing professionally since 1958. The highest-grossing tour of the year was by a sixty-year-old woman from Nutbush, Tennessee, who had left a Texas limousine with thirty-six cents in 1976.
The tour records accumulated over the course of her career form a specific kind of evidence about what the name Tina Turner meant to concert-going audiences by the end of the twentieth century. The 1988 Maracanã record had established that she could fill a stadium with paying customers on a scale that rivaled the biggest acts in popular music history. The 2000 tour established that the commercial appeal had not diminished with age — that audiences were buying tickets to see Tina Turner at sixty with the same enthusiasm they had brought to seeing her at forty-four.
This is not common. The popular music industry has a general assumption built into its commercial structures that artists’ ticket-selling power declines with age, that the audience of a given artist ages with them while new young audiences are not recruited, and that the eventual result is smaller venues and smaller grosses. The Twenty Four Seven Tour’s $120 million represented a specific refutation of this assumption as applied to Tina Turner.