Dear Stones family:

I am listening to "Sympathy for the Devil" this very second (06:52 p.m. MEZ; on German TV - "3SAT") and all of a sudden this question hits me:

Has anyone ever tried to count the heads of all the people who have ever attended concerts of the Stones, i.e., tried to find out how many tickets have ever been sold?

I would be interested in getting this number, just for the heck of it.

By the way: I wish all of you a very happy New Year with lots of Stones-music and maybe even a new album!

Ruediger

How would we count? If I attended 10 shows, am I 10 people or still a single person?

@ doitywoik:

You're right - it's not easy to count. I have attended 19 shows and am also only one person. My wife has attended 7 or 8 shows (we have just tried to find out) and is also only on person... And think of Bjornulf: he has no doubt seen many hundreds of shows and will be the absolute no. 1 insofar, but is still one person... I see the my spontaneous idea was definitely not well-thought-out. May be anyone (a statistician?) has an idea, if anyone is interested at all in my crazy end-of-the year-thoughts...

(If we counted the tickets, we knew that number, but not, how many people have ever seen the Stones.)

143,964,871 and counting...

There's no way to know how many times all of one person has seen the Stones, so just stick to how many people saw them on each tour.

Even when you count simple every person once for every concert it’s not easy to know

The precise answer is right here:

[iorr.org]

Ironically, Mick and Keith have never seen the Rolling Stones play live.

When I was active for a fanclub magazine I did a serious and tedious attempt based on data available from James Karnbach, BV, and several other sources. I felt so free to title it: Rolling Stones, most popular live act of the 20th Century.
I came to a total of 1739 performances (maybe missed one or two) in 37 years with around 30 million concert visitors.
Meanwhile there have been concerts in 2002, '03, '05, '06, '07, '12 to '18. So if anyone has time to check (I think BV's database is sufficiënt) all those concerts you will get a pretty good idea
Happy New Year anyway!

Over 40 million by now-

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FrogSugar
The precise answer is right here:

[iorr.org]

The thread you mention arrived at the following conclusion:

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Lukester
...ouch!!!

I read the "other" link and given the info from Stein and Gazza, Marko could be quite close to "the correct total" of 40 million. I think we all can agree, that that is a very impressive number of visitors.
Some try to "translate" such figure to "real visitors", meaning not the multiple ones (being possibly most of us die-hards). I know fans who went twice as well as fans who saw them 400+ times (okay, bv is a special "case" ), but statisticians would probably break their necks over calculations. For no reason at all I guess that there could be some 4 to 6 million (die-)hard Stones fans around the world (I even know several die-hard fans who never went to see them, because of economic limitations!)
Some albums sold maybe 10+ or so million copies, but that's not general practice.
But it means that there are also a fair number of "die-soft" Stones fans of which possibly many saw the band live.
Anyway, if all goes well this year, we can add maybe another million (or maybe even more) to the total. WoW ...

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MKjan
Ironically, Mick and Keith have never seen the Rolling Stones play live.

they must look at each other while on stage, at least occasionally!

I drew this a few years ago.
Don't remember what the @#$%& I was thinking. Not a mathematician.
Maybe someone else can figure this out...