Tickets to Strait’s Kyle Field concert selling at a record pace
A decade ago, 104,793 George Strait fans gathered in Arlington for the finale of his The Cowboy Rides Away Tour at AT&T Stadium.
At the time, it broke the Rolling Stones’ record for the largest audience for a concert at an indoor venue. It’s still Strait’s biggest crowd ever.
His upcoming concert at Kyle Field in College Station may be bigger.
Tickets went on sale
March 28, and already more than 100,000 have been sold for the June 15 concert. Scattered platinum seats, starting at about $360, are still available at 12thmanfoundation.com. And blocks of seats associated with suites could be released for sale if the suite holders choose not to attend the concert.
The concert promoter expects attendance to exceed the AT&T Stadium show.
“George has always said he has the best fans, and there’s nothing like a Texas crowd,” Louis Messina, Strait’s longtime promoter and founder of Messina Touring Group, said through a spokesperson. “We knew the show at Kyle Field would be exciting as it’s the firstever one of its size to be held in the stadium, but even I didn’t expect we’d sell over 100,000 tickets in just a few days. He’ll play to more people in one night than we did at AT&T in 2014!”
The audience for “The King at Kyle Field” could even surpass what is widely considered the highest attendance for a ticketed concert — excluding free shows and festivals — in U.S. history. That’s the Sept. 3, 1977, Grateful Dead concert at Raceway Park in Englishtown, N.J., which had paid attendance of 107,019, according to a report in Billboard a couple of weeks later.
Like the AT&T Stadium concert, the Kyle Field show will be presented in the round, with a slowly rotating stage in the center of the field, which maximizes the number of floor-level seats.
“Usually if you do an end stage, you’re blocking a pretty substantial percentage
of your tickets” with video screens and space for production equipment, said Ebie Mcfarland, Strait’s publicist.
Capacity is just over 107,000 for the concert, so if every single seat sells, the Grateful Dead’s 47year-old attendance mark could be beaten.
The record attendance for a football game at Kyle Field is 110,633 on Oct. 11, 2014, when the Aggies played Ole Miss.
Though Strait, 71, officially
retired from touring at the end of the Cowboy Rides Away tour, he has continued to record and perform one-off shows, including several stadium dates with Chris Stapleton scheduled for later this year.
The Kyle Field concert will be his first in Texas since he played the Houston Rodeo in 2022 and his only Texas performance this year. The opening acts, both from Texas like Strait, are Parker Mccollum and Catie Offerman.
Both the format and lineup are unique to the Texas concert.
Messina is known for putting artists in front of huge crowds. He created the Texxas Jam rock concerts in the late ’70s and co-founded Ozzfest with Sharon Osbourne. Messina Touring Group is the promoter of Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras Tour.
He has been working with Strait since his first country music festival on Labor Day 1993 at the Alamodome. He first worked with Swift when she opened for Strait on a series of dates in 2007.
“It’s a testament to George’s reputation as an entertainer and performer that here we are, still setting records and personal bests years later,” Messina said. “We’ve spent the last few years playing specialty one-off shows in markets he’ll likely never play again, and I’m excited about this summer of special shows with Chris Stapleton — it’s always been such a great experience for the fans.
“Bringing these magical nights from the King of Country Music to fans has been one of the greatest honors of my life.”*