Why Beyonce bringing the Renaissance Tour to State Farm Stadium is a big deal for Glendale

When the Renaissance Tour hits State Farm Stadium on Thursday, Aug. 24, the Westgate Entertainment District will be swarming with Beyonce fans.

The venue can hold more than 70,000 people. And many of those fans will choose to make a full Beyonce Day of it, arriving early to avoid the traffic and enjoying dinner, drinks and maybe even lunch in nearby restaurants and bars.

Retail spending will be up at Tanger Outlets and other nearby businesses.

A week out from Beyonce’s concert, the average occupancy rate at the 12 hotels in Glendale’s Sports & Entertainment District was approximately 83% for the night of the show, according to Visit Glendale.

Many of those hotels only had a few rooms left, and they’re all confident they will sell out before the concert.

This is all good news for Glendale, Arizona, even though the city doesn’t stand to make a dime on what goes on inside the stadium itself.

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The real benefit for Glendale is 70,000 people spending the day there

“It's a state-owned facility,” City Manager Kevin Phelps explains. “And when they put the package together to finance the stadium, the deal they carved out was that sales tax revenue and ticketing revenue generated within the footprint of the stadium does not get credited back to the city of Glendale.”

The real benefit, then, is that 70,000 people are coming to Glendale and they will be spending money both before and after the concert.

As Phelps says, “People don't show up a half hour before the concert. They take the day off. They park. They go have lunch. They do some shopping. They go have some drinks with their friends. The amount of revenue we're able to capture off a mega-concert like this is substantial.”

Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl brought additional bumps in revenue

The City of Glendale enjoyed a bump in revenue from the Taylor Swift tour launch in March, briefly changing its name to Swift City, as the entire crew and video production team was in Glendale for several weeks before the launch preparing for not only that first concert, but the tour itself.

The same thing happened when Rihanna played the Super Bowl.

“Rihanna’s team rented out Desert Diamond Arena for eight or nine days,” Phelps says. “Their crew, their dancers, everybody, they were practicing that show here in town. So they were staying in hotels, eating food, ordering catering, etc., etc. Whenever you kick off a tour or have a big halftime event like that, it's more than just an in-and-out, one-day kind of a deal.”

This concert may not generate the same amount of buzz that greeted the opening weekend of the Swift tour or the Super Bowl.

“But in terms of economic impact, that national buzz doesn't always equate to additional revenue because you can only fit so many physical bodies in the stadium,” Phelps says.

“In that regard, 70,000 Beyonce fans versus 70,000 Taylor Swift Fans will have a very similar positive impact because at the end of the day, the same amount of people are gonna be here and when I talk to Westgate and the owners of those businesses, they say it's an incredibly busy day when we have a sold-out show at State Farm Stadium.”

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The ultimate goal is getting concertgoers to come back to Glendale

The ultimate goal, of course, is that those people will not only frequent those neighboring businesses on the day of the concert or before a Cardinals game but “will come back time and time again,” Phelps says, “because they're now familiar with the area.”

And so far, it’s been working like a charm.

“If I say the Westgate Entertainment District or I say ‘next to State Farm Stadium,’ most of the 4 million people who live here in metro Phoenix know where that's at,” Phelps says.

“So the real advantage is that it makes this a place that people know how to get to. And they get in that habit of coming here.”

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It’s worked so well, in fact, that now these major stadium events aren’t quite as vital to the economic outlook of the Westgate Entertainment District as they were when the stadium opened as Cardinals Stadium in 2006.

“When you rewind the clock to 2006, those 10 or 12 events a year that they were doing were in many cases the lifeblood of the entertainment district,” Phelps says.

“I think a typical Cardinals season, between preseason games and actual games, their average is around 700,000 people come to State Farm Stadium. You throw some concerts and RV shows in there, let’s say that gets you to a million visitors a year. Back in 2006, those were critical numbers.”

State Farm Stadium was “critically important” to fueling the growth of that entire area.

“But as we build around it, we're less reliant on the activity that takes place in the stadium,” Phelps says. “We still appreciate it just the same. But we're less reliant on it.”

That became clear in 2020 when COVID-19 protocols restricted attendance at Cardinals games and effectively shut down the concert industry.

“Because of how many people typically come to the entertainment district,” Phelps says, “that wasn't as much of a death blow as it could have been 15 years earlier.”

The last time Phelps asked Westgate for an estimate of the number of people who visit the entertainment district annually, he was told it was between 10 and 11 million.

“When we open VAI Resort, that could bring another two million plus to the area,” Phelps says. “And while the Desert Diamond people won't tell me what their number is, I'm guessing Desert Diamond Arena by itself brings six or seven million people a year to the area.”

More stadium concerts than ever are playing metro Phoenix

The number of stadium concerts swinging through the Valley has been on the rise since the pandemic shutdown. In the six months since Rihanna played the Super Bowl, State Farm Stadium has hosted two Taylor Swift concerts, George Strait and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And now, Beyonce. The weekend after she performs, Metallica will play two concerts.

“We're seeing larger shows happening, more shows that can fill up a stadium,” Phelps says. “It wasn't that many years ago that Garth was one of the only country artists that could sell 75,000 tickets in a stadium. George Strait couldn't eight or nine years ago. Nowadays, I mean, Luke Combs is coming in and doing two shows.”

A reporter asked Phelps recently if Glendale may be putting all its eggs in one basket going after the concert business.

“My response to that reporter was that there are very few things I can say if we go back 500 years in human history, 1,000 years in human history, that we still do today,” Phelps says.

“And one of those is live entertainment. It was big back when Caesar was emperor of Rome. And if anything, it's getting even more and more ingrained into the fabric of our culture.”

Reach the reporter at [email protected] or 602-444-4495. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter @EdMasley.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Why Beyonce tour at State Farm Stadium is a big deal for metro Phoenix