If you’re a pop country fan in Tampa Bay, you’ve had it good.
Concertgoers in this region often lament about missing out when their favorite artist tours. Florida is out of the way, Orlando provides competition, and this area hasn’t always had the coolest profile. We usually don’t get Beyonce and Taylor Swift in the same year.
But which big names do play our venues, from Raymond James Stadium to Jannus Live? We checked the data, and we found out this: They’re often holding a guitar.
The Tampa Bay Times analyzed records of all Florida concerts since 2014 kept by the set-list website setlist.fm. We sifted through more than 68,000 concerts in 58 counties and matched them with year-end Billboard Top 100 Artist lists and genre data from Spotify to create our own, first-of-its kind Florida music dataset. We counted shows that artists played during calendar years they made year-end charts to measure when they’ve played Tampa Bay at the top of their game.
So who tops the list?
In first place: country legend Chris Stapleton.
He has played in Tampa and St. Petersburg eight times in the past decade. Each time, he made year-end charts. (He played another show here when he was unranked.) That includes seven times at MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa.
That venue is a Live Nation site, and concert promoters and record labels exert lots of influence over who plays where. An artist showing up a lot in the data doesn’t mean they personally love Tampa, or vice versa.
Also in the top 10: country-turned-pop star Taylor Swift, Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean and Zac Brown Band.
Of 297 Tampa Bay concerts by Billboard artists in the time period, 1 in 4 was a “contemporary country” artist, according to Spotify data.
J.R. Jaus, a host on country radio station WQYK-FM’s morning show, credited Tampa’s location and stadium for drawing fans of the genre.
“I’m not exactly sure why, but I’m sure it’s very profitable for them, because … you have a lot of people that are coming up from Fort Myers or down from Orlando,” Jaus said. “So they can kind of get three different markets in one, because you got a stadium that will hold 60,000 people.”
For example, officials expected more than 100,000 fans in town for two scheduled Morgan Wallen shows in July at Raymond James Stadium, local outlets reported.
Jaus said the area’s different venues can serve artists at different stages of their fame.
“Like the first time they came through, they played a venue like the Dallas Bull, where there’s 300 people there,” he said. “And now they realize, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m playing the amphitheater.’ And Morgan Wallen is a perfect example.”
Over the last decade, Raymond James Stadium has held no more than a few shows a year, and more than 1 in 3 headliners made the Billboard charts the year they played it. But Amalie Arena and the amphitheater average dozens of concerts annually, and nearly 9 in 10 artists have been outside the top-100 charts. (Data from setlist.fm can be incomplete and miss some shows at smaller venues).
Performers’ statures can grow quickly, of course. In 2019, a Lizzo show scheduled for Jannus Live, the outdoor, standing-room-only club in St. Petersburg, was quickly moved to the Yuengling Center at the University of South Florida. Ticket prices for Chappell Roan at Jannus this May skyrocketed in step with her fame.
The venues also vary in what genres they highlight: The amphitheater favors contemporary country, while Jannus and the Yuengling Center feature more rappers. Raymond James Stadium and Amalie Arena stage more pop stars.
Lately, it hasn’t been hard to see the biggest artists here, said Cameron Parker, a Tampa artist and fan known for painting murals for Beyonce and Lady Gaga.
“Most of my favorites, most of my favey-fave-fave-fave-faves, they always come to Tampa,” he said.
“And if it’s somebody that I need to travel to Orlando for, I’m not necessarily mad.”
Local News
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