While most of the other major names in pop, rock and country music are bringing their tours indoors to the notoriously echoy U.S. Bank Stadium nowadays, Beyoncé will land back at the Gophers' outdoor football stadium instead this summer.
The R&B/pop megastar will touch down at the football palace now known as Huntington Bank Stadium on July 20, 2023, as part of her Renaissance Tour, named after last year's album that landed her a leading nine nominations for Sunday's Grammy Awards.
Queen Bey's 47-date stadium trek across the globe was announced Wednesday morning, with a kickoff date of May 10 in Stockholm. Minneapolis is the tour's fourth stop in America, preceding a July 22 date at Soldier Field in Chicago and well before a Sept. 18 show at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City.
Tickets for the Thursday night concert in Minneapolis will be sold through Ticketmaster's Verified Fan program. Fans can register via Ticketmaster.com or Beyonce.com to be eligible for tickets beginning now through Feb. 19.
As usual, tour promoter Live Nation (which owns Ticketmaster) did not name what the public will have to pay for admission into the publicly funded venue that night, in keeping with its dynamic-pricing ticketing policies. You can bet your Destiny's Child CDs the tickets won't be cheap.
In a new twist on major concert ticket sales, seats for the tour will also go on sale via resale site Stubhub concurrently with Ticketmaster. Opening acts for the tour have not yet been announced.
Beyoncé will arrive at the University of Minnesota campus a month after the other biggest name in modern pop music, Taylor Swift, plays U.S. Bank Stadium. Swift's June 23 and 24 were part of the nationwide ticketing debacle that led Minnesota's U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar to co-helm a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week on Ticketmaster's business practices.
Beyoncé performed at U.S. Bank Stadium back in 2018 on a joint tour with her husband, rap legend Jay-Z. Like many concerts at the Vikings' indoor stadium, the 2018 gig earned widespread complaints from fans for bad acoustics, whereas her prior solo tour date in 2016 at Huntington Bank Stadium — then named TCF Bank Stadium — is one that still sets many of her Twin Cities fans aglow.
That 2016 performance, by the way, was the last major concert at the Gophers' stadium, not counting some smaller gigs for homecoming and other special events. U.S. Bank Stadium also opened in 2016, and since then it has dominated the concert business in the Twin Cities, since it promises no weather-related cancellation and the chance to sell 5,000-plus more seats.
The Foo Fighters were scheduled to perform at Huntington Bank Stadium last summer, but the show was abruptly moved to U.S. Bank Stadium when university officials at the Gophers stadium refused to honor the band's wishes for COVID-19 vaccine requirements. In the end, then the concert was canceled altogether after the Foos' drummer Taylor Hawkins died last March.
Led by the single "Break My Soul," Beyoncé's "Renaissance" album predictably enjoyed major commercial success, coming in just behind Swift's "Midnights" and Harry Styles' "Harry's House" as the bestselling record of 2022. It was an even bigger critical hit, though, topping best-of-year lists from Rolling Stone, NPR, Pitchfork, the New York Times and many other music journalism hubs.
