Electric Picnic and Dua Lipa help MCD Productions make €180m from ticket sales in 2025
Gordon Deegan
Stellar box office performances by Dua Lipa at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin and a host of performers, including Hozier, at the Electric Picnic Festival last year, helped promoters MCD Productions to ticket sales of $210 million (€180 million) in 2025.
That is according to figures from trade industry journal Pollstar, which show that MCD Productions sold 2.56 million tickets in 2025, ranking its box office performance at 14th globally.
MCD Productions is owned by LN Gaiety Holdings Ltd, which is a joint venture between Denis Desmond’s Gaiety Investments and Live Nation.
The 2.56 million tickets sold by MCD Productions were down 12 per cent on the promoter’s best-ever ticket sale performance of 2.92 million in 2024.
Live Nation was last year ranked number one globally with ticket sales of $8.36 billion from 76.7 million ticket sales.
Hozier and Chappell Roan were just two of the headliners of Electric Picnic in 2025, and the Pollstar figures show that the Electric Picnic recorded a box office of $18.19 million from the 57,750 music fans who attended at Stradbally in Co Laois.
The 2026 event is already a sell-out, and the Pollstar figures separately show that Hozier gigs generated $44 million at the box office, where the ‘Too Sweet’ singer-songwriter played to 555,848 music fans across 28 gigs in 2025.
The figures show that the average box office from Hozier gigs in 2025 was $1.5 million.
However, individual box office figures for the most eagerly awaited gigs of 2025, Oasis’s two gigs at Croke Park in Dublin in August, are not available as the band did not submit figures to Pollstar.
Instead, Pollstar estimates that Oasis generated $405 million at the box office from their 36-date global tour in 2025 with an average box office of $11.2 million per gig.
Pollstar estimates that the average price for each ticket at Oasis gigs was $181.
In September 2024, the consumer watchdog here, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) launched an investigation into Ticketmaster Ireland and its handling of the sale of Oasis tickets following a review of more than 100 complaints received concerning the dynamic pricing that was in place for the ticket sale.
Earlier this week, MEP Regina Doherty (FG) complained, “Oasis have completed an entire world tour, and we’ve yet to hear a peep from the investigation.”
She said: “Fans were promised answers after the Oasis controversy, not a process that drags on endlessly behind closed doors.:
Asked to comment, a spokeswoman for the CCPC on Thursday would only say: “As the CCPC’s investigation is ongoing,â¯we are unable to give further informationâ¯at this time.â¯We will provide an update when in a position to do so.”
The Pollstar figures also show that Dua Lipa generated a box office of €6.16 million from her gig before 51,700 fans at the Aviva Stadium at the end of last June.
The figures also show that the Denis Desmond and Caroline Downey operated 3Olympia in Dublin generated a box office of $12.8 million in 2025 on the back of 293,311 tickets sold.
