This Tuesday Beyoncé will take to the stage at London’s 62,850-capacity Tottenham Hotspur stadium, the halfway point of what should be a triumphant six-night stint. Yet the headlines surrounding the star’s latest Cowboy Carter tour couldn’t be more of a stark contrast to her last one just two years ago; as we went to press, thousands of £100-plus tickets were still available on Ticketmaster. And the prices may drop: just before her Los Angeles shows in May, you could bag a seat for just $25. There’s more online buzz about poor ticket sales and questionable cameos from her daughters Blue Ivy, 13, and Rumi, seven, than Queen Bey’s performance itself. A recent Mail Online survey posed the question, ‘Is Beyoncé overrated?’ to which 91 per cent of almost 15,500 respondents said yes.
Compare this to the launch of Beyoncé’s 2023 Renaissance tour, when fans were in such a frenzy the Ticketmaster website crashed. Her first solo tour since 2016, it was the highest grossing to date by any female artist (£433 million) and by any black artist in history. Yet within a year, Taylor Swift’s Eras tour decisively beat Beyoncé’s record, grossing £1.5 billion and selling over ten million tickets worldwide to Beyoncé’s 2.7 million (Swift’s was, of course, a much longer tour).
Star-spangled singer: Beyoncé on stage in Los Angeles last month
Cynics online have blamed a lukewarm response to her latest country album, released in March last year. The Washington Post called Cowboy Carter ‘intrinsically corny’ and Beyoncé’s ‘worst album’. Even the usually diplomatic BBC described its 27 tracks as ‘dry and academic’. It’s sold around 50,000 units in the UK; Taylor Swift’s latest album, released three weeks later, has shifted more than 750,000. Then there’s Beyoncé and husband Jay-Z’s historical association with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, the hip-hop mogul currently on trial facing charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
In February a lawsuit against Combs and Jay-Z, both 55, which alleged the rape of a 13-year-old girl in 2000, was dismissed. Jay-Z, whose legal name is Shawn Carter, issued a statement referring to the dismissal as a ‘victory’. The anonymous accuser, known as Jane Doe, initially filed the lawsuit against Combs in October 2000 before adding Jay-Z’s name in December of that year. She alleged both men assaulted her at an MTV Video Music Awards afterparty.
Over the years Beyoncé has had other brushes with controversy: her 2023 private £19.4 million performance in Dubai, where homosexuality remains a crime, was seen as a betrayal of the LGBTQ+ community; then there was the globally publicised 2014 altercation in a lift, where Beyoncé’s sister Solange attacked Jay-Z while the singer impassively looked on.
Yet while some have commented that Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s reputations may have been recently tainted by their association with Diddy, Mark Sutherland, journalist and host of the music industry podcast The Money Trench (TMT), takes a more prosaic view. ‘A lot of people saw Beyoncé last time she was in the UK,’ he says. ‘And Cowboy Carter did well but isn’t one of her biggest albums, particularly here in Britain, where it only had one hit [“Texas Hold ’Em”].’ Ticket prices are much more expensive than two years ago, but that’s not just Beyoncé, that’s everyone.’
There’s been discourse, too, on whether Beyoncé, at 43, could be edging towards ‘legacy artist’ status, her powers weighted to her past and her audience ageing with her.
‘She’s been at the top of her game for so long,’ says Sutherland. ‘She doesn’t do much media, she’s not out there doing fun TikToks to remain relevant to the youth audience. To teenage pop fans, Beyoncé is seen as an older artist and more remote.’ Cowboy Carter also arrived in a landscape dominated by new female pop contenders Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo, plus the UK’s self-styled ‘Brat’ Charli XCX.
It’s hard to believe, now, how accessible Beyoncé once was. Back in December 2000, I travelled with Destiny’s Child – the group Beyoncé formed in Houston at a staggering nine years of age. By then the trio – Beyoncé, 19, and her bandmates Kelly Rowland, 19, and Michelle Williams, 20 – were an eight-million-album-selling global phenomenon.
I spent four days witnessing their punishing promotional schedule as they appeared on countless TV and radio shows, conducting phone interviews in between and averaging 40 minutes’ sleep some nights. Constantly moving, they remained perennially fabulous, changing in transit from everyday fashions (jeans, padded jackets; Beyoncé even wore a grey scarf from Gap) into sequinned stage wear. We went from London to Birmingham on a hired National Express-style coach, Beyoncé’s mother Tina Knowles travelling with them as guardian and stylist.
For years Tina had set out ‘the rules’ for would-be collaborators: no drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, profanity or the playing of hardcore hip-hop allowed (the girls carried bibles in their travel bags). At one photo shoot, US gangster rappers NWA had been chosen as background music, which was swiftly swapped for Chattanooga Choo Choo from American forces’ sweethearts the Andrews Sisters. Beyoncé was supernaturally serene, declaring herself ‘truly blessed’ in her folksy Texan drawl, politely yet skilfully avoiding what she called ‘private’ topics, especially anything sexual or political.
In January 2009, nine years on from her neutral political stance, she sang At Last at President Barack Obama’s inaugural ball, while her 2013 self-titled album publicly embraced feminism, and she performed at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards with the word FEMINIST as a billboard-sized backdrop. Ever since she’s been a figurehead for female empowerment, and her groundbreaking moments remain impressive: the first black woman to headline Glastonbury (2011) and Coachella (2018); the most Grammy-awarded artist in history since 2023, finally winning the conspicuously missing Best Album in February for Cowboy Carter. She’s even the subject of a Yale university course – ‘Beyoncé Makes History: Black Radical Tradition History, Culture, Theory & Politics Through Music’ – taught by Professor Daphne Brooks.
‘The arc from the self-titled album to Cowboy Carter is unprecedented in the history of pop,’ says Brooks. ‘The album form was presumed to be dying in the streaming era, and she reimagined it as a platform in which to tell epic stories about black history and black women’s genius musicianship.’
The second time I interviewed her was in 2003 in New York. Flawless in light make-up, she was newly solo, Crazy In Love an imminent global number one. She was as serene as when I’d interviewed her three years before, avoiding confirmation of her rumoured relationship with Jay-Z. With his past, I’d laughed – a former crack-dealing Brooklynite hustler, as his lyrics so vividly described – her mother’s rules over proximity to hardcore hip-hop had been, evidently, relaxed. ‘You’re funny,’ she replied. ‘I’m happy, I’ll say that.’
Her ultimate message was to encourage women ‘to accept themselves and their imperfections. I try to take every bad experience and make it something positive.’ That day, at 22, she was about to take her first fortnight off work since she was nine years old. Why did she work this hard? ‘Because I wanna be remembered,’ she replied. ‘I wanna be respected. And I wanna be an icon.’
This week’s London dates may not have been an instant sellout and Gen Z may be getting their music elsewhere, but Beyoncé has come a long way from the Texan schoolgirl who launched Destiny’s Child. While the LA leg of the tour was dogged with negative press, it still earned a record-setting $55.7 million from just five shows. As Sutherland concludes: ‘In 20 years’ time people will still be listening to Beyoncé’s music. We don’t know where we’ll be with artificial intelligence even in five years’ time, but having a strong personal brand and sense of identity, AI is not able to replicate that. The rest of us will be replaced all too easily! But Beyoncé, whatever happens, will be fine.’
THE BUSINESS OF BEYONCÉ
£7.9m
Annual revenue of Beyoncé’s management company, Parkwood Entertainment
£568.4m
Beyoncé’s net worth in 2024, according to Forbes
£175m
Price of the Knowles-Carters’ 40,000 sq ft Malibu mansion, the most expensive property ever sold in California
£2.6bn
Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s estimated combined wealth, making them the world’s richest celebrity couple
£433.6m
Gross profit of 2023’s Renaissance world tour, Beyoncé’s most lucrative to date
£44.9m
Value of Beyoncé’s 2019 three-project deal with Netflix
£9.4m
Beyoncé’s pay for her role in 2006’s Dreamgirls, which then made her the highest-paid black actress ever
