The number of touring markets continues to expanding across the globe, but live entertainment professionals believe the infrastructure has not yet caught up. With the advent of streaming, artists are able to grow their audiences far beyond their own country’s borders, but not all countries are able to accommodate the demand.
Across the globe, agents and promoters are having to book tours years in advance because the limited number of venues in emerging markets is so slim.
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“We really need more infrastructure from every country,” OCESA director of international events Guillermo “Memo” Parra said at the 2026 Billboard Live Music Summit today (Nov. 10). Mexico “was ahead of the curve regarding South America because of the Olympics and some other special events. Mexico had infrastructure. It was old, but they had infrastructure.”
On the International Touring Panel moderated by Billboard co-chief content officer Leila Cobo, AEG’s senior vp of global touring Angie Rho added that the promoter is looking to meet the demand in Asia, but is also facing a lack of event spaces. “You might have desire. You might have willingness. You might have fans, but we need venues,” Rho said.
Steve Collins, president of global venue development at Oak View Group told the audience that for every 10 buildings the company proposes, only one or two will come to fruition. Public funding for concert venues, Collins said, is not a popular model, so OVG looks into local partners in global markets to produce new buildings.
“Any market outside the U.S. is really tough to get these buildings done,” Collins said. “Whoever our partner is, you’re not going to take the risk. We’ll figure it out. We’ve become really good at commercializing these buildings and making them work standalone rather than putting our hand out as the first measure.”
Collins pointed to two music-first venues OVG is currently developing in Dublin and Madrid as examples. Both of these developing venues will not have sports tenants and therefore be purpose built to artists and music fans, as well as have more availability for concert nights.
Live Nation global tour promoter Nidhish Varughese said that the company has been focusing on growth in India, which has seen a series of record-breaking shows in recent years.
“With India specifically, we’re doing more shows there. Traditionally, it was always just a two-market play, whether it’s Delhi or Mumbai. But now there’s multiple markets that artists are trying to perform in,” he said at the panel held in Los Angeles. Varughese explained that Live Nation tested the demand with concerts at racetracks in India and discovered there was a huge appetite for more large-scale concerts. Live Nation is now working alongside OVG to find appropriate locations for arenas in the country.
“There’s a lot of territories like in Central Asia where governments are realizing [concerts] could be a good vehicle for tourism,” added Varughese, pointing to Shakira’s recent stop in Kyrgyzstan where the government helped fund the show. “People travel to that region to watch the show. So, it’s a win-win for the artists, where they get to go to a new market. We unlock the new market, discover new audiences and [are] also serving the audiences that have always been there.”
For Rho, Andrea Bocelli’s 2026 performances in Indonesia not only helped broaden AEG’s involvement in the country, but created a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the Italian singer. “It is a place where one of my colleagues almost stepped on a five-foot snake,” Rho joked. “So, even when you have five-foot snake danger, you are also – the flip side of that coin – producing and putting on these performances that are going to be, in an artist’s mind, he’s going to look back on this as a capstone.”
Even in Mexico, where OCESA has seen continued growth, new markets are emerging as artist’s create more routing. Parra explained that Shakira’s record-breaking Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour played cities in Mexico that he says, “I’ve never even been to.”
But, Parra added, there are only a handful of acts who could pull off the feats Shakira did in Mexico, because of the lack of structure and because of the importance of soccer in the country. “They [would] rather have football instead of concerts because the field will get damaged, and they don’t want to move their games,” Parra said. “So it’s hard to do shows in some other parts of Mexico.”
