Concerts in Germany: facts & figures
How many concerts took place in Germany in 2025? Which venues attracted the most visitors? How has the concert industry recovered from the coronavirus pandemic? We offer exclusive insights into the data for the concert year 2025.
Record attendance at concerts in 2024
2024 was a good year for live music: more concerts than in the previous year, attended by numerous music fans. We recorded 70 million concertgoers last year. In other words, almost every person in Germany - from infants to the elderly - attended a concert in 2024. That's even more than in 2019. The number of concerts is still just below pre-coronavirus levels, but is on the right track.
The following analyses show which regions are hosting the most concerts, which venues are attracting the biggest crowds and who is benefiting most from the boom.
Concerts in Germany: 2019 to 2025
For the first time since the pandemic-related slump, both the number of concerts in Germany and the number of concert-goers are above 2019 levels.
Where the most concerts take place
Among the federal states, Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia are leading the way. Bavaria, which is less densely populated, is even slightly ahead of the most populous federal state in western Germany.
As for cities, it comes as little surprise that Berlin is leading the way – both in terms of the number of concerts and the number of visitors. Cologne hosts a particularly large number of major concerts and has therefore moved up from fourth to third place in the visitor rankings.
The Lanxess Arena in Cologne takes the lead
In the ranking of the most-visited concert venues, the Lanxess Arena in Cologne has overtaken Munich’s Olympic Park. An impressive 1.31 million music fans attended the concert hall in Cologne-Deutz in 2025.
Both international and national stars drew huge crowds to the arena: Katy Perry, Sting, Billie Eilish, Lionel Richie, Nina Chuba, Ayliva, Bonez MC, Finch and Andrea Berg are just a small selection from the 2025 concert programme.
Photo: KölnTourismus, cropped by GEMA, CC BY-SA 4.0
When most concerts take place
Summer, sun, festivals: Germans go to the most concerts between June and August. This is shown by our analysis of the seasonality of concerts. However, most events do not take place in summer, but later: October, November and December are the months with the most concerts in Germany.
The months of January and February occupy the lowest places - both in terms of the number of concerts and the number of concertgoers.
Small concerts dominate the music map
At the beginning, we talked about a good concert year, record attendance figures and a recovery from the coronavirus period. We want to further differentiate this picture below. To do this, we have clustered the concerts according to attendance figures. A differentiated look at the 2024 concert year shows that Small concerts are the backbone of the German music landscape. Almost 230,000 of the total of 250,000 concerts will take place in front of a maximum of 500 concertgoers. That is so many more than in all other clusters that the graph for large concerts shows almost no difference. And because the small concerts play such a central role, the next chart takes a closer look at this cluster.
Changing concert Landscape
By far the largest share of the German concert scene is accounted for by small events with up to 500 attendees. These concerts have been slow to recover from the pandemic-related disruptions. In 2025 – five years after the first Covid-19 lockdown – the number of concerts held in Germany exceeded the 2019 figure for the first time. However, attendance figures for small concerts remained below pre-pandemic levels.
The number of medium-sized and large concerts has risen much more sharply in recent years. At the same time, 2025 saw a slight shift away from the trend towards mega-concerts: unlike in previous years, the strongest growth was not in the very large concerts with more than 50,000 attendees, but in the medium-sized segment with 5,000 to 15,000 attendees.
Explanation of all figures: The analyses on this page relate to the U-K tariff. These are therefore mainly concerts of pop music and related genres. Concerts with so called 'serious music' (E-Musik) are not included, nor are events with live music where the musical performance is not the main focus.The evaluation is based on the data as of 24 April 2025. The figures may change slightly due to late registrations and corrections.