The Sticky & Sweet Tour opens in Cardiff, later becoming the highest-grossing concert tour ever by a female artist (~$408M).
On August 23, 2008, Madonna launched the Sticky & Sweet Tour at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, in support of her album Hard Candy. The tour would ultimately run into 2009, becoming one of the largest and most lucrative concert tours in music history.
Blending elements of hip-hop, disco, and dance-pop with elaborate staging, the tour visited stadiums and arenas across Europe, North America, South America, and Asia, drawing massive crowds at every stop, including record-setting attendance figures in cities across Latin America.
By its conclusion in September 2009, the tour had grossed approximately $408 million, a figure that made it, at the time, the highest-grossing concert tour ever undertaken by a female solo artist, and one of the highest-grossing tours by any artist in history, according to Billboard Boxscore data cited by Guinness World Records.
This achievement carried significant weight within an industry where touring revenue had long been dominated overwhelmingly by male rock acts. Sticky & Sweet demonstrated conclusively that a female pop artist could command stadium-level ticket demand and revenue on a global scale, decades into her career, further cementing Madonna's status as a singular commercial force in live entertainment and paving the way for subsequent blockbuster tours by other female artists.