Garth Brooks’ Rise to the Top

In May 2021, Garth Brooks received one of the most prestigious honors an artist can receive, The Kennedy Center Honor. He remains the #1-selling solo artist in U.S. history, certified by the RIAA with 157 million album sales. Brooks is the first and only artist in history to receive nine RIAA Diamond Awards for the now nine albums certified at over 10 million. Brooks is the first-ever seven-time recipient of the CMA Entertainer of the Year award. Recently, he was awarded Country Touring Artist of the Decade at the 2021 PollstarAwards. In March 2020, Brooks received the esteemed Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. He has received nearly every accolade the recording industry can bestow on an artist and is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Musicians Hall of Fame, and the Grand Ole Opry.

In November 2020, just after receiving the Billboard Music Icon Award, Brooks released two new albums, his 12th studio album, FUN, and Triple Live Deluxe.

In March 2019 Brooks rolled out The Garth Brooks Stadium Tour, which has set new stadium attendance records at every venue so far. For example, Brooks set a record for ANY entertainment event at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis and hosted the largest concert crowd in the history of Detroit’s Ford Field. At State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, he set an attendance record not only for the stadium, but the entire state of Arizona, while at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, he set an all-time concert attendance record. Pollstar deemed Brooks’ stadium tour the best-selling country music tour of 2019. While the COVID pandemic put a pause on the tour in 2020, it is resuming its sold-out run in the summer of 2021

In November of 2019, A&E aired Garth Brooks: The Road I’m On over two consecutive nights. Part of A&E’s esteemed ‘Biography’ franchise, the documentary offered an intimate look at Garth’s life as a musician and father over his entire career.

In 2017, Garth finished the three-and-a-half-year-long Garth Brooks World Tour with Trisha Yearwood. The tour sold over 6.3 million tickets, making it the biggest North American tour in history.

Brooks has 20 Billboard #1 singles to his credit. In March 2020, Billboard announced that he was the first artist to garner top-5 singles at country radio (across Billboard and Mediabase charts) across five consecutive decades–the 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s and 20s. His run on the airplay charts began with his first single, “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)” in 1989 and has continued most recently with “Dive Bar,” his duet with Blake Shelton. During that time, his music has filled the radio airwaves with timeless classics that earned a place in the American songbook, including “The Dance,” “Friends in Low Places,” “The River,” and “If Tomorrow Never Comes.”

In 2019 Brooks released his first vinyl package, THE LEGACY COLLECTION, including three boxed sets–The Limited, Original Analog, and Remixed/Remastered Editions. Each box contains seven vinyl albums and seven CDs with bonus tracks. This is the first-ever, multi-album offering of Triple Live, No Fences, In Pieces, The Chase, and Fresh Horses. Buyers ordered their LEGACY COLLECTION with their unique 6-digit number, commemorating a special date, on each box, making it a one-of-a-kind collection. During the first pre-sale for the collection, Garth smashed records with 20,000 packages sold in under 18 hours. That’s 420,000 vinyl records! The second 24-hour pre-sale window saw people secure an additional 300,000 vinyl albums. “To put this in context,” Forbes noted, “The Beatles were the number-one vinyl artist in 2018 with 321,000 sales over 12 months.”