Cowboy Carter Tour, anyone? Also: The incredible rise of cocoa prices.

A cowboy-clad Beyoncé at the iHeartRadio Music Awards at the Dolby Theatre on April 1.

Photographer: Michael Buckner/Billboard/Getty Images

Ever since Cowboy Carter dropped last month, Beyoncé fans have been buzzing about the prospect of their favorite superstar saddling up and heading out on tour this summer.

After all, her critically adored album, which is both a homage to country music and a provocation to Nashville to be more embracing of Black artists, has been a smash hit, debuting at No. 1 not just on the Billboard 200 but also on the magazine’s Top Country Albums and American/Folk Albums charts.

Along with the usual wishful thinking, the anticipation among fans for a Cowboy Carter tour has been fueled by the appearance of a mysterious website featuring static pictures that attest to Beyoncé’s countrified roots but little else, implying that a bigger announcement is coming. What would be more tantalizing to her devotees, whose dreams of a high-tech residency at the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas failed to materialize last year?

But beyond the Beyhive, there is another constituency rooting for a Cowboy Carter tour: people in the live music business. Their industry enjoyed a fabulous year in 2023. According to Pollstar, the top 100 tours grossed a combined $9.17 billion in 2023, a 46% increase from the previous year. The question now is whether the business, fully rejuvenated after the pandemic, will shatter that record in 2024, and the answer may well hinge on Beyoncé’s travel plans.

Last year’s biggest live performer was Taylor Swift, whose Eras tour—the top-grossing tour of all time—was responsible for more than $1 billion of the total. Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour came in second, with an also staggering $580 million, according to Pollstar. Taken together, she and Swift outperformed the combined results of next five biggest tours on Pollstar’s yearend list: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Coldplay, Harry Styles, Morgan Wallen and Ed Sheeran.

Swift will be stadium-hopping once more this summer, along with Springsteen, Olivia Rodrigo, Vampire Weekend, and the Rolling Stones, whose Hackneyed Diamonds tour will be sponsored by, yes, the AARP. That’s a good start, but what the industry needs is another mega star who could do Beyoncé numbers, and, unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anyone else at that level aside from Swift.

Assuming Beyoncé does toss her hat into the ring—that would be the off-white one she wears on the homepage for Cowboy Carter on her website—she might come closer to a $1 billion year herself. The album, described by often breathless critics as the cultural equivalent of a Molotov cocktail intended to incinerate the racial barriers in country music, isn’t likely to bring only fans of Luke Combs to her show, but also casual listeners who have yet to join the Beyhive but still want to be part of this singular moment.

“The brilliance of Cowboy Carter is that it has used a different medium to introduce people to her music,” says Nathan Hubbard, former chief executive office of Ticketmaster and co-founder of the music startup Firebird. “Beyoncé’s probably bigger than she’s ever been.”

As Pollstar’s data show, she may have seats for this new influx of listeners.

Swift did 60 shows and sold a total of 4.3 million tickets, but there’s only so much better she can do. “She’s not going to be able to repeat the Travis Kelce phenomenon,” says Matthew Strauss, deputy managing editor of Pitchfork. “I mean, they’re still dating, but the newness of it certainly isn’t there. Unless they get engaged or there’s some other major headline.” (In fairness, Swift does have a new album of her own, The Tortured Poets Department, scheduled for release on April 19.)

By contrast, Beyoncé played 56 shows but sold only 2.8 million tickets, a figure more in the range of Harry Styles, Coldplay or Ed Sheeran. Presumably, she could do better this summer with so many listeners humming Texas Hold ’Em, one of the riveting first singles from Cowboy Carter. Beyoncé fans speculated earlier this month that she would announce a tour on April 4. That date came and went, but they can still dream. So can people in the touring business. —Devin Leonard, Bloomberg News

Like Money for Chocolate

In Cameroon, the astonishing surge in the price of cocoa has Banyuy Elsie Kinyuy planning the next chapter of her life. In November, the 57-year-old high school tutor bought a 3-hectare (7.4-acre) parcel of land about 200 kilometers (124 miles) northwest from her home in Yaoundé, the capital. The cocoa trees she’s planted there should begin bearing fruit by the time she retires in three years.

Laying the groundwork for Kinyuy’s career switch hasn’t come cheap. The traditional chief who sold her the plot also collected a fee of three goats, 40 liters (10.5 gallons) of palm wine and a bag of salt to grant her permission to farm the cash crop.

Kinyuy reckons the investment will pay off: “If the price of cocoa keeps rising, the crop will give me more money than teaching.”