Rihanna is eager to pounce on her status as one of the hottest artists on the planet, announcing a world tour that will consist of 27 dates in North American cities in early 2013.
Rihanna’s 2013 Diamonds World Tour will begin on March 8 in Buffalo, NY, at the First Niagara Center. It will continue through Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Hartford, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, Vancouver, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta and Tampa, in addition to quite a few other cities. The whirlwind tour is scheduled to conclude on May 4 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn—a fitting close since that is the arena overseen by her mentor Jay-Z, who is christeningthe joint with a series of eight sold-out shows starting next Friday, Sept. 28.
Observers expect strong sales for Rihanna, but how quickly they go will largely depend on their pricetag. If her last tour is any indication, she will do fabulously. Her Loud tour was the 7th highest grossing tour of 2011, pulling in $90 million, according to Masslive.com.
Rihanna is scheduled to release her seventh studio album this November, so she likely will have some hot new hits to perform on the Diamonds Tour. According to reports from Billboard.com Rihanna may continue the November trend with the release of a seventh album this November.Before she gets to the Diamonds Tour, she has some other dates planned, including the iHeart Music Radio Festival this Friday, September 21 at MGM Grand in Las Vegas. In October, Rihanna travels abroad to Azerbaijan for two performances.Tickets for Rihanna’s Diamonds Tour went on sale to the public last Friday and a handful of additional shows will start selling tomorrow.Hopefully this tour will be kinder to her than those in her distant past: in July, Rihanna filed a lawsuit against her accountants in Manhattan federal court for stealing millions of dollars from her since 2005, mishandling her finances and taxes—resulting in her being audited— and failing to pursue considerable amounts that she was owed for royalties.
Rihanna, 24, and her tour company, Tourihanna, is seeking unspecified compensatory damages and loss of earnings from the accountancy firm Berdon LLP and two former employees, Michael Mitnick and Peter Gounis.
According to the lawsuit, the accountants concealed facts regarding her finances, and in a deal Rihanna’s lawyers called unusual, earned commissions based on a percentage of Rihanna’s gross receipts which were “exorbitant and expensive.”
One of the most eye-opening facts in the lawsuit was the estimation that between 2007 and 2010, the accountants earned 23 percent of gross tour receipts while Rihanna got 6 percent. The accountants said Rihanna lost millions during her “The Last Girl On Earth” tour, but still paid itself millions in fees.
