Our Touring Radar series looks at newly announced tours and live events that stand out not simply because they can generate headlines, but because they offer a glimpse at where live music may be heading.
These are five newly announced tours we're excited about.
1. Lil’ Kim turns Hard Core into orchestral repertory
Demand has already produced a second Brooklyn performance of Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core Symphony, featuring the all-Black Thee Phantom & The Illharmonic Orchestra. This is more interesting than yet another album-anniversary show. It places a landmark hip-hop record inside a premium format historically reserved for rock, pop, and classical catalogs — and asks audiences to hear Kim’s music as composed repertory rather than period nostalgia.
2. Lizzy McAlpine is scaling market by market
Lizzy McAlpine’s Over Country Tour moves between theaters and major arenas, including Detroit’s Fox Theatre, Durham’s DPAC, Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, Madison Square Garden and Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena. That unevenness may be the point. Instead of forcing every city into the same room-size narrative, the routing appears to meet individual markets where their demand actually is — preserving intimacy in some cities while allowing genuine arena moments elsewhere.
3. Christopher proves that “going global” can mean going home
Danish pop star Christopher sold 60,000 tickets for a single 2027 hometown concert within 54 hours. The promoter initially planned for 50,000 before expanding capacity; his previous Copenhagen-area headline drew 35,000. The especially useful detail is that this growth has coincided with Christopher leaning further into Danish-language material. His trajectory makes a strong counterargument to the assumption that artists must sing in English or prioritize export markets to reach stadium scale.
4. Brent Faiyaz is attempting intimacy at arena scale
After three years away from U.S. headline stages, Brent Faiyaz is returning for only three shows: Chicago’s United Center, Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena. The production is being pitched as an intimate, cinematic encounter despite the arena capacities. That contradiction is the story: can an artist create scarcity, emotional closeness, and genuine event status by concentrating an entire national return into three enormous rooms?
5. Brandi Carlile gives fans control — and takes away their phones
Brandi Carlile’s 15-date Burn the Setlist theater tour will build every setlist from requests made in the room. The concerts will also be phone-free, while attendees receive access to selected official bootlegs and can purchase a recording of the full show. It is an unusually complete live-music experiment: audience participation creates the performance, Yondr protects its immediacy, and authorized recordings give the night a commercial afterlife.
The One We’ll Be Watching: Brandi Carlile
Every Touring Radar edition ends with one artist who represents a larger industry question. This week, it’s Brandi Carlile.
Fans control the songs, phones disappear, no two nights can be reproduced, and the artist (not hundreds of shaky audience uploads) controls how the performance circulates afterward. This new initiative of Brandi's treats spontaneity and monetization as partners rather than opposites.
