TWICE's 'This Is For' World Tour Rewrites K-Pop Touring History With $93.8M Opening Leg

TWICE's sixth world tour "This Is For" launched July 19, 2025, at the Inspire Arena in Incheon. By the time the first 24 shows were complete, the numbers told a story no K-pop girl group had written before. Pollstar-reported box office data documented 671,888 tickets sold, $93.8 million in gross revenue, and an average of 27,995 attendees per show across the opening leg. That $3.9 million per-show average placed TWICE in a tier of global touring acts where K-pop artists have rarely operated.

The scale of "This Is For" represents more than just a commercial achievement. It marks the moment when TWICE transitioned from a K-pop act with strong international reach into one of the world's most commercially viable touring artists — a distinction that cuts across genre boundaries and positions the group alongside acts who define stadium-era pop performance on a global stage.

The Box Office Architecture: What the Numbers Mean

The $93.8 million gross revenue figure, drawn from Pollstar's submitted box-office data for the first 24 shows, provides the most objective measure of the tour's commercial standing. For context, that 24-show average of $3.9 million per show places "This Is For" above the per-show gross of many major Western acts touring in the same period. The 671,888 tickets sold across those 24 shows reflect demand that extended well beyond the core Korean Wave fan base into mainstream concert-going audiences in each territory.

In Oceania, the tour set a regional benchmark: more than 50,000 tickets sold across four arena performances in Sydney and Melbourne, making "This Is For" the best-selling K-pop arena tour in the region's history to that point. The performance in Kaohsiung was even more economically significant — a single sold-out show at Kaohsiung National Stadium with over 55,000 fans in attendance generated an estimated NT$500 million (approximately US$15.9 million) in tourism-related revenue for the city. For a local government, those are infrastructure-level economic impacts typically associated with international sporting events rather than music concerts.

Japan National Stadium: The Milestone Ahead

While the opening-leg data is already historic, the tour's most structurally significant achievement was announced in December 2025 when TWICE confirmed three nights at the MUFG Stadium (Japan National Stadium) in Tokyo for April 25–26 and April 28, 2026. Three shows at the National Stadium represent a total audience of approximately 240,000 — and they would make TWICE the first foreign artist ever to headline a concert at the venue. That distinction is not a record within K-pop. It is a record in the history of international touring, full stop.

The Japan National Stadium announcement arrived at the end of a year in which TWICE had already validated their stadium-tier status in multiple markets. The trajectory — domestic arena dominance, Oceania records, large-format stadium show in Kaohsiung, and now the Tokyo National Stadium milestone — forms a coherent commercial narrative that the industry will analyze as a template for how a K-pop act transitions into the global touring ecosystem at the highest level.

The "Ten: The Story Goes On" Connection

The world tour did not exist in isolation from TWICE's recorded output. On October 10, 2025 — their exact tenth anniversary since debuting on October 20, 2015 — TWICE released the special anniversary album Ten: The Story Goes On. The album debuted at No. 11 on the Billboard 200, making TWICE the first K-pop girl group to achieve 10 entries on the chart. The simultaneous touring achievement and chart milestone created a convergence of commercial validation that defined September–October 2025 as the most consequential period in the group's decade-long career.

The album's structure — the lead single "Me+You" alongside nine solo tracks drawn from the "This Is For" world tour setlist — was itself an argument about the tour's artistic significance. Solo tracks that fans had experienced live were formalized into a released record, creating a feedback loop between the touring and recording sides of the operation. The Billboard 200 No. 11 debut confirmed that the audience for the recorded material was as commercially substantial as the audience filling stadiums and arenas across multiple continents.

The Industry Significance

What "This Is For" accomplished in its opening phase was to confirm that a K-pop act could function as a top-tier global touring property in 2025 — not just a successful niche market player, but a competitive presence in the mainstream concert economics that the broader music industry uses to measure an artist's actual commercial weight. TWICE achieved this while remaining fundamentally rooted in the K-pop structural model: JYP Entertainment management, Korean language primary releases, a dedicated international fan base, and the promotional apparatus specific to the Korean entertainment industry.

That combination — mainstream touring economics built on a K-pop foundation — had no clear precedent before "This Is For." In the months that followed the tour's opening leg, industry observers began measuring subsequent K-pop touring announcements against the benchmark TWICE had established. The $93.8 million first-24-show figure had become the reference point for what K-pop touring success could look like at its highest level in 2025.

Future Outlook

With 78 shows spanning July 2025 through June 2026, "This Is For" was still in active progress as of the tour's September midpoint. The North American and European legs — historically the highest-grossing markets for Western touring acts — had not yet fully contributed to the Pollstar totals. The Japan National Stadium announcement, with its 240,000 total capacity across three nights, represented the single largest audience concentration of the entire tour and would carry significant weight in any final accounting of the tour's commercial legacy.

TWICE's tenth anniversary placed their touring achievement in a longer arc: a decade of consistent output, fan development, and market expansion that culminated in a world tour that broke regional records on four continents. The record they established with "This Is For" would take years for any subsequent K-pop act to match — if matching it proves possible at all within the current commercial structure of the global touring industry.