Olivia Rodrigo joins Smashing Pumpkins at Lollapalooza as legacy tours expand
Olivia Rodrigo’s surprise guest appearance with the Smashing Pumpkins at Lollapalooza highlights a lucrative live music strategy where legacy acts and current pop stars merge audiences to maximize global tour revenues.
Pop star Olivia Rodrigo took the stage at Chicago’s Grant Park on Friday night to perform with the Smashing Pumpkins during the Lollapalooza festival. Rather than headlining the event as she did last year, she joined the alternative rock band to play “Thirty-Three” from their album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
This guest slot reflects a broader commercial strategy in the live entertainment sector. Rodrigo has increasingly shared the stage with established alternative rock figures over the past few years. Her recent collaborators include Robert Smith of The Cure, Weezer, David Byrne, Avril Lavigne, and No Doubt.
For promoters and investors in the live music economy, these cross-generational collaborations serve a distinct financial purpose. They bridge demographic gaps, allowing legacy acts to tap into younger consumer bases. This simultaneously provides emerging pop stars with established cultural credibility and drives ticket sales.
Former Smashing Pumpkins bassist Melissa Auf der Maur noted that Rodrigo told her 13-year-old daughter, “Without your mother, none of this would have happened.” Auf der Maur added, “That’s when it locked in for me that there are direct correlations.”
Auf der Maur observed a clear 1990s influence in both Rodrigo's songwriting and production. She also highlighted that the cover of Rodrigo’s debut album, SOUR, features a deliberate nod to Hole’s Live Through This, specifically with the beauty queen.
The Lollapalooza set demonstrated the wide commercial appeal of this era of music, with Yungblud joining for “Luna” from Siamese Dream and Auf der Maur reuniting for “The Everlasting Gaze”. The sprawling setlist also featured major catalog hits like “1979”, “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”, and “Cherub Rock”.
The band's Friday night performance included deeper cuts such as “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans”, “Tonight, Tonight”, and “Ava Adore”. They also played tracks like “Disarm”, “Jellybelly”, and “Pentagrams” to a massive festival crowd. The extensive setlist showcased the enduring demand for their 1990s material.
Both artists are now capitalizing on this momentum with major upcoming global tours. Rodrigo will launch “The Unraveled Tour” this autumn to support her latest record, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. Meanwhile, the Smashing Pumpkins are preparing for a 30th anniversary tour of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
These concurrent tours underscore the enduring profitability of nostalgia-driven live music markets and ensure robust ticket sales across multiple generations. The strategy ultimately secures the financial viability of legacy catalogs in a competitive global entertainment landscape.
