When Harry Styles takes the stage at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday for the first of 30 performances in his residency there, it will be the latest and perhaps most ambitious example of the concert industry’s favorite trend: putting on more shows in fewer places. Last year, Bad Bunny held a 31-date residency in Puerto Rico, brimming with local pride. In 2024, Billy Joel completed a 10-year run at the Garden, selling out 104 nights.

This year Jay-Z is celebrating landmark albums with stadium shows in New York, London, Paris and Los Angeles. And in Las Vegas, the cutting-edge tech of Sphere has upped the multimedia ante for concerts everywhere. For artists and their promoters, these concentrated runs have come about through a combination of budget-crunching math — the savings on trucking and fuel alone can be substantial — and a desire to level up the razzle-dazzle, according to touring and talent executives.

Longer engagements allow artists to create experiences that simply aren’t practical when a production is constantly moving, said Omar Al-joulani, the president of touring at Live Nation. The company is putting on more than 470 residency shows this year, most of them in Las Vegas. For his latest tour, Styles, the 32-year-old British pop heartthrob, is playing 67 dates in just seven cities around the world, a move that has made his tour the talk of the industry — and set off a frenzy over tickets.

When presales began in January, many fans balked at prices that crested the $1,000 mark, but still snapped them up in huge numbers. Thousands of seats for the Garden shows have been listed on resale markets at multiples of their original cost, even as Ticketmaster has trickled out more tickets in recent weeks for fans who joined nightly wait lists. For veteran concertgoers, residencies are nothing new.

Fans of Bruce Springsteen still wax poetic about his 10-show breakthrough at the Bottom Line in 1975. Prince played 21 nights at the O2 Arena in London in 2007. When Styles last toured, from 2021 to 2023, he played a string of residency shows, part of an industrywide adaptation to touring in the waning days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The paradigm has evolved as artists have sought to freshen their shows and stand out in a crowded market. Festivals like Coachella, which proved that fans would travel for a special show, provided a model, said Mitch Rose, the head of North American touring at the Creative Artists Agency. Coachella was a destination where people went for the hang, went for the music, went because they had FOMO, he said.

So I think of residencies as the same as a festival. Rose, who represents Styles, John Mayer, Katy Perry and other major acts, said he was unable to comment on specifics about his clients’ tours. Styles’s managers also declined to comment.

Las Vegas, once derided as a landing spot for performers past their prime, has gradually been remade as a moneymaking capital for top acts. Celine Dion was pivotal in this change, selling about $660 million in tickets for two residencies starting in 2003. Elton John, Britney Spears, Adele and other stars followed. (After health problems, Dion will mount a comeback series next month in Paris.) Then came Sphere, the $2.3 billion brainchild of James Dolan, the executive behind Madison Square Garden, which has further transformed Vegas.

Since U2 inaugurated the venue in 2023, its futuristic visual display — and fans’ willingness to pay premium prices to be there — have set a new standard. Rose called Sphere the new "mother of all residencies." For artists and their crews, staying put can ease the wear and tear of the road and offer rare creature comforts, said Michele Bernstein, a former partner at William Morris Endeavor who has consulted with artists like Bruno Mars and Dead & Company on touring. You can have some familiarity, Bernstein said.

Brew your own coffee, keep your fitness routine. But when a residency replaces a full tour, it can place financial burdens on...