Williams-Brice Stadium Set to Host Its First Concert in Nearly a Decade
Williams-Brice Stadium is about to host live music again after a lengthy hiatus, with Chris Brown and Usher bringing “The R&B Tour” to Columbia on October 29 — the venue’s first concert appearance in almost ten years.
Ticket details and timing
Presale registration for the show runs through Tuesday at 10 p.m., with the presale window itself opening Thursday, August 20. General public tickets go on sale the following Monday, August 24. An official start time for the concert hasn’t yet been announced.
No conflict with the football schedule
South Carolina fans won’t need to worry about competing plans on game day, since the concert falls on a Thursday that sits comfortably within the football calendar without overlapping any home games. The show comes the week after South Carolina hosts Tennessee, and it lands during the same week the Gamecocks travel to face Oklahoma — meaning Williams-Brice will be empty of football obligations that week regardless. South Carolina’s next home game after the concert is a November 7 matchup against Texas A&M, giving the stadium roughly nine days to transition back to football mode following the show.
Ending a nearly decade-long concert drought
The scale of this booking becomes clearer with some historical context. The last time a concert took place inside Williams-Brice Stadium was 2018, when Beyoncé and Jay-Z brought their “On the Run II” tour through Columbia — meaning South Carolina’s home football venue has sat dormant as a concert destination for roughly eight years until now.
Before that Beyoncé and Jay-Z show, country star Kenny Chesney was the most recent act to headline Williams-Brice, bringing his “No Shoes Nation” tour to the stadium in 2013. Chesney had also performed there previously in 2008 as part of his “Poets & Pirates” tour — a show notably remembered for an injury Chesney suffered to his foot during that performance.
A venue with real concert history, even if it’s been dormant lately
Williams-Brice Stadium’s history as a concert venue actually stretches back further than these more recent shows, though the bulk of that activity happened in the 1990s and 2000s. Past performers at the stadium have included Columbia’s own Hootie & the Blowfish, along with major international acts like Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, U2, Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. That the venue previously attracted acts of that magnitude, only to go nearly a decade without hosting a single concert since 2018, makes this Chris Brown and Usher booking a genuinely notable return for South Carolina’s biggest stage — one that both music fans and Gamecock supporters alike will be able to attend without any scheduling conflict with the football season underway around it.
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