Empower Field at Mile High is well known for how the stadium shakes on Sundays when the Denver Broncos are playing, but during the summer time, it’s known for the massive headliners that come through the Mile High City, drawing record crowds.

Over the last three years, the official home of the Broncos has hosted big-name artists and bands during the months that lead up to kick off for football season. 2025’s lineup was just as big as 2024’s, which helps make the city of Denver a great concert destination.

2024 saw the likes of Zach Bryan and Morgan Wallen host two-night events, with other major acts like Kenny Chesney, The Rolling Stones, and the Foo Fighters having one night events. 2025 has already found itself off to a hot start, having hosted three major concerts already in the month of June.

The last three weeks have been busy at Empower Field at Mile High with Coldplay opening up the summer concert series back on June 10, followed by Post Malone on June 15, and this past weekend saw The Weeknd on his After Hours Til Dawn tour.

This weekend features Metallica as they begin the first of two nights of their No Repeat Setlist on Friday and conclude on Sunday evening. Denver’s last summer concert will take place on Aug. 2nd with The Lumineers.

Mile High Sports spoke with Jay Roberts, Stadium Manager for the Denver Broncos, who oversees all stadium operations, including guest services, security, booking, and event management, about the stadium’s summer concert series.

“These shows are each doing over 60,000 in attendance,” Roberts said. “So we’ll end up getting close to 400,000 people through the stadium this summer just for those six events, which is pretty substantive. We were actually No. 1 on the tour so far with Post Malone for the most tickets sold for that single show. The Weeknd, it’s still early in the tour, but we’re No. 1 right now for number of tickets sold, so we’re pretty excited about the sales. Denver is a great concert market, and the combination of Denver being a great market and people liking the trek to Empower Field at Mile High, I think, helps. Then the artists obviously do the majority of the work with their amazing music, but that combination has been working really well and has led to a lot of people coming out this summer.”

Most of the summer concerts are one-night events, but there are some instances where a band like Metallica has a two-night event. Unlike last year’s Zach Bryan and Morgan Wallen two-night concerts that played back to back on consecutive evenings, Metallica has a one-day break in between their shows, which provides stadium management and staff flexibility to prepare.

“The good news is that Metallica gives us a day in between to clean and re-stock and prepare,” Roberts said. “With Metallica, we’ll probably have 70,000 people on night one, so to get everything re-set up, re-stocked, and re-cleaned for night two is quite the production. It takes the entire team. Last year with Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan, they didn’t have a day in between, so it probably can’t be as perfect as you would like, but it takes a lot more people, and it’s more challenging to do the back-to-backs than when it is when you have that one day in between to reset, which is great. We love that.”

Denver’s final concert of 2025 will feature The Lumineers on Aug. 2, which gives the stadium team time to prepare for the Broncos’ lone home preseason game that takes place on Aug. 16 against the Arizona Cardinals. Roberts praised the stadium team and staff for mastering how they move from a stadium setup for concerts to preparing the field for the upcoming season.

“Our team has been getting better and better at it now that we’ve been this busy with concerts,” Roberts said. “We’re starting to get really good at it. On August 3rd, the stage will move out, and we will immediately start prepping the field. There is no grass under there right now, it’s covered with a drivable plastic field cover so that trucks can drive right onto it and drop off their equipment. So at any one time, there might be 20 trucks dropping off equipment on the field. When we’re done with The Lumineers, the stage will go away, and the field cover will come up. we will prep the field to put new sod down. We’ll spend about three days between prep and sod and have a brand new field down, and then we’ll have about 10 days to make sure the field is in perfect shape for our great players when they take the field for that preseason game.”

There’s so much around-the-clock work that surrounds ensuring that the stadium operates effectively for the concerts and games that take place on a yearly basis.