What's up with all these musical acts booking venues they can't sell?
The Black Keys just announced that they were planning to downsize their upcoming tour, but they're not the first to make the miscalculation
Everyone seems to think they can launch their own Eras Tour these days, and the instinct does make sense. We’ve spent almost two years now reading about venues selling out in seconds despite skyrocketing ticket prices, fans who couldn’t attend tuning in via livestream to hear their favorite songs night after night, a film of the concert going on to break its own records, and other massive tours like Beyoncé’s Renaissance impacting the U.S. economy on a level on par with hosting an Olympics.
That sort of hype around live performance must be intoxicating, especially if you have your own cadre of die-hard fans willing to drop significant cash on every new thing you make. But as we all know, most artists aren’t Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, and can’t even come close to supporting a tour on this scale. Increasingly, though, that doesn’t mean they’re not willing to try—often with results that can be described as embarrassing at best.
This weekend, The Black Keys quietly canceled the entire planned North American leg of their upcoming International Players arena tour, before announcing on Instagram that the band had “decided to make some changes… that will enable us to offer a similarly exciting, intimate experience for both fans and the band, and will be announcing a revised set of dates shortly.” While they didn’t explicitly say the change was due to low ticket sales, that’s a pretty clear explanation. Seats cost $100 at the lowest for a band that hasn’t been able to support those sorts of crowds since they sold out Madison Square Garden all the way back in 2011. Many people who used to listen to The Black Keys casually may not have even known they had a new album out at all.
But this isn’t the work of just one overly optimistic tour manager. These tours haven’t been canceled (yet), but the same is currently happening to Wallows, the indie band featuring 13 Reasons Why’s Dylan Minnette, and even joint-headlining ventures like the Sweat Tour featuring Charli XCX and Troye Sivan. Wallows has a few popular tracks like “Are You Bored Yet?” (feat. Clairo) and “Remember When,” but certainly not enough of a following to sell out venues like Madison Square Garden or Philadelphia’s Mann Center, both of which currently have relatively cheap seats available in almost every section for the band’s headlining tour later this summer.
The same is true for Charli and Troye, who are each bigger names in their own right than Wallows, but still fairly niche in the grand scheme of things. In New York and Los Angeles, which host the greatest concentration of fans by far, bought out nosebleed tickets are re-selling for a minimum of $208 for the former and $81 for the latter. However, the same seats are retailing for about $40-$60 on most of the tour’s other stops, and don’t seem close to selling out anywhere else but Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.
It’s not that these artists (or their teams) shouldn’t dream big, but as The Black Keys learned the hard way, arenas are far from the be-all and end-all of live music. The fact that tours are trending in that direction is a frustrating prospect, both for fans who’ve been priced out and would rather see their favorites in a smaller venue anyway, and artists who deserve to play for a full house rather than hundreds of empty aisles.
At least some major names are actively resisting the Eras Tour Experience. Despite selling out her first-ever stadium show, which will take place in Boston’s Fenway Park in June, Lana Del Rey is holding firm in her decision not to do a larger stadium tour. “I want to go to McCreary County in Kentucky. I want to go meet the people. I want to say ‘hi’ and have breakfast with them,” she said at the Ivor Novello Awards last week. “It’s not always about just going north and going to every island and… picking up money at the stadiums.”
While Billie Eilish is doing an almost entirely sold-out arena run for her recent album, Hit Me Hard And Soft, she also recently told fans during a Q&A that it would be a little different than either Beyoncé’s or Taylor Swift’s. “I’m not doing a three-hour show, that’s literally psychotic,” she said (via The Hollywood Reporter). “Nobody wants that. You guys don’t want that. I don’t want that. I don’t even want that as a fan. My favorite artist in the world, I’m not trying to hear them for three hours.” We’ll see if this tour starts any trends of its own when it kicks off in Quebec’s Centre Videotron this September.