Touring
Page: 124
Among the most prominent Latin stars of the 21st century, Daddy Yankee has played the final shows of his farewell tour, ending at Miami’s FTX Arena on Thursday night (Dec. 22). According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, La Ultima Vuelta World Tour wrapped with $197.8 million and 1.9 million tickets sold over 83 shows in 2022. That makes it the biggest tour of his career, by a long shot.
The tour kicked off at Denver’s Ball Arena on July 25, and played 33 shows until finishing its first leg at Madison Square Garden. The U.S. and Canada run earned $61.6 million and sold 376,000 tickets before venturing to Latin America.
There, Yankee hit 22 Spanish-speaking markets and earned $112.7 million and sold 1.383 million tickets. He then closed the tour with 12 additional American shows, adding $23.4 million and 143,000 tickets to the final count.
With something of a home-field (or language) advantage, Latin American shows averaged $3 million and 36,000 tickets in mostly stadiums, compared to $1.9 million and 12,000 tickets in mostly domestic arenas.
Yankee’s geographical divide is in contrast with that of the year’s other major Latin tour from Bad Bunny. With more significant crossover success in recent years, Bad Bunny paced a similar 40,000-plus attendance in both territories but earned nearly three times more per show in the U.S. and Canada because of more elastic ticket scaling.
Bad Bunny and Daddy Yankee played a major role in lifting promoter Cardenas Marketing Network to No. 3 on the year-end Top Promoters ranking. After the final show in Miami, Henry Cardenas reflected to Billboard via email on the impact of Yankee’s final tour and touring career that started on day one.
“It was an unforgettable tour for me and for the entire CMN team. Having produced the farewell tour of the icon and influencer of an entire generation is one of the greatest accomplishments that our company has achieved. In 2005 we were the producers of his first tour, Barrio Fino, and today we say goodbye to him in La Ultima Vuelta. I thank Raymond and Mireddys for giving us the opportunity to be part of this dream that is now a reality and for allowing us to be direct witnesses of their great legacy.”
The La Ultima Vuelta World Tour was 2022’s second-biggest tour in Latin America, besting Bad Bunny’s $80 million-plus total, but falling short of Coldplay’s $127.9 million from two separate legs of Music of the Spheres Tour.
Still, Yankee’s nearly $2 million average in the states on a robust 45-date routing made for a gargantuan global total. Excluding Latin American dates, La Ultima Vuelta World Tour represents a leap of more than 100% from his previous nightly best. All shows considered, he’s up by 162%.
Regardless of geography or genre, Daddy Yankee finished at No. 13 on the year-end Top Tours chart, ranking artists on their concert business between Nov. 1, 2021-Oct. 31, 2022. On Billboard’s monthly Top Tours chart, he’s climbed from No. 22 in July to No. 9 to No. 5 and, for October and November, to No. 3 (December’s ranking will publish next month).
Further, in the calendar year of 2022, Daddy Yankee has the sixth-highest grossing tour worldwide, behind Bad Bunny, Elton John, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and Harry Styles.
And even beyond his year-end achievements, La Ultima Vuelta World Tour finishes as the second-highest grossing Latin tour in Boxscore history, sandwiched between Bad Bunny’s World’s Hottest Tour ($314.1 million) and El Ultimo Tour Del Mundo ($116.8 million).
Less than three weeks after two dozen Taylor Swift fans sued Live Nation over Ticketmaster’s disastrous presale of tickets to her Eras Tour in November, another similar lawsuit has been filed against the concert giant in California federal court.
Filed Tuesday (Dec. 20), the class-action lawsuit, brought by Swift fan Michelle Sterioff, accuses Live Nation and subsidiary Ticketmaster of violating federal antitrust and unfair competition laws and “intentionally and purposefully” misleading “millions of fans into believing” Ticketmaster would prevent bots and scalpers from participating in presales for the tour.
Similar to the lawsuit filed earlier this month, Tuesday’s lawsuit alleges that Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which merged in 2010, represent a monopoly in both the primary and secondary ticketing markets and have used that alleged monopoly power “in a predatory, exclusionary, and anticompetitive manner.” According to the complaint, this monopoly is used to charge “supracompetitive” ticketing fees that can increase the price of tickets “by 20-80%” over their face value.
“Ticketmaster…has violated the policy, spirit, and letter of [antitrust] laws by imposing agreements and policies at the retail and wholesale level that have prevented effective price competition across a wide swath of online ticket sales,” the complaint reads, adding that the company “is only interested in taking every dollar it can from a captive public.”
Sterioff claims that she registered for the Eras Tour presale on Nov. 1, 2022, and “relied” on Ticketmaster’s claim that its Verified Fan program “would ‘level the playing field’” so that more tickets would go to real fans over bots. However, she claims she was unable to secure a ticket during the presale on Nov. 15 or Nov. 16, forcing her to purchase tickets “through an alternate secondary ticketing service provider” after Ticketmaster canceled the general public sale, citing widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried -– and many failed –- to buy tickets.
Additionally, Sterioff says the amount she paid for her ticket on the secondary market was subject to Ticketmaster’s “monopolistic prices” due to the company’s dominance in the secondary ticketing market as well. She cites a Ticketmaster technology that limits ticket purchasers from transferring tickets unless they’re resold through the company’s secondary ticketing platform — essentially making it all but impossible to purchase a Swift ticket outside the Ticketmaster ecosystem. That allows the company “to charge monopolistic ticketing fees every time a single ticket is resold,” the complaint adds.
There are a total of eight counts listed in Sterioff’s complaint, including violation of California’s Consumers Legal Remedies Act; intentional misrepresentation; common law fraud; fraudulent inducement; antitrust violations; violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law; violation of California’s False Advertising Law, and quasi-contract/restitution/unjust enrichment.
Sterioff is asking the court for injunctive relief, statutory damages, punitive or exemplary damages, costs of bringing the lawsuit and more.
Reps for Live Nation and Ticketmaster did not immediately return a request for comment.
In the wake of the Swift ticketing controversy, Ticketmaster apologized to fans and pinned the blame on a “staggering number of bot attacks” and “unprecedented traffic.” But that explanation has seemingly not been enough for many of the company’s critics, who have resurfaced longstanding complaints about the outsized power Ticketmaster and Live Nation have wielded in the market for live music since they merged.
In November, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and her counterpart on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), jointly announced they would be holding a hearing to examine the effects of consolidation on the ticketing industry. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are also reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department over whether the companies represent an illegal monopoly, though that probe is said to have predated the Swift incident.
Earlier this month, breakthrough country superstar Kane Brown became the first touring artist to play all 29 National Basketball Association (NBA) arenas during a single tour, fulfilling a lifelong dream around his passion for pro hoops.
“Kane’s a huge basketball fan,” says his manager Martha Earls with Neon Coast. “He’s athletic, loves sports and first got the idea back in 2019 when he was invited to headline a 20th-anniversary show for what was then the Staples Center in LA (and now is known as Crypto.com Arena).”
The January 2020 show — postponed from October 18, 2019, due to the tragic death of Kane’s longtime friend and drummer Kenny Dixon days earlier — and a Lakers game attended the night before by Kane, Earls and promoter Rich Schaefer with AEG Global Touring became the genesis for Brown’s first arena tour.
Originally scheduled to be announced in March 2020, publicity for Brown’s tour was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a plan to “be ready the minute we can get back on the road,” Schaefer recalls. “That opening came in April of 2021 and we ended up being one of the first sales in the year following COVID-19.”
Schaefer said he wanted Brown to get back on the road after releasing his EP Mixtape, Vol 1 in Aug. 2020 on RCA Records Nashville, which hit No. 2 on Billboard‘s Country Albums chart and No. 15 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. Mixtape, Vol. 1 included the crossover track “Be Like That” featuring Swae Lee and Khalid, as well as “Cool Again” featuring Nelly and “Last Time I Say Sorry” featuring John Legend.
“Sales for the tour were massive and the tour kicked off six months later,” Schaefer said of the Blessed & Free Tour, which officially launched on Oct. 1, 2021, at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento and hit 28 of 29 NBA arenas and college facilities in Nampa, Idaho and College Station, Pennsylvania. The tour also made three stops at hockey arenas in Pittsburgh, Seattle and Las Vegas, wrapping its first leg at Sin City’s T-Mobile Arena on Feb. 4.
The final show took place 10 months later on Dec. 4 at the final NBA arena on the tour, ScotiaBank Arena in Toronto — marking the 29th of 29 NBA arena concerts. “We couldn’t get into Canada during the initial run of the tour because of the restrictions and the lockdown in the country,” Schaefer says.
In Jan. 2022, the Blessed & Free Tour was the most well-attended concert tour of the month, averaging 11,000 fans per show. “When we did announce the tour in April, I got some calls from people thinking we were maybe being a little bit bullish,” Earls recalls, “but we just felt there was such a desire from the fan base and an excitement from fans for live music coming back that we knew we were ready.”
Helping boost sales was the chart success of Chris Young’s track “Famous Friends” featuring Brown, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Country Airplay in July, two months after the Blessed & Free Tour went on sale.
“At almost every show, we had NBA players come out on stage for ‘Famous Friends,’ often with the mascots from each team,” Schaefer said. In Milwaukee, player Khris Middleton appeared on stage for the song months after leading the Bucks to their first NBA Finals victory.
During the downtime between the February date in Vegas and the Canada show, Brown performed the first concert ever held at Finley Stadium in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, on May 7.
“It was a heavy lift and we all learned a lot together including the stadium staff,” Schaefer recalls. “We don’t really say no to a lot of things. If it’s Kane’s dream to do it, we’re gonna help make that happen. That’s what we do for a living here.”
A month later, Brown reached another milestone, headlining a stadium show at Fenway Park in Boston on June 23. The venue became available to Brown thanks to a quick sellout at the city’s TD Garden arena five months earlier on the Blessed & Free Tour.
“That was the great thing about this tour — each success lead to a new opportunity and a chance for Kane to hit a bunch of venues he has always wanted to play,” Earls said. “We learned more than we ever thought possible and watched Kane continue to grow and strengthen his relationship with fans who have grown with him. We are all so proud of what he has achieved.”
TAIPEI — Back in the early 2000s, Taiwanese artists such as Jay Chou and Jolin Tsai dominated Chinese-speaking markets throughout Asia, creating a golden era for Taiwanese pop music. While some, like Chou, continued to be influential, other music stars from the island disappeared from the public eye amid increasingly fierce competition from Japan, South Korea and mainland China.
Two decades years later, Taiwanese artists are making a comeback, as TV variety shows and music platforms in mainland China, in a wave of nostalgia rife with political undertones, have pushed their re-emergence. In May, over 100 million people watched re-screenings of Chou concerts from his 2013 and 2019 world tours as part of Tencent Music Entertainment’s Live Concert Series — a record for online concerts that emerged during the pandemic.
That same month, Cyndi Wang — the now 40-year-old Taiwanese singer dubbed the “Sweetheart Goddess” for her sugary pop songs — topped a Chinese music chart after her appearance on the variety show Sisters Who Make Waves. Nine of her songs from the early 2000s took over Chinese streaming site QQ Music’s “rising hits” chart for about a week. Wang’s fans called to buy shares of Mango TV, the station broadcasting the show, and threatened to dump shares if she was eliminated from the show, according to Weibo posts.
“Her appearance on the variety show and the need for entertainment during pandemic lockdowns created the hit,” says Shao I-Te, former China representative of Channel V and general manager at EMI Music China. “It’s a sense of nostalgia. Her fans who have the most purchasing power are now in their 30s, and artists like Cyndi Wang are like a symbol of their youth. With her, everyone starts to miss the good old days of the millennium era.”
Yet with tensions between Taiwan and Beijing’s communist government mounting once again, Wang’s sudden return to fame has also drawn online criticism in mainland China. After former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s visit to Taiwan in August, netizens accused Wang of not supporting the “one China” principle after she initially failed to share a propaganda post from CCTV (Chinese state television) on social media site Weibo which declared “there is only one China in the world.”
Wang was among about 30 Taiwanese artists, including Chou and Tsai, that people online called out for not supporting the statement without hesitation. (She later reposted the CCTV message on Weibo and expressed support for the “one China” principle, which then generated criticism from Taiwanese citizens.)
China sees Taiwan as a breakaway province, while Taiwan has its own constitution and democratically elected leaders. China has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control and has held military drills in the air and seas around Taiwan, including the firing of ballistic missiles after Pelosi’s visit.
The Rise and Fall of Taiwanese Music in Mainland China
Taiwan’s pop music export wave started in the 1980s when Teresa Teng swept mainland China by storm. Then Jacky Cheung‘s 1993 album The Kiss Goodbye sold 1.36 million copies in Taiwan and over 4 million copies in greater China — sales that surpassed U.S. album sales for Madonna and Bruce Springsteen around that time, which helped entice global record companies to enter the Asian market.
Universal, Warner, Sony, EMI and BMG established their Asian hubs in Hong Kong, bringing capital and production technology and further spreading the influence of Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop music across Asia.
After the financial crisis in 1997, Hong Kong’s economy struggled, and a group of newcomers appeared in Taiwan. In 2001, Shao’s Channel V named Chou best male singer; it was the first time someone replaced Hong Kong’s Four Heavenly Kings in this award category. Since then, artists such as F4, Mayday, Tsai and Singaporean artists Stefanie Sun and JJ Lin — who went to Taiwan to jumpstart their careers — started to influence the next decade’s music.
“People born from 1980 to 1995, this entire generation has become an important generation supporting these singers, who have purchasing power and great acceptance of pop music, and with their help, these artists created the music taste of a generation,” Shao says.
In 2004, during the Taiwanese golden age, Wang performed her hit “Love You” on the Sisters Who Make Waves variety show. But after the global financial downturn of 2008, and the rise of China’s economy that followed, the fortunes of Taiwanese artists began to change.
Cyndi Wang attends a press conference to promote her new album on December 16, 2018 in Taipei, Taiwan of China.
Visual China Group via GI
Around 2010, Chinese internet giants Tencent, Netease, Alibaba and Baidu kicked off an era of online music streaming that created a more distinct mainland Chinese market, which made it tougher for Taiwanese and Hong Kong pop music to break into China.
By 2018, despite a history of rampant piracy, China had grown into the seventh-largest music market in the world with $531.3 million in total revenues that year, according to IFPI. (Taiwan, which has 23.5 million people — a small fraction of China’s 1.4 billion — has held around No. 25 the past few years.)
“Taiwan continues to breed contemporary pop acts but with reduced probability of success in the mainland market,” says Xing Xiaole, French music distributor Believe’s Beijing-based head of artist services for China. He says that’s because Taiwanese artists have struggled to adapt to the distinct ecosystem of Chinese social and advertising platforms, and had to endure travel and group gathering restrictions during the pandemic.
Xing, who also deals with Taiwanese clients, says the biggest Taiwanese music influence in mainland China today comes from indie bands such as the jazz-influenced synth-pop group Sunset Rollercoaster and The Chairs, which releases songs written in English, Mandarin, Japanese and the Taiwanese dialect.
But the rise of mainland China’s market means that Chinese-speaking musicians can no longer rely on Taiwan as a starting point to become as influential as before. Some of them choose to head west to China. And when tensions flare between China and its island neighbor, they often get tangled up in the political wrestling across the Taiwan Strait.
In the 1980s, the Taiwanese government used Teresa Teng’s love ballads, which were popular across China and then banned by communist Beijing, in anti-communist propaganda broadcasts.
The Chinese government, for its part, often requires artists to toe the party line, including referring to Taiwan as being part of China. Taiwanese singers whose careers are based in China have been invited to attend CCTV’s New Year’s Gala to spread pro-unification thoughts.
“There’s always been a red line for Taiwanese artists in mainland China, ever since the 1980s,” Shao says. “What the new generation of artists can do is draw from their everyday experiences and create music that can connect with the world.”
A social impact tech platform long aligned with the music industry has found success at the iconic Red Rocks amphitheater near Denver, raising money and awareness for more than a half-dozen non-profits working with nearly 30 artists and comedians in 2022.
Founded by CEO Brandon Deroche in 2015, Propeller was originally created for the band Incubus to help raise money for their foundation and educate donors about the various nonprofit groups the foundation was supporting, Deroche explains. It was designed to promote “a deeper level of involvement from the fans,” beyond charitable giving, he continues, educating fans on how to support causes by volunteering, advocacy work and contacting their local legislators.
“Fans might have known that a dollar per ticket from the show they attended went to a good cause, but they don’t always know who the organization is and what that organization does,” Deroche says. “It’s a missed opportunity to turn those fans into supporters of that cause. And that’s a big aspect of what Propeller tries to do – provide education and understanding of the different ways fans can take action.”
The goal for many non-profits, Deroche says, is to expand their marketing efforts to a younger audience, which is more difficult to reach in the current media landscape. By working with Propeller, non-profits are able to tap into the active fan bases of many artists, he explains.
The decision to partner with a venue was part of a larger effort to expand Propeller’s footprint and meet different types of audiences and artists. While Deroche was looking for the right venue partner, the city-owned management team behind Denver’s Red Rocks amphitheater was also looking for new charity-based partners to expand the venue’s own impact. After averaging about 80 shows a year for the past decade, Red Rocks had won approval to host 200 concerts in 2022 and was looking for ways to create a more meaningful experience for its growing audience.
“We recognize that artists want to have an impact, and venues do too,” says Brian Kitts, director of marketing & communications at Red Rocks. “When Propeller came along and said they could match the venue with the artist and the organization, we felt like it was the complete package.”
Propeller connected with every performer from the more than 200 concerts at Red Rocks in 2022, offering each the opportunity to support a cause of their choice with special activations including exclusive post-show meet and greets, memorabilia and side stage viewing access. That included an after-party with The Black Keys and Molson Coors for fans who took action to support Save The Music, with 100 winners selected from the audience at Red Rocks and chartered via private shuttle buses to a secret dive bar location.
“They make it really easy for me to show up, participate and raise awareness and a little bit of money for a good cause,” says comedian Bert Kreischer, who gave away free tickets and airfare to see his show at Red Rocks in September in an effort to raise money for Climate Action Now.
Before each show, a short video is shown encouraging fans to take action for the chance to win a ticket upgrade. Propeller also operates an interactive booth with a prize wheel on Red Rock’s upper deck section to engage fans.
In total, Propeller interacted with more than 95,000 music fans and raised $165,784 in its first year, “a very impressive first year here at Red Rocks,” says Kitts.
Propeller covers the costs of the activations and getaways included in the promotions it runs and collects a fee from each charity and non-profit it represents. Deroche says Propeller will be back in 2023 and is looking to expand even further.
“We learned a lot,” Deroche says. “We feel like we barely scratched the surface on what’s possible there. Next year we are looking to go a lot bigger with our efforts and really dive in and apply everything we’ve learned.”
Since the business of Christmas music is growing so fast – it occupies five of the top 10 places on the Billboard Hot 100 this week – we are re-presenting some of our stories from Christmas past. This piece, the touring success of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, originally ran in 2019. Since then, TSO’s touring success has continued. In 2019, the group’s 109-date tour sold 1,016,000 tickets for a $66.8 million gross. In 2021, it sold 767,000 tickets to 98 shows for $54.6 million. And, this year, as of the end of November, TSO sold 223,000 tickets to 27 shows for $15.6 million.
To date, TSO has grossed $683.2 million and sold 13.5 million tickets.
The Mid-America Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which is located in an industrial park down the street from the Cresline Plastic Pipe Company, looks from the outside like any other 8,000-capacity arena. Next week, the Council Bluffs Kennel Dog Show will take place there, followed by a charity bubble-soccer face-off between firefighters and cops from the state and neighboring Nebraska. But every year for three weeks or so in late October and early November, Trans-Siberian Orchestra management turns the venue into a high-tech assembly line and launch pad for the act’s perennial tour.
In one room, storage buckets hold portions of the stage; in a larger space stocked with forklifts and work benches, carpenters weld those portions together. A large mixing board sits inexplicably in one of the arena’s bathrooms, and in separate rehearsal suites, two iterations of the 18-piece orchestra — one that will play dates east of this central U.S. location and one that will head west — go over, and over, this year’s set.
In the main arena space, two rehearsal stages are set end to end. On a Thursday night, one stage sits dormant while the East group runs through its nearly two-and-a-half-hour set, complete with dozens of fiery explosions, webs of crisscrossing green and red lasers, floating video screens, dueling long-haired metal guitarists and elaborate classical and progressive-rock songs engineered from, among many other things, Beethoven riffs, Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” At one point, a 24-foot metallic contraption on the side of the stage spews out tiny lightning bolts timed to lead guitarist Joel Hoekstra’s solos. It is the show’s latest upgrade: a double-Tesla coil. “Well,” says Al Pitrelli, 57, the tour’s musical director and lead guitarist for the West group, as he stands near the soundboard. “That doesn’t suck.”
For years, the two orchestras played slightly different arrangements of the same songs — the deviations so fine that they were apparent only to the musicians — but that proved unnecessarily complicated for such a large undertaking, especially for the backup drummer who had to learn both versions. Now, both follow the same script and sheet music, more or less. “Each band has a different personality,” says longtime drummer Jeff Plate. “So there are some spots that have a different vibe.”
Trans-Siberian-Orchestra
Jason McEachern
Not that there’s any kind of East-West rivarly. About 85 percent of the crew worked on the previous TSO tour, as have most of the musicians. “We have an expanded family out here,” says Plate of the group that has gathered in Council Bluffs — not surprising for a group that has spent years celebrating the Christmas holidays on the road. Although most of the cast, crew and musicians return home when the tour breaks briefly for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, on work days they bond over meals catered by topline servers, many customized according to family holiday traditions. For good measure, Pitrelli years ago taught the catering department’s head chef the recipe for his grandmother’s “Sunday sauce.” The musicians spend hours after every evening concert — there are usually two performances a day — greeting fans. “I wouldn’t know what to do without it, honestly,” says Joel Hoekstra, who has toured with the orchestra for 10 years and also plays with Cher and Whitesnake.
The tour — which is slated to hit 66 cities in seven weeks for a total of 109 shows — kicked off on Wednesday. The West orchestra plays its first show in Council Bluffs, while the East contingent debuts in Green Bay, Wis., ushering in the 20th year of an unlikely live-music concept that, despite such a compact itinerary, consistently ranks among the top live outings of the year. According to Billboard Boxscore data, to date, TSO has grossed $546.1 million and sold 11.5 million tickets over 1,484 shows. It is one of only 32 acts in the history of the database to gross more than $500 million as a solo headliner — the orchestras do not co-headline with other acts or even use openers — and one of only 15 solo headliners to sell in excess of 10 million tickets. And for an act that is not a radio staple — even during the holidays — TSO has charted nine albums on the Billboard 200, four of them reaching the top 10; sold 10.1 million albums and 4.9 million downloads; and generated 273.5 million on-demand audio and 177.5 million on-demand video streams, according to Nielsen Music.
Green Bay Press Gazette reviewer Kendra Meinert describes the East orchestra’s opening night as “a little like a family reunion” making a “warm and welcome return.” Noting that the concertgoers in her row included “two teens, a Harley rider and senior citizens talking about their bus trip to Branson, Missouri,” she writes: “That’s how you get to be a top-grossing touring act year after year by touring only for a few weeks.” A loyal fanbase is also a big part of TSO’s perennial success: Management says that 60 percent of this year’s ticket-holders are repeat customers.
In April 2017, Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s extended family was rocked — and the future of the family business suddenly put in doubt — when the orchestra’s founder Paul O’Neill, a driving, dreaming perfectionist who had once played guitar in a touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar and later worked as a promoter and a manager for AC/DC and Def Leppard, died unexpectedly at the age of 61 from a reaction to prescription medicine he was taking. O’Neill’s family made the decision that the show would go on, and when the touring company hit the road again that November, it quickly dispelled any doubts that Trans-SIberian Orchestra had lost its luster without its creator and chief cheerleader at the helm. In 2017 and 2018, TSO went on to score the two biggest Boxscore grosses of its history: $50.2 million and $56.7 million, respectively. (The latter figure also reflects, in part, the highest ticket prices of the act’s history.) The orchestra also finished at No. 20 on Billboard‘s Money Makers ranking of the top-earning acts of 2018, with $18.5 million in collective sales, streaming, publishing and touring income.
Based on ticketing trends for the act, Billboard estimates that TSO’s 2019 box office could approach $60 million this year, thanks, in part, to the decision to revisit in its entirety the orchestra’s debut album, Christmas Eve and Other Stories — and that continued success has the organization already thinking how to top itself next year.
[embedded content]
In the early ‘90s, O’Neill began to plot a holiday-themed live spectacle that combined progressive rock, heavy metal and classical music with elaborate stage productions. He had been producing a struggling Tarpon Springs, Fla., metal and prog rock band called Savatage when its label, Atlantic Records, encouraged him to pursue his idea of a holiday-themed rock opera with a Pink Floyd-style light show. The Queens, N.Y., native mined Savatage for talent, including Pitrelli, who has played with Alice Cooper, Blue Oyster Cult and Megadeth and auditioned after O’Neill rejected what the axman calls “great guitar players all over the planet.” O’Neill asked Pitrelli to play excerpts from Mozart’s Symphony No. 24, and when the guitarist transposed the complex piece into a different key on the spot, he hired him.
Together, O’Neill, Pitrelli and Savatage composer Jon Oliva — who remains a constant presence at TSO rehearsals, clapping and snapping from a chair beneath the stage and bantering with the musicians about key changes and fantasy football — worked out arrangements for original compositions like “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24.” The instrumental became the heart of Christmas Eve and Other Stories, which told the story of an angel who responds to a father’s prayer to see his daughter for the first time in years. Released in 1996, the album eventually went triple-platinum.
In 1999, O’Neill took his vision on the road, and in 2004, Trans-Siberian Orchestra became the 19th highest-grossing tour of the year, according to Boxscore. It would finish among the top 25 for eight of the next 14 years.
Success did not satisfy O’Neill. “Paul wanted more and more and more,” Plate says of TSO’s shaggy-haired, bearded founder, who wore a leather jacket and sunglasses pretty much everywhere. “He would be almost unrealistic and so adamant.” O’Neill pushed everybody, from musicians to pyro wizards, and during rehearsals could be found “running around the floor” like a rock ‘n’ roll Bob Fosse, Plate adds, “stopping the song in the middle because somebody’s not in the right spot or the singer didn’t have the right inflection on a certain word or the lighting cue was off.” Although he died more than two years ago, managers and musicians still speak of O’Neill in the present tense.
O’Neill’s brand of ambition did not come cheap then — and doesn’t now. Although touring and production director Elliot Saltzman declines to reveal the cost of putting two touring companies — consisting of 120 people and 20 trucks each — on the road (a practice O’Neill initiated in 2000 to meet demand for bookings), he does allow that he budgets $1 million for pyrotechnics alone. (“It’s like being in Iwo Jima [onstage],” Pitrelli says. “But it works.”) “Our startup costs are more than The Rolling Stones — and we have to recoup in seven weeks,” Saltzman says of the double-tour, which runs through Dec. 30 this year.
When O’Neill was alive, he would demand more pyro, lasers and special effects for each successive tour, while Saltzman, Adam Lind and Kenny Kaplan, who oversee the band as partners of Castle Management, played the budget scolds. Since his death, the trio has reversed roles. “Now we have to push a little,” Lind says. Ten years ago, Pitrelli might have attended rehearsal and thought, “It’s pretty good.” Now he “looks for stuff to fix.” Adds the guitarist: “He was my big brother. I’m keeping myself on my toes now. In the back of my mind, I hear Paul always pushing me, but I’ve learned to do it myself.”
At one point, walking through the arena, Saltzman, Lind and Kaplan encounter pyro specialist Doug Adams, who promises imminent Cryo-Jet fog-machine functionality. Pitrelli says Adams frequently tells him, “Wait till you see what I designed this year!” and, anticipating being barbecued onstage, thinks to himself, “Oh, kill me.” Adds Saltzman, who also manages Joan Jett and consults with other tours: “We have fire coming out of everything. We’ve got a lot of mad scientists here.” Kaplan, though, says the managers are experienced enough to know when a piece requires just 15 explosions rather than, say, the pyro team’s preferred 30. “They’re just thinking ‘big is big,’ but we’re trying to measure where it’s spent best,” he says.
Trans-Siberian-Orchestra
Jason McEachern
TSO’s first tour in 1999 played seven shows in five cities and drew 12,000 concertgoers. By 2004, its itinerary had expanded to 100 shows — often two a day — that attracted 1 million ticket-holders. (From 2010 through 2012, TSO took its only non-holiday album, 2000’s Beethoven’s Last Night, on the road in the spring and reps say the orchestra is considering similar tours in the future.) The shows are family-friendly and celebrity attendees include Eddie Van Halen, Kid Rock, the New York Mets’ Noah Syndergaard and The Band Perry, who once drove from Nashville to Knoxville to see the show, parents and grandparents in tow.
When the news broke of O’Neill’s death, the organization was stunned. O’Neill’s imagination and drive to innovate had kept TSO evolving for 20 years. “Paul always had a knack for being one step beyond what anybody could envision,” says Hoekstra. “He would whip everybody into a frenzy.”
“He would come into our dressing room and talk about dreams and mystical ideas and fantasies,” recalls Mee Eun Kim, a keyboardist since 2000. “By the time he leaves the room” — there’s the present tense again — “the girls would all whisper to each other: ‘That’s never going to happen.’” But, Mee Eun adds, “After our first arena show, we looked at each other like, ‘Oh my God, he did it.’ From then on, any time he said anything crazy, we said, ‘OK, Paul!’”
With O’Neill gone, the doubts arrived. “There was a moment when I was like, ‘Oh, what’s going to happen?’” says Mee Eun. Plate and Hoekstra called each other to discuss what a future without the Trans-SIberian Orchestra would look like. They did not have to wonder for very long. O’Neill’s wife, Desiree, and his daughter, Ireland — who, as a young girl, used to shadow her father during rehearsals — quickly decided the show would continue. They declined to comment for this story, and while Lind calls the first tour after O’Neill’s death “very difficult,” he adds, “Paul talked long before his passing of TSO outlasting us all.”
For Trans-Siberian Orchestra to remain relevant to future generations, new music will almost certainly have to be composed for coming tours. Conceivably Oliva and Pitrelli, who were there at the beginning, could carry the torch at least part of the way, and Saltzman, Lind and Kaplan say are always thinking ahead — but right now, they have a tour to do. “That kind of decision comes a little later,” says Kaplan. “We get through this one, then we look at how this played out, what we liked about it, how it will change, what we learned along the way.”
The O’Neill family’s decision to revisit Christmas Eve and Other Stories for this year’s tour has ratcheted up the emotional quotient again for the musicians who date back to the early days of TSO. Pitrelli, whose shoulder-length mane is streaked with gray, says he has a hard time “keeping it straight” while playing songs from the album.
There’s another reason performing TSO’s first album and its story of a father praying for the safe return of his child resonates with the guitarist. Pitrelli’s oldest son, Jesse, is a Coast Guard sniper and his youngest, Zach, a nuclear-submarine engineer “somewhere under the Indian Ocean.” “When I recorded these [songs] for Paul back then, I was in a different head,” Pitrelli adds. “Listening to these songs at this point in my life, I’ve become the older character. I can’t help inserting my name into that story: Where are my boys now? I miss them.”
O’Neill used to tell the musicians and crew the music should last not decades but for centuries, and, for their part, they are determined to fulfill that prophecy. “I’m fairly positive he’s watching it, going, ‘You’re doing good, guy, keep going’” Pitrelli says. “He used to tell me every tour: ‘Just get me through January.’ I’m gonna get him through another January.”
Additional reporting by Eric Frankenberg.
A second person has died after a crush at a London concert venue last week, British police said Monday (Dec. 19).
Gabrielle Hutchinson, 23, was working as a security guard at the O2 Brixton Academy, where Nigerian singer Asake was due to perform Thursday. Hutchinson was one of eight people hospitalized after being caught in mayhem at the venue, and died on Monday, the Metropolitan Police force said.
Rebecca Ikumelo, 33, died on Saturday morning. A 21-year-old woman remains in critical condition. All three were in the foyer of the concert hall when they were caught up in a throng of people.
The police force said emergency services were called to reports of a large crowd and people trying to force their way into the venue.
The force said detectives were reviewing security camera and phone footage, speaking to witnesses and conducting forensic examinations as part of a “large and complex” investigation. It said it was too early to say whether any crimes were committed.
The Brixton Academy in south London is one of the city’s most famous music venues. Built as a movie theater in the 1920s, it has a capacity of just under 5,000.
Wynonna will once again welcome a slate of her fellow artists and friends for the upcoming 2023 leg of The Judds: The Final Tour.
Ashley McBryde, Brandi Carlile, Kelsea Ballerini, Little Big Town and Tanya Tucker will join her for select dates on the tour, while Martina McBride will return to open all upcoming tour dates. The Judds: The Final Tour dates for 2023, produced by Sandbox Live and Live Nation, will launch Jan. 26 in Hershey, Penn.
“What I can think of to say is that I am looking so forward to being out on the road again, and that I am absolutely thrilled to have my friends joining me for this next tour,” Wynonna said via a statement. “I’m so grateful to the fans that they want more, and I’m anxious to be with everybody again.”
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
The country star opted to continue with the tour as a tribute following the death of her mother and musical partner Naomi Judd. The country legend died at age 76 on April 30, just one day before The Judds were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. The Judds: The Final Tour had been initially announced prior to Naomi’s passing.
Several of the artists chosen joining Wynonna on the tour previously joined her and her sister Ashley Judd to honor their late mother during a public memorial service that aired on CMT, and was held at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. McBride spoke during the memorial, while McBryde performed “Love Is Alive,” and Little Big Town delivered “Grandpa (Tell Me ‘Bout the Good Old Days).” During the service, Carlile teamed with Wynonna for a stirring rendition of “The Rose.”
One of the most successful duos in country music history, The Judds notched 14 No. 1 hits on Billboard‘s Hot Country Singles chart.
See the full list of The Judds: The Final Tour 2023 showdates below:
Jan. 26, 2023: Hershey, PA – Giant Center *Ashley McBryde
Jan. 28, 2023: Bridgeport, CT – Total Mortgage Arena *Ashley McBryde
Jan. 29, 2023: Worcester, MA – DCU Arena *Ashley McBryde
Feb. 2, 2023: Tulsa, OK – BOK Center *Kelsea Ballerini
Feb. 3, 2023: Kansas City, MO – T-Mobile Center *Kelsea Ballerini
Feb. 4, 2023: St. Louis, MO – Chaifetz Arena *Kelsea Ballerini
Feb. 9, 2023: Omaha, NE – CHI Health Center Omaha *Little Big Town
Feb. 10, 2023: Moline, IL – Vibrant Arena at THE MARK *Little Big Town
Feb. 11, 2023: Dayton, OH – Wright State University Nutter Center *Little Big Town
Feb. 16, 2023: Greenville, SC – Bon Secours Wellness Arena *Tanya Tucker
Feb. 17, 2023: Fairfax, VA – EagleBank Arena *Tanya Tucker
Feb. 18, 2023: Charleston, WV – Charleston Coliseum *Tanya Tucker
Feb. 23, 2023: Savannah, GA – Enmarket Arena *Brandi Carlile
Feb. 24, 2023: Tampa, FL – Amalie Arena *Brandi Carlile
Feb. 25, 2023: Hollywood, FL – Hard Rock Live at Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood *Brandi Carlile
AJ Capital Partners, the new owners of revered Nashville music venue Exit/In, have named a new talent buyer for the iconic entertainment hub and plan to re-open the shuttered venue as early as this Spring after it temporarily closed in late November.
Though there had been local speculation and concern that AJ Capital would turn to a large promoter such as Live Nation to book the 51-year old independent venue, the new owners are utilizing an in-house team with Dan Merker serving as Exit/In’s lead talent buyer. Merker, who oversees talent buying for all AJ Capital properties, has previously worked at Outback Presents, HUKA Entertainment and Tortuga Music Festival.
“We are honored to carry on the legacy of this iconic venue and raise the bar for both the fan and artist experience,” Merker said in a statement to Billboard. ‘We look forward to announcing 2023 shows soon and as the calendar will reflect, restoring Exit/In as a welcoming place for artists that span all genres and everyone within our community.”
After moving their headquarters from Chicago to Nashville in 2020, AJ Capital Partners in July 2021 acquired the beloved Exit/In, located at 2208 Elliston Place, as well as the adjacent Hurry Back bar, for $6.45 million from Anthony Rentals (representing property owners the Nash and Anthony families). AJ Capital says they plan to continue Hurry Back as a restaurant/bar concept. A representative for the Nash and Anthony families declined to speak for this story. AJ Capital Partners officially take over operations of Exit/In on Jan. 1, 2023.
In addition to the Graduate Hotel chain, AJ Capital owns and developed the buildings that house two current music industry entities: Live Nation’s Nashville office in the Nashville Warehouse Co., and newly opened Nashville headquarters for the Academy of Country Music, both in Nashville’s Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood.
AJ Capital Partners also owns the Memphis, Tennessee venue Minglewood Hall. Other venues in AJ Capital Partners’ portfolio include New Orleans’ Joy Theater, The Senate in Columbia, S.C., Houston’s White Oak Music Hall, and Iron City in Birmingham, Ala. AJ Capital also has plans for a 4,500-capacity music venue in Nashville’s Wedgewood-Houston area.
“The Exit/In has been Nashville’s music forum for 51 years, under the stewardship of more than two dozen operators over that time,” Tim Ryan, Principal focused on live music venues, boutique hotels and other experiential real estate, AJ Capital Partners, told Billboard via a statement. “Ultimately, the venue’s history, legacy and soul belong to Nashville. As the next stewards in line, we’re committed to doing whatever is necessary to restore her to good health and set the stage for another legendary half-century and beyond. AJ’s track record of restoring and reviving historic spaces speaks for itself, both here in Nashville and across our portfolio.”
After AJ Capital takes over the venue’s operations on Jan. 1, 2023, it plans to renovate the Exit/In’s bathrooms and green room. Updates will also include refreshing of the building’s west-facing outer wall, which previously showcased a mural featuring artists who have performed at Exit/In. The mural has since been painted over.
Since opening in 1971 with a performance by Jimmy Buffett, the bare-bones, 500-person capacity Exit/In has been one of the city’s most enduring and popular venues, and a mainstay of Nashville’s rock music scene, hosting a diverse slate of artists, including Billy Joel, Etta James, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, Muddy Waters, Jason and the Scorchers, R.E.M and more. On the back cover of The Police’s Zenyatta Mondatta, Sting is seen wearing an Exit/In shirt. Episodes of the CMT series Western Beat with Billy Block — which grew out of Block’s Western Beat Roots Revival — were taped at Exit/In beginning in 2000.
In 2021, AJ Capital filed a request to designate the Exit/In as a historical landmark, and historic overlays were approved for a section of the property.
The switchover in ownership has not been without controversy as the most recent operator, Chris Cobb, had been passionately opposed to the change. Cobb, whose name had grown synonymous with the venue, has been an integral part of Exit/In for 18 years. In 2012, he partnered with Josh Billue to oversee Exit/In, and became its sole operator since 2019 until the last show under his watch on Nov. 23.
In February, as Exit/In went on the block, Chris Cobb and his wife Telisha, partnered with Grubb Properties’ Live Venues Recovery Fund, an entity that helps club operators become owners, to try to buy the property. The Cobbs also launched a GoFundMe campaign that reached its initial $200,000 goal, ultimately raising more than $271,000, but were unsuccessful in buying the club. Cobb pledged to donate the money raised to the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) and to Music Venue Alliance (MVAN). Cobb was unavailable for comment by press time.
In April 2021 Cobb also filed trademark applications for the name “Exit/In Nashville’s Music Forum,” as well as “Exit/In Nashville Music Forum Fifty Years and Counting 50,” which were subsequently opposed by AJ Capital in October of this year. The opposition filing from AJ Capital contended that according to license agreements, tenants were granted a limited license to use the name Exit/In on the leased premises only, and that the landlord “at all times shall retain sole and exclusive ownership and right to the name Exit/In subject only to the limited license granted herein.”
There is no word on when the patent office will hand down its decision.
The Exit/In has long served as the anchor for the geographic area dubbed The Rock Block, which over the decades has included The End, Elliston Place Soda Shop, Obie’s Pizza and The Gold Rush. The Rock Block was commemorated with a historical marker in 2020.
Ned Horton, whose The Horton Group operated Exit/In from 1998 through 2001, says, “Real estate in Nashville has been going through the roof, home neighborhoods are changing and in rapid fashion. So to be beholden to a landlord in running a business does have its limitations from time to time. AJ controls its destiny by owning the building and the land. But it does seem like the new owners are well-intentioned and have the capital to do somethings that others maybe couldn’t in the past.”
Rick Whetsel, who operated Exit/In from 2003-2006, says, “It’s really exciting to have an owner with deep pockets. As caretakers or stewards of Exit/In, we’ve always kind of financed things out of our own pockets. Taking care of upgrades and fixing various things, we tended to kind of put off repairs or kick things down the road a bit. It’s nice that someone has the money and capital they have to take care of the building and put it on the path to a good future. The Exit/In is such an important part of not just the music industry, but the city of Nashville. There’s such a sense of history and you can feel that energy when you are in there.”
“Change is not always a bad thing,” Whetsel added. “Financial security is a wonderful thing. It’s nice to know that the place will be here and able to operate as a venue for a long time. The stewardship of Exit/In, they realize it is a big deal. You have to go out there and build bridges and become part of the community and they are. It’s amazing the work that myself, Chris Cobb, Josh Billue, and others in the past couple of decades have been able to do, to get the Exit/In on the right path. The Exit/In has always been here and it needs to stay here.”
It was a year in which Rammstein blasted plumes of fire from a backpack, The Weeknd destroyed a miniature city in a hurricane of black smoke, Pepe Aguilar sang on horseback amid Aztec warriors and equestrian acrobats and Elton John gave a “Rocketman” tour of space from a video screen that bled into the stage. artists provided fans with endless stadium explosions and other over-the-top spectacles. Even though Inflation and supply-chain issues considerably jacked up expenses for 2022’s biggest tours, cutting corners was not an option. “It’s really important that we don’t short-change anybody,” David Furnish, John’s husband and manager, told Billboard in November, just before the singer’s final U.S. farewell tour show.
And in 2023, stars who continue or return to stadiums after emerging from COVID-19 quarantine are unlikely to scale down. “Our show is evolving,” Aguilar says from his Mexico City home. “Once I experimented with it, it’s hard to go back.”
Here are the stories behind five other ground-breaking concert special effects in 2022:
Bad Bunny’s floating dolphins and live-video merry-go-rounds
Befitting the year’s highest grossing tour, Bad Bunny went big with stadium special effects. The giant dolphins floating above the crowds were the most instantly eye-catching, but Bunny also integrated video into the shows in new ways. During “Callaíta,” he built on the merry-go-round imagery of his 2019 video and projected a 3-D live feed of his performance, as well as captured shots of individual fans and other elements of the show, into the frames of the rotating structure on stage. “There’s a lot more to it than meets the eye,” says Adrian Martinez, creative director for Sturdy, the production company that created much of the tour’s visual imagery. “A lot of shows just use loops and clips here and there and kind of just repeat. We wanted to make sure people were looking at something new pretty constantly.”
Coldplay’s LED spheres
After Coldplay‘s designer approached Frederic Opsomer with the idea for a new effect— hovering spheres festooned with LED strips— his staff at PRG Projects began two months of problem-solving. First, they considered “hardshell with a trussing system inside.” But that could have required seven or eight trucks with a crew of more than 60, which was unsustainable given the band’s mandate to be environmentally conscious. “We have to come up with another way,” Opsomer, PRG’s vp of global scenic, told the staff. So they concocted inflatable spheres, tested lightweight fabric coatings and determined they could fit in a fractional portion of a truck with just one crew member for maintenance. After accounting for rainy and windy stadium conditions, they built structures for the tour that began in March and tested them in factory settings, but didn’t feel fully comfortable until they lit up in bright colors on the first date. “How did we celebrate?” Opsomer asks. “I think we had a big smile on our face.”
Kendrick Lamar’s shadow play
During Kendrick Lamar‘s The Big Steppers tour, which ran from June to December, the rapper hunched over with his microphone, creating a big-screen shadow during “Count Me Out” with arrows wedged into Shadow Kendrick’s back when they did not actually appear in Real Kendrick’s back. “It’s this little photogenic moment that plays with reality,” says Mike Carson, one of the tour’s show designers and show directors, who helped coordinate choreographers, directors, lighting designers and video programmers to make it work. “It’s like a magic track. I read reviews and people describe what it is and still can’t pinpoint how he did it.” (Watch the whole show here.)
Adele’s piano on fire
It was Adele‘s idea last May to light her piano aflame during “Set Fire to the Rain.” That prompted five months of designers and crew members plotting and building a faux white Yamaha grand piano that bursts into flames while Adele sings during a manufactured rainstorm at her Caesars Palace residency in Las Vegas. Those flames spread more than 100 feet across the stage, part of an effect that involves a high-tech fire suppressant and huge troughs of water. The piano, says Paul English, Adele’s production manager, is “like a bath. It contains a load of water, so there’s a moment where [the piano] falls over and the water spills out. Then it sets itself on fire.” The flames heat up to 300 degrees, which means everything around it is at risk of melting or burning – which requires an elaborate rain “curtain” to keep in check. “So, yeah, it’s been challenging,” English adds.
Lady Gaga’s flaming cannons
For her Chromatica Ball stadium tour that kicked off this summer, Lady Gaga contrasted a brutalist-architecture set design inspired by 1920s German expressionism with non-stop explosions. Her “cold, very stark feel” in the set created a gray landscape that allowed her longtime production designer, LeRoy Bennett, to go crazy with orange-and-yellow pyro, aided by Rammstein’s special-effects company, FFP. (The flaming cannons are technically known in the special-effects industry as “liquid flame giga,” or LFGs.) “We’ve always had some pyro here and there, but never really went full-on big metal or Rammstein-style flames,” Bennett says. “She loves those kinds of effects. She’s a big fan of fire and the power and drama of it.”