Touring
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Back in October, Greta Van Fleet were forced to postpone seven shows of their Dreams in Gold tour after singer Josh Kiszka ruptured his eardrum during a show in Bangor, Maine.
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However, the group revealed the rescheduled tour dates on Wednesday (Nov. 30), noting that all seven shows in Jacksonville, Fla.; Hollywood, Fla.; Tampa, Fla.; Greenville, S.C.; Raleigh, N.C.; Tucson, Ariz., El Paso, Texas; Anaheim, Calif. and Sacramento, Calif. will take place in March 2023.
“We appreciate your patience as we navigated logistics and can’t wait to see you again soon,” GVF captioned the post, noting that original tickets are still valid for the rescheduled dates.
After his ear ruptured in Maine, Kiszka said he’d been experiencing a “situation” in his left ear that’s “caused plenty of infections, tinnitus (ringing in the ear) and difficulty hearing” — leading Greta Van Fleet to postpone three shows in support of their latest album, The Battle at Garden’s Gate.
After playing at the AT&T Center in San Antonio, Texas, in early November, the band had to reschedule four more shows. “I just wanted to express how beautiful and how awe-inspiring these couple of shows have really been, truly. Also, unfortunately, they’ve been rather painful,” he said in a video message to fans announcing the postponements. “The last time I spoke with you, I had asked for your understanding; I was dealing with a ruptured eardrum. Unfortunately, while the eardrum continues to heal, it also has continued to cause me great deal of physical pain, which has made it very difficult to perform.”
Elton John played his final U.S. touring concerts over the weekend, saying goodbye to his fans on the road in America with three shows at Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium. With reports for his last 13 domestic shows, the total gross for the Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour sprints closer to the top of the all-time Boxscore heap. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, John’s goodbye tour has grossed $749.9 million and sold over 5 million tickets since launching in 2018.
That means that since our last report on his whereabouts, John added almost $90 million to his total gross and is now within $30 million of Ed Sheeran’s The Divide Tour, which finished with a record-setting $776.4 million. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour has passed U2’s 360 Tour ($736.4 million) to become the second-highest grossing tour in Boxscore history. (John still has about 50 shows left next year in Australia and Europe, so he could surpass Sheeran’s record soon enough — more on that in a moment.)
Ultimately, the tour’s North American stadium leg added $222.1 million to its total gross, doubling the revenue of his domestic arena run in the Spring, and tripling the revenue of his Summer spree of European stadium shows. His Fall dates averaged $6.7 million and 40,500 tickets.
Those three final Dodger Stadium shows grossed $23.5 million and sold 142,970 tickets on Nov. 17, 19 and 20. The last of those was livestreamed on Disney+ and featured guest appearances by Brandi Carlile, Kiki Dee and Dua Lipa. It was the biggest gross and attendance total of the entire tour, surpassing the $16.7 million take at Gillette Stadium and the 99,827 ticket count at MetLife Stadium, all of which played in July.
It was John’s third trip to Dodger Stadium, following shows in 1992 (two nights – $3.4 million; 99,453 tickets) and 1975 (two nights).
With $26.5 million separating John’s farewell big from Sheeran’s mid-career high, each report becomes more tense than the last. The trek will continue with 10 shows in Australia and New Zealand in January. He played 38 shows on the continent between November 2019 and March 2020, averaging $2.5 million. At that rate, he’d end January at $774.4 million, just $2 million short of the record.
But his previous Oceania run was in arenas, and his 2023 shows will be in stadiums. With ballooned venue capacities, he’s bound to break Sheeran’s record early in the new year, and even if ticket prices (and thus, grosses) stay modest, he’s got another 40-plus shows in Europe to follow, making it all but inevitable that John will set a new all-time high. It’s just a matter of when.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is following up last week’s open letter to Live Nation over “dramatic service failures” during the Taylor Swift presale with a hearing on competition across the ticketing industry. The senator and her across-the-aisle counterpart on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), jointly announced the hearing, with a date and witness list forthcoming.
“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets,” said Klobuchar, without mentioning Swift. “The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve.”
Klobuchar said the hearing will examine the effects of consolidation across ticketing — namely that a lack of competition suppresses the need to improve services and maintain fair pricing.
Lee added that consumers “deserve the benefit of competition in every market, from grocery chains to concert venues. I look forward to exercising our Subcommittee’s oversight authority to ensure that anticompetitive mergers and exclusionary conduct are not crippling an entertainment industry already struggling to recover from pandemic lockdowns.”
Aside from a possible grilling by U.S. senators, Live Nation and Ticketmaster are said to be under investigation by the Justice Department as to whether the company maintains an illegal monopoly over the live event ticketing ecosystem. The probe, according to The New York Times, predates this current debacle involving Swift’s tour presale.
Ticketmaster has apologized for the debacle, which started Nov. 15 when millions of Swift fans overwhelmed a presale for her Eras Tour — causing site crashes and hours-long waits, with many fans left empty-handed and — possibly newly engaged in politics. Ticketmaster went on to cancel the general sale as well.
“I apologize to all our fans. We are working hard on this,” Liberty Media CEO and Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei said in an appearance on CNBC last Thursday. “Building capacity for peak demand is something we attempt to do, but this exceeded every expectation.”
Swift’s tour is actually being promoted by Live Nation competitor AEG, which has told Billboard it “didn’t have a choice” in terms of ticketing sales and distribution because of Ticketmaster’s “exclusive deals with the vast majority of venues on the Eras tour.”
Ticketmaster and Live Nation have long been dogged by accusations that they exert an unfair dominance over the market for live concerts, particularly since they merged in 2010 to create their current structure. The combined entity has operated for its entire existence under a so-called consent decree imposed by the DOJ when it approved the merger. Under the decree, Live Nation is prohibited from retaliating against venues that refuse to use Ticketmaster. Those restrictions were set to expire in 2020 but were extended by five years in 2019 after the DOJ accused Live Nation of repeatedly violating the decree.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sent a special message to Elton John ahead of the last U.S. show of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour on Sunday night (Nov. 20).
“Hi Elton, we just wanted to say congratulations,” the Duchess of Sussex said in a video played during Disney+’s Countdown to Elton Live ahead of its broadcast of his final show at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, which is the final North American date of his farewell tour. “And we are just so proud of you. We’re so grateful that we were able to see you on your farewell tour also.”
After offering his own “congratulations,” the prince added, “And thank you for entertaining everybody for so many decades. Thank you for being the friend that you were for my mum, thank you for being our friend. Thank you for being a friend to our kids and thank you for entertaining people right around the world.
“Even though this is officially your retirement, this will not be your last gig, we know that,” Harry concluded. “But we love you and congratulations on an incredible career.”
Of course, Sir Elton’s friendship with the late Princess Diana dates all the way back to before Harry’s birth, when he was asked to perform at Prince Andrew’s 21st birthday party in 1981. Elton and Princess Diana remained close for the remainder of her life, and the singer famously performed “Candle in the Wind 1997” at her funeral in 1997. (The song rocketed to No. 1 when he released the studio version following the service; it went on to spend 14 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100.)
Elton’s farewell concert also featured a number of special, in-person guests throughout the night, including Dua Lipa, Kiki Dee and Brandi Carlile.
Watch Harry and Meghan’s well wishes for John below.
As his husband, Elton John, prepares for the U.S. finale of his absolutely-positively-unambiguously-final farewell tour Sunday night (Nov. 20) at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, David Furnish wants to clarify one thing: “It’s really important to make a distinction between Elton retiring from touring but Elton not playing his very last public performance for the very last time,” says Furnish, 60, a former advertising executive who has produced numerous films, including John’s 2019 biopic, Rocketman. “Will Elton return as a live performer? I hope so! It’s in his blood.”
In a wide-ranging phone interview from the family’s home, Furnish, also John’s manager, discusses the tour’s COVID-19 challenges, how high gas prices and supply-chain issues have complicated budgets and his entry into the music business. “I love working in this world,” he says. “We have the privilege of working with the very best in the business.”
As of last month, the Farewell Yellow Brick World Tour has grossed $661.3 million and sold 4.5 million tickets, including 30 U.S. stadium shows this year that totaled $133.4 million and 830,000 tickets. When the tour returned in January, Omicron loomed over the concert business, but COVID-19 fears have dissipated. How has your thinking about the tour changed throughout 2022?
From us, nothing has changed. COVID is still out in the world. It is still a risk to the health of our crew and to Elton and the band. We put in place a very strict testing protocol. We went back out on the road last January with a regular cadence of testing, keeping everybody up to date on vaccines and boosters. We’ve kept all of that in place. We have people in the tour in separate bubbles. Elton feels really badly, but he hasn’t been able to mix with his band. His band travels in one bubble. He and his assistants, the people who support him, his hairdresser and people in security — they’re in his bubble. It’s been very challenging for Elton, because he always loves being with his band before he goes on stage. He always sits with them and chats and has a laugh with them. That’s not been possible. While he’s been home, between shows or in hotels, he has to isolate. Everybody that supports him at home is also tested regularly — all staff in the household.
How difficult was it to reschedule the shows in Dallas when Elton himself came down with COVID?
We had to postpone, but it meant we lost two shows in Montreal to allow those Dallas shows to be rescheduled. There’s only so much wiggle-room in a tour schedule. This is a big behemoth of a tour. You suddenly just can’t jump to another side of the country or cross the Atlantic to make up a show.
How did fans’ excitement for the tour evolve as the COVID-19 landscape changed throughout 2022?
Thankfully, COVID hospitalizations have massively decreased and there are more medical treatments than there were at the beginning, so people can make the decision as to what medical risk is appropriate for them and still come to see a show. Lockdown was very hard for most people. It was very isolating, and nothing brings people and the world together like music. It’s emotionally and mentally and spiritually very healthy for people to get back out and see shows again. We just had to go back on the road in the safest way possible, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
How have you adapted to higher gas prices and supply-chain issues? Does Elton eat the extra expenses, or have you cut the budget or production?
We just eat the extra cost, because the tour we started with is the tour we intend on finishing with. We sold tickets in good faith and people bought tickets in good faith and it’s really important that we don’t short-change anybody and we honor our commitments. Elton is really committed to that. It’s the largest traveling-production tour Elton’s ever mounted, and it didn’t even occur to us to try to reconfigure it in any way to make it cheaper.
Please set the record straight: Will Sunday’s concert at Dodger Stadium be the last U.S. show Elton ever plays?
I know for a fact he will not be touring in any capacity. What you’re going to see is the possibility of a special one-off or a small residency in one venue for a limited period of time. I don’t think it will be Las Vegas. Elton feels he’s done the best he can in Las Vegas. He mounted two hugely successful residencies there. When you’re an artist and something’s in your blood, you don’t want to shut the door completely. Having said that, I know Elton, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t do any more live shows, either. He’s really looking forward to spending time with his family. That’s the No. 1 priority in his life. Any type of return to any type of touring is going to be a very well-considered situation, and definitely not a given, at all.
Given your background in other businesses, I wonder what it was like to transition into the music business as Elton’s manager.
I have a business-advertising-marketing background, but I’ve also worked in musical theater, I’ve worked in film production and I’ve been in Elton’s life for 29 years. So it’s not foreign to me at all. When you launch a tour like this, it’s like going on a dangerous mission, and you say to yourself, “I’m hurtling down rapids, and we’re about to go over the falls — who do you want to steady things in the boat and keep things under control?” I’m very fortunate. When I took over, Elton’s tour infrastructure was very, very healthy.
Am I reaching you at the family home in Los Angeles?
Yeah. The whole family’s here in Los Angeles. Obviously, I’m here for work, but I’m here to support my husband and our sons are here. This is a big, big moment in our family’s life.
In a week when everybody seems to be talking about touring, Post Malone pulled off his biggest feat yet: wrapping his 39-date Twelve Carat Tour with four sold-out shows in Los Angeles, the most he’s done in the city in his career. The run marked his return to touring, after a pandemic pause, and featured the hitmaker re-connecting with a fan base that has only grown with the release of his latest album, Twelve Carat Toothache, which he released this year.
Across the first 33 shows of the tour that were reported to Billboard Boxscore, Post moved 413,000 tickets between Sept. 10 and Nov. 6, bringing in $59.7 million, according to Billboard Boxscore — with the L.A. dates not even factored into those totals as yet. And it helps Post’s agent, UTA partner Cheryl Paglierani, earn the title of Billboard’s Executive of the Week.
Here, Paglierani — who also reps clients like Dominic Fike, who played the Palladium this week, and Flo Milli, who just wrapped her own tour at The Roxy — speaks about booking the Post Malone tour, the challenges caused by the pandemic and the return to live music, and the differences in booking an artist as their career grows from the club level to arena headliner. “We’ve seen a lot of success by not skipping any steps and staying focused on consistent growth with each tour,” she says.
This week, Post Malone wrapped his Twelve Carat Tour with four sold out shows in L.A., after having sold 413,000 tickets across the tour’s first 33 dates. What key decisions did you make to help make that happen?
It’s always a team effort amongst myself, his managers Dre London and Austin Rosen, and our tour promoter Colin Lewis. Each tour starts with mapping out the markets we want to play and then building out a strategy that allows us to hit all the major cities while also making sure we’re able to weave in smaller markets we may not play as often. Post already has such a massive fanbase, but the goal is to always continue expanding and make sure that we’re reaching more people each time than we have in the past. On the last tour, we did two nights in L.A. and New York and now we are doing four. We’ve seen a lot of success by not skipping any steps and staying focused on consistent growth with each tour.
This was Post’s first tour since the pandemic. How did you want to re-introduce him to audiences with this tour?
Post is an artist who needs no introduction. This tour was more about a re-connection with the fans after three years of being out of the spotlight. He really stepped up the production and put his all into creating not just an incredible show visually, but an experience that fans will remember forever. The stage is set up with two GA pits that allow fans to get right up against the stage. During the entire show, he is dapping their hands, taking items from the crowd and truly engaging with them in a way I have never seen an artist do. When the show ends, he stays on stage for an extra 30 to 40 minutes signing autographs and taking pictures with fans as the venue is clearing out. It’s truly mind blowing to watch one of the biggest stars in the world show so much love to his fans and go above and beyond. I think it’s a big part of what differentiates him from other artists.
How has touring changed since the pandemic?
At first there were a lot of new hoops to jump through to follow vaccination policies and COVID regulations. We are starting to see a lot of regulations that were put in place post-pandemic get lifted and touring feels to be on its way back to normalcy. I can’t say there’s any one thing I could point to that is drastically different as a result of the pandemic.
What challenges are you facing with routing, pricing and venue selection these days that perhaps weren’t there in the past?
The biggest challenge has been avails and oversaturated markets. With so many artists looking to get back out on the road we saw so many tours going out during the same time periods. You always want to make sure your clients are playing the right venue and we would often encounter venues that had no avails for weeks, so routing became a lot more challenging. We are starting to see things level out a bit but I think it will take another 12 to 24 months to truly go back to normal.
How is booking an arena tour different from booking theater or club outings these days, as for some of your other clients?
The booking process is very similar but there are more intricacies to work through as an artist grows into larger rooms on the deal-making side. As the show grows, so does the production, the amount of crew that needs to be out on the road, and the amount of money being offered to the artist. There are more deal points that need to be negotiated than at the club level. Ticketing also becomes a lot more complex at the arena level where you’re scaling rooms at different price levels versus general admission clubs. Paying attention to the ticketing and how fans are buying is crucial to maximizing show grosses and needs to be done in real time. If you’re doing it right it can be very time-consuming but also greatly impact the amount of money the artist makes, and as agents it’s our job to ensure that we get the best deal for our clients.
Maybe Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei’s statement that Taylor Swift and promoter AEG “chose” to work with Ticketmaster for her calamitous onsale earlier this week should have come with an asterisk.
On Thursday (Nov. 17), Maffei attempted to correct criticisms about Ticketmaster and its owner Live Nation operating as a monopoly by pointing out that Swift’s 2023 Eras Tour “is not actually a Live Nation promoted concert” but rather “promoted by one of our largest competitors.”
Maffei — who is also the president of Live Nation’s largest shareholder Liberty Media — continued: “AEG who is the promoter for Taylor Swift, chose to use us because, in reality, we are the largest and most effective ticket seller in the world. Even our competitors want to come on our platform.”
The thing is, AEG says it’s essentially forced to work with Ticketmaster because of the stranglehold it has over the touring business. “Ticketmaster’s exclusive deals with the vast majority of venues on the Eras tour required us to ticket through their system,” an AEG spokesperson told Billboard in a statement. “We didn’t have a choice.”
The debacle centers around Swift’s presale Tuesday for her Eras Tour, which initially crashed shortly after launch as 14 million fans and billions of bots flooded the site, causing service disruptions. The ticket crash caught the attention of Capitol Hill. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, both of whom criticized the outage at Ticketmaster and doubled down on claims that the Live Nation-owned ticketing service was a monopoly. The Justice Department is now reportedly investigating Live Nation, though the investigation reportedly pre-dated the Swift debacle.
AEG and Live Nation have a complicated relationship built around intense competition and steady cooperation going back decades. While AEG’s facility group relies on Live Nation for programming, AEG Presents, the company’s concert promotion wing, competes directly against Live Nation’s global touring team and has its own preferred ticketing system, AXS.
While AEG Presents prefers to use AXS, their partner in the Eras Tour, Louis Messina (Messina Touring Group is a 50-50 joint venture between AEG and Messina), is basically agnostic when it comes to ticketing systems — he will work with any ticketing company, based on where the show takes place. In North America, that means working with Ticketmaster, which is especially dominant in the NFL as it provides tickets to 27 of the NFL’s 32 teams. By choosing to stage her show in NFL stadiums – really, in choosing to tour stadiums in the U.S. — Swift and her partners at AEG and Messina Touring Group are effectively forced to use Ticketmaster due to its supremacy in North America.
In that sense, Maffei’s argument that AEG chose to work with Ticketmaster is misleading, but it would also be inaccurate to describe Swift or AEG’s relationship with Ticketmaster as one built upon coercion. Historically, it’s been more mutually beneficial.
AEG’s venue management company ASM Global — formed following the merger of AEG Facilities and SMG in 2019 to become the biggest such company in the country — expanded its partnership with Live Nation in 2021, allowing the use of Ticketmaster for any of the shows the promoter brings to ASM’s 300 clients. In this arrangement, both sides win, since AEG relies on Live Nation to bring content to its buildings and grants the company incentives to entice shows to their facilities.
Swift has worked very closely with Ticketmaster over the years — for her Reputation stadium tour, the COVID-19-canceled Lovers Fest and now the Eras Tour, building an entire fan verification and Taylor Swift-branded ticketing platform together. While Swift might have preferred to have had more options to sell tickets to her fans, she did partner with the company in a way that few artists have in the past.
Perhaps Ticketmaster and Swift will mend their relationship once they start counting how much money they made together. Or maybe, they’re never, ever, ever, ever getting back together.
In light of fans — and Taylor Swift herself — taking issue with Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s highly publicized Verified Fan Presale failure, Jack Antonoff has a few choice words to share about the touring industry’s treatment of artists.
The Bleachers frontman and producer hit Twitter on Friday (Nov. 18) to blast music venues for taking away the revenue that newer artists have the potential to make from merchandise sales during concerts.
“While we are having the discussion can venues simply stop taxing merch of artists? This is literally the only way you make money when you start out touring,” he started. “The more we make it tenable for young and small artists to make a living on the road the more great music we will get. Touring is one of the most honest ways to make a living. Some of the hardest and most heartfelt work you can do. So why must [they] f— artist[s] so hard?”
The Grammy winning producer continued, “[Simple] solutions, stop taxing merch, stop lying to artists about costs of putting on shows, include artists in more areas of revenue. The stories I could tell from my years of touring are bananas. Young artists on tour are the last to see any money.”
Antonoff’s thread comes at what feels like a watershed moment for the music industry. Ticketmaster and Live Nation have come under fire from Antonoff’s frequent collaborator Taylor Swift, her fans and lawmakers after the disastrous sale of tickets for her 2023 The Eras tour.
The failure has led to the U.S. Department of Justice launching an investigation to see if the companies have abused its market shares in the music industry after 14 million fans attempted to access the presale, experienced major technical difficulties and failed to secure tickets, despite gaining entry into Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan Presale for the event. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” Swift said in a note to fans.
Another one of Antonoff’s collaborators, Lorde, spoke about the harsh realities of touring in a newsletter post to fans, stating, “for pretty much every artist selling less tickets than I am, touring has become a demented struggle to break even or face debt.” According to the “Solar Power” singer, an increase in ticket prices could cover the heightened cost of touring, but “no one wants to charge their harried and extremely-compassionate-and-flexible audience any more f—ing money.”
Antonoff, with the rest of Bleachers, will complete the final dates of the band’s How Dare You Want Tour on Dec. 3-4 at the Zona Festival in Phoenix. The band are confirmed for two festival dates in 2023; the High Water Fest in North Charleston, S.C., on April 15 and the Adjacent Music Fest in Atlantic City, N.J. on May 27.
See Antonoff’s tweets below.
while we are having the discussion can venues simply stop taxing merch of artists? this is literally the only way you make money when you start out touring— jackantonoff (@jackantonoff) November 18, 2022
the more we make it tenable for young and small artists to make a living on the road the more great music we will get— jackantonoff (@jackantonoff) November 18, 2022
touring is one of the most honest ways to make a living. some of the hardest and most heartfelt work you can do. so why must fuck artist so hard?— jackantonoff (@jackantonoff) November 18, 2022
simpel solutions, stop taxing merch, stop lying to artists about costs of putting on shows, include artists in more areas of revenue. the stories i could tell from my years touring are bananas. young artists on tour are the last to see any money.— jackantonoff (@jackantonoff) November 18, 2022
Taylor Swift has spoken on the Ticketmaster fiasco, and it seems that she’s just as angry as her fans are. In a lengthy Friday (Nov. 18) message posted to her Instagram story, the 11-time Grammy winner shared that the mass outages and hours-long delays her fans experienced while trying to purchase tickets during her Eras Tour presale on Nov. 15 “pisses” her off.
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“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” she began in the statement. “We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house. I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do.
“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse,” Swift continued. “There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.”
So many attempts — 14 million, to be exact — flooded Ticketmaster’s website on the day of the presale that the company’s site experienced major technical difficulties, causing some Swifties to walk away without securing a single ticket, even though they had previously been sent a special “Verified Fan” presale code by Ticketmaster. Hours later, the company posted a statement saying that it had been unprepared for the “historically unprecedented demand” Swifties exhibited that day, and postponed other Eras Tour onsales scheduled for that day.
Consumer response to the situation was so overwhelmingly negative, Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei appeared on CNBC to apologize to fans.
“It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” Swift added in her note. “And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs.”
“Thank you for wanting to be there,” she concluded. “You have no idea how much that means.”
A rebound in the live music business helped German concert promoter CTS Eventim improve its revenues to 694.4 million euros in the third quarter ($699.3 million at the average exchange rate in the quarter), 84% higher than the same period in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced Thursday.
Revenue increased due to contributions from pre-sales, the staging of events and higher income from currency conversion. That was offset by a reduction in COVID-19 economic aide, received as compensation for event cancellations or events with reduced capacity, of 76.8 million euros ($77.3 million) from the prior-year period.
“These excellent results are testimony to the fact that our strategic initiatives are taking us from strength to strength following the post-pandemic restart of live entertainment,” said CEO Klaus-Peter Schulenberg in a statement. “Even in the face of new uncertainties caused by the high level of inflation and geopolitical factors, we will maintain this proven course in order to continue to drive our profitable growth, both at home and abroad.”
The live entertainment segment’s revenue was 563 million euros ($566.9 million) in the third quarter, up 103.6 from the same period in 2019, and 1.11 billion euros ($1.11 billion) in the nine-month period, a 42% improvement. Live entertainment EBITDA was 64 million euros ($64.4 million), about triple the amount in the same period of 2019.
The ticketing segment’s revenue improved to 137 million ($138 million) in the third quarter, up 28% from the same period in 2019, and to 339 million ($341.1 million) for the nine-month period, up 10.4% from 2019. CTS Eventim sold 17.2 million tickets in the quarter and 45.1 million tickets in the nine-month period, increases of 31% and 23%, respectively, from the pre-pandemic periods in 2019.
The company’s staff, including part-time workers, grew from 2,357 a year ago to 2,956 at the end of the third quarter.
The company sounded an alarm about rising costs stemming from higher personnel costs in security, catering and stage technology “induced by an increasing shortage of specialists in the event industry and at least temporarily higher demand due to the fact that both postponed and new events are currently being held at the same time,” it explained in its earnings release. The fourth-quarter results could be hampered by rising energy prices and a possible pullback of fan spending due to inflation’s impact on household purchasing power.
Still, CTS Eventim is going to have a record year in 2022. The company expects full-year revenue of 1.7 billion euros ($1.71 billion) and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of 330 million euros ($332.3 million). That would represent gains of 17.8% and 16.2% over 2019, which was a record year for CTS Eventim. The company’s tenor improved from a quarter ago, when management was unable to provide a precise forecast for 2022 “owing to uncertainty about the pandemic and the geopolitical situation going forward.”
CTS Eventim shares fell 0.3% to 56.00 euros on Thursday. Year to date, the share price is down 13%.