Touring
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Kenny Chesney will become the first country artist to have a residency at Sphere when he brings his show to the Las Vegas venue starting May 22 for a 12-date run. Chesney announced the news on Today this morning.
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“I’m always looking for ways to deepen the way No Shoes Nation experiences this music,” said Chesney in a statement. “Over the years, they have shown me through their own response to these songs how passionate they are about what they mean, how these songs are part of their lives. When people give you that much heart, I want to give them even more.
The 17,600-seat Sphere’s one-of-a-kind immersive experience played into Chesney’s decision. “When we started talking about all of the possibilities playing Sphere offered, I was all in. Just the idea of 4D technology and the impossibly dialed in sound raises the experience for No Shoes Nation, literally immersing them in music, visuals, sound and being together. To me, this is going to be a whole new way of rocking the fans, and I can’t wait.”
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Kenny Chesney Live At The Sphere
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Chesney, whose Sphere run will be promoted by his long-time promoter The Messina Group, is the only country artist to hit $1 billion in grosses reported to Boxscore. His 2022 Here and Now Tour, which brought in $135 million, landed at No. 9 on Billboard’s all-genre 2022 Year-End Top 40 tours chart, making Chesney the first country artist to reach the Top 10. Last year, his tour grossed $159.5 million, according to Billboard’s 2024 year-end chart. He’s come quite a long way since his first-ever Billboard Boxscore report entry, for a Sept. 23, 1995 concert at Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, which brought in $135,000.
Tickets go on sale to the general public on Friday (Jan. 31) starting at 10 a.m. PT via KennyChesney.com. The run is presented by Chesney’s Blue Chair Bay Rum.
Since opening in September 2023 with a 40-show run by U2, Sphere has hosted a number of acts, including Phish, Dead & Co. and Anyma. The Eagles are currently in a residency that started in September.
Chesney will appear on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon tonight.
The new “junk fee” rules passed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to clean up the event ticket industry won’t slow the rising price of concert tickets or reduce the huge fees added by ticketing companies, a group of prominent music agents and managers is warning.
In a letter to the FTC last week, Nathaniel Marro, executive director of the National Independent Talent Organization (NITO), said the new rules are “a positive step forward” in cleaning up the business but that they do “nothing to reduce the junk fees buried inside each concert ticket.” NITO is now asking the FTC to expand its ruling to address its concerns.
So-called junk fees, which are added to a ticket purchase by ticketing companies like AXS and Ticketmaster, regularly push ticket fees up 25% to 30%, often without any sign-off from the artist, says Marro.
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“The artist is kept in the dark about how much their fans are being charged in fees for tickets,” Marro wrote in the letter. “We don’t know the fees in advance. Most agents, and artists and managers don’t see the full spread of fees until the show goes on sale.”
Some of the fees also aren’t accounted for during show settlement, Marro added, meaning that most artists don’t know how much revenue ticketing companies are making from their concerts.
Officials with Live Nation pushed back on this claim, telling Billboard that “if an artist team is ever unsure of the venue fees, it’s a simple ask that the venue rental agreement outline it,” adding, “this is never hidden as it’s a standard cost of doing business.”
Marro worries that the FTC’s new requirements that fans be shown the full price of a ticket upfront –instead of first being shown the face value before fees are tacked onto the price at checkout — will make it easier for ticketing companies to add fees to the face value of a ticket while effectively hiding them, resulting in higher ticket prices.
Recent data from Billboard Boxscore shows that ticket prices are rapidly increasing. The average cost of a concert ticket to one of the tours on Billboard’s Year-End top 100 tours chart last year was $132.30, marking an increase of 9.1% from 2023 and a 20.6% increase from 2022. Prior to the pandemic, ticket prices were increasing at a much more sustainable rate of just 3% to 4% a year.
In a statement to Billboard explaining its support for mandatory all-in pricing, Live Nation said that “fans are better off when they focus on the true cost of a ticket, which is the sum of face value and all mandatory fees. There is no basis for obscuring the all-in price on the fiction that artists do not understand ticket fees. That information is never hidden as the NITO comments suggest. It is readily available to artist teams, who also know that most ticket fees go to the venues hosting their events.”
WME has added veteran music agent Lance Roberts as a partner in its Nashville-based country music division. In addition to more than three decades of experience in the business, he brings artists including Chris Janson, Craig Morgan, Parmalee, Easton Corbin, Ian Munsick and Sammy Kershaw to the WME fold. Roberts began his career at the […]
Bay Area punk rockers Green Day will join pop icon Justin Timberlake and folk singer/songwriter Noah Kahan to headline this year’s BottleRock festival in Napa, California, May 23-25, topping off a stacked lineup that includes something for nearly all musical tastes.
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Since launching in 2013 and later being purchased by its current ownership group Latitude 38 Entertainment in 2014 (and later selling a majority stake to Live Nation in 2017), BottleRock has become a booking bellwether for the festival business with a lineup that would often provide a preview of the year ahead. Scheduled for Memorial Day weekend each year, BottleRock’s early summer date (late May) places it early on the festival season calendar, with many of the bands announced for one of its half-dozen stages typically booked for other major festivals later that summer.
Green Day, for example, is also booked to play Coachella this year and will headline 10 rock festivals in Europe and the U.K. over the summer, while Justin Timberlake is scheduled to play Lollapalooza festivals in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Paris. Other acts appearing at this year’s BottleRock festival include “Beautiful Things” singer/songwriter Benson Boone, experimental Texas outfit Khruangbin, alt rock veterans Cage the Elephant and hip-hop legend Ice Cube, who dropped his 11th studio album Man Down in November, garnering 8 million views from the album’s lead single “It’s My Ego” on YouTube.
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Also performing at this year’s BottleRock festival is legendary Bay Area rapper E-40 (a member of hip-hop supergroup Mount Westmore along with Ice Cube), Long Beach reggae and punk legends Sublime (now led by Jakob Nowell), EDM superstar Kaskade, Cali-roots reggae outfit Rebelution, surfer-soul duo G. Love & Donavon Frankenreiter, Mexican singer/songwriter Carín León, jam band Goose, NYC electro-duo SOFI TUKKER, rap icons Public Enemy, Icelandic tour-de-force KALEO, Americana couple The War and Treaty, Texas troubadour Bob Schneider, Hollywood actress Kate Hudson who released her cover of “Voices Carry” last Spring, Beastie Boys turn-tablist Mix Master Mike, Doors founding guitarist Robby Krieger, the Linda Perry led 1990s alternative pioneers 4 Non Blondes and many, many more.
Known for its high-end food and wine pairings and embrace of the culinary world, this year’s BottleRock festival will once include the Williams Sonoma Culinary Stage, featuring a number of world renowned chefs, celebrities, performers and artists. Organizers also announced that it will be supporting California wildfire relief by matching every dollar donated by fans for the first $50,000 to support FireAid, a benefit concert dedicated to aiding those affected by the devastating wildfires.
Tickets for BottleRock go on sale Tuesday (Jan 14) at 10 a.m. PT. Three-day general admission tickets, including all fees, begin at $456 per person, and a special layaway plan is available for fans who want to pay as they go, starting with a $100 deposit. Learn more at BottleRockNapaValley.com.
Ahead of his ¡Ay Mamá! Tour, Mexican music hitmaker Tito Double P has unveiled additional dates to his first-ever U.S. trek, set to kick off March 5 in Atlanta. The Live Nation-produced stint – with a handful of dates helmed by Bobby Dee Presents – now includes stops in Virginia, New York, New Jersey […]
If the Supreme Court upholds a U.S. law that would ban TikTok if its Chinese parent company ByteDance fails to sell it by Jan. 19, it would be bad news for the music industry, including the live events business – which has increasingly relied on TikTok as a marketing engine in recent years.
A decision by the court could be days, even hours, away, and it will have a major impact on dozens of U.S. industries that rely on the site for marketing, including the live music business during one of its busiest marketing months. TikTok’s popularity among concert and festival marketers has increased significantly in the last two years, explains FanIQ CEO Jesse Lawrence, as the event industry shifts to content-based marketing models.
“The music industry is finally getting away from the static lineup ad and embracing storytelling and lifestyle content,” said Lawrence, who notes that the the company is seeing a return of 15 to 20 times its ad spend on TikTok.
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Part of the appeal of TikTok, Lawrence said, is that the learning curve for posting and sharing ads on the platform is fairly simple. Customers are separated into two buckets: upper funnel, which includes essentially new customers who know little, if anything, about an upcoming event, and lower funnel, in which clients have gained awareness and are close to making a final decision on a purchase.
“Our whole approach is about matching upper funnel engagement, based on the user’s interests, with content we’ve created around the festival,” says Lawrence. That includes using beauty and fashion content to find potential customers for a summer country music festival, sneaker content for hip-hop festivals or skateboarding and surfing content to market a punk rock and action sports expo.
“Our videos have a watch time tracker and if someone watches the video for 15 seconds or more, the next video they’ll get is one with specific details about the festival and specific videos instructions on conversion,” meaning buying tickets, Lawrence said. He later noted, “it’s just about knowing where your audience is spending time and putting content in front of them on those platforms.”
A recent content piece FanIQ created for the Oceanfront Festival detailed rapper Key Glock’s extensive sneaker collection, featuring interview snippets with the Memphis rapper.
“That video is getting served to the fan from the festival’s account,” Lawrence said. “The whole idea is that we’re taking content that feels very organic and putting it into paid (content).”
Lawrence encourages his clients to use multiple social media platforms – Snap, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and Spotify — for their marketing campaigns, noting that each platform is home to a different audience.
FanIQ is one of the new systems that “aggregates performance across every platform,” Lawrence explained. “We want to give them this access so they can easily understand what’s working, do more of it where we’re seeing performance, and scale back where we’re not.”
Will Franklin with UK marketing firm Round says the strength of TikTok as a marketing platform for the live music business comes from its early success helping artists go viral, starting with the release of “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X in December 2018. In 2020, Meghan Thee Stallion’s tracks “WAP” and “Savage” — used in countless dance videos by contributors to the platform — made her the No. 1 most played artist on TikTok that year and helped her land headliner slots at a number of major festivals in 2021 including Lollapalooza.
Franklin also notes that fans are increasingly looking to TikTok for video and content from events, noting that searches for the Boomtown festival in the U.K. soared from 29.5 million in the month leading up to the event to 266.8 million during the festival, creating increased awareness around the band.
Many marketers are holding out hope that TikTok will receive a last-minute reprieve from the Supreme Court, but several news outlets covering the hearing reported that a majority of the court’s justices expressed a lack of support for overturning the current ban. If the site is outlawed in the U.S., Franklin says he believes YouTube Shorts will temporarily fill the void.
“I haven’t seen huge budget shifts from TikTok to YouTube yet, but a lot of my clients are experimenting and spending small allocations on different platforms in case they do have to make a shift,” Franklin explains. “There’s a hesitancy because no other platform has as many Gen Z users as TikTok, but the assumption is that if the site is banned, its user will go somewhere else. For now all we can do is guess which platform that may be.”
If the Supreme Court does not intervene to save TikTok, it will be removed from U.S. app stores on Jan. 19 but remain live on users’ phones, albeit without regular push software updates to fix bugs and glitches. ByteDance might be able to maneuver and keep the platform online for a few months after the cut-off date, but the company hasn’t unveiled any of its contingency plans.
“We’re advising client partners to be cautious but optimistic, and recommending they pause TikTok media spend starting Jan. 18 to avoid any unforeseen investment complications,” said Kerry McKibbin, president/partner at ad agency Mischief @ No Fixed Address, adding that advertisers should familiarize themselves with the shorts platforms on both YouTube and Meta if they are concerned about a TikTok shutdown.
01/10/2025
From international superstars to that Oasis reunion, it’s set to be a busy year for music lovers.
01/10/2025
LONDON — The British government has launched a public consultation into the ticketing industry, including the heavily criticized use of dynamic pricing for popular tours, as part of wider efforts to stop music fans from “being fleeced” by “greedy ticket touts.”
The 12-week consultation was announced by the Department for Business and Trade and Department for Culture, Media and Sport on Friday (Jan. 10). It sets out a range of measures to transform the U.K.’s secondary ticket market, including a proposed cap on the price of ticket resales and new legal regulations for ticket platforms around transparency and the accuracy of information they provide to fans.
“From sports tournaments to Taylor Swift, all too often big events have been dogged by consumers being taken advantage of by ticket touts,” said business secretary Jonathan Reynolds in a statement. “These unfair practices look to fleece people of their hard-earned income, which isn’t fair on fans, venues and artists.”
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Government ministers are additionally reviewing pricing practices across the entire live events business, including the use of dynamic pricing by primary vendors whereby prices surge based on demand.
The use of dynamic pricing for concert tickets came to the fore in the U.K. in September when it was used on the U.K. and Ireland legs of Oasis’ Live ‘25 reunion tour, prompting hundreds of complaints from fans after tickets unexpectedly soared from around £150.00 ($200) for standard admission to £355.00 ($470) without prior warning.
The angry consumer backlash was accompanied by fierce condemnation from British politicians, including the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, who called the “vastly inflated” prices “depressing to see.”
Soon after, the U.K. competition regulator launched an investigation into Ticketmaster examining whether the Live Nation-owned company broke consumer protection laws and engaged in “unfair commercial practices” by failing to notify ticket buyers in advance about the price rises. Ticketmaster has consistently stated that ticket prices are set by the artist team and event organisers, not itself.
Starmer had previously vowed to cap resale prices on secondary ticketing platforms, such as Viagogo and StubHub, in the run up to July’s election win.
According to the Competition and Market Authority (CMA), around 1.9 million tickets were sold through secondary platforms to British consumers in 2019, accounting for between 5% and 6% of all tickets sold that year. Tickets sold on secondary sites are typically priced more than 50% higher than their face value, reports CMA, which estimated the U.K. secondary ticketing market to have been worth around £350 million ($430 million) a year pre-pandemic.
“For too long fans have had to endure the misery of touts hoovering up tickets for resale at vastly inflated prices,” said Nandy announcing the three-month-long consultation, which closes April 4.
The government said it was seeking views from live industry stakeholders and music fans on a number of proposed measures designed to make ticket resales fairer and more transparent.
They include capping the price of resale tickets at up to 30% above face value and banning resellers from listing more tickets than they can legally buy on the primary market. These measures would disincentivise industrial scale touting, said the government.
Ministers are also proposing to pass tougher regulations for ticket resale companies and issue tougher fines for offenders. At present, the maximum fine that can be issued by Trading Standards against companies that breach ticketing sale rules is £5,000 ($6,100). The consultation will investigate whether this cap should be increased.
The primary ticketing market is also under scrutiny with ministers calling for evidence on whether fans are protected from “unfair practices,” including the use of new technologies and dynamic pricing.
Rocio Concha, director of policy and advocacy at consumer protection organization Which?, said the government must use the consultation “to regulate the industry properly, ensure ticket resales don’t exploit fans and decide when the use of dynamic pricing is unfair and shouldn’t be allowed.”
As in other countries, the practice of dynamic pricing is commonly used in the U.K. by travel companies, taxis and hotels, but it has only been fleetingly used in the British touring market with Oasis’ comeback tour – which is being jointly promoted by Live Nation, SJM Concerts, MCD and DF Concerts – marking its most high-profile roll out for live music concerts in the United Kingdom and Ireland so far.
The British government’s probe of the ticketing business is the latest attempt by authorities to tackle the persistent issue of large-scale ticketing touting in the U.K.
In 2021, watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) concluded its long-running investigation into secondary ticketing platforms by making a series of recommendations to government on how to fix the sector. Those recommendations were rejected by the then Conservative government, but now form the basis of the Labour Party’s proposals.
There has also been a number of investigations by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) into secondary sites, with a particular focus on Viagogo.
When reached for comment, a Viagogo spokesperson insisted the company will “continue to constructively engage with the Government and look forward to responding in full to the consultation and call for evidence on improving consumer protections in the ticketing market.”
Responding to the public consultation, a spokesperson for Ticketmaster U.K. said the company was “committed to making ticketing simple and transparent” and supported plans to introduce an industry-wide resale price cap.
“We also urge the government to crack down on bots and ban speculative ticket sales,” said the U.K. arm of Ticketmaster, which has capped resale prices to face value on its platform since 2018. StubHub did not respond to a request to comment.
Adam Webb from U.K. campaign group FanFair Alliance called the government’s proposed measures “potentially game-changing” and highlighted the success of other countries, including Ireland, in passing legislation that has effectively banned ticket scalping. “The U.K. simply needs to follow their example,” said Webb.
Chris Stapleton is extending his All-American Road Show through summer 2025, and the burly-voiced Kentucky native is using the trek to not only play some iconic U.S. venues such as New York’s Madison Square Garden, but also to highlight the talents of an array of artists who will be opening shows on the tour. Explore […]
Following a recent license review, London dance venue Drumsheds has been allowed to remain open but was ordered to enforce new safety measures at its events.
Located in Tottenham, a northern suburb of the capital, the 15,000-capacity venue was reported as being at risk of losing its license late last year. This followed a number of serious incidents on the premises and a subsequent investigation launched by Enfield Council.
On Oct. 12, 2024, a 27-year-old man died after attending a Drumsheds event, an incident believed to have been drug-related (as per The London Standard). On Dec. 7, a 29-year-old woman also died after a show by Belfast dance duo Bicep at the venue, with police stating the tragedy was also connected to drug usage. An emergency licensing review was called after the latter incident.
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In November, meanwhile, a man was stabbed inside Drumsheds, with emergency services called to the scene. No arrests have been made in connection with any of these three incidents. The stabbing was later confirmed by police to be non-fatal.
Following a meeting held by Enfield Council Tuesday (Jan. 7), it has been ruled that Drumsheds has permission to remain open, but will need to operate under specific safety measures going forward. The space — a repurposed IKEA unit — will now boast an increased police presence during events, and any serious incidents on the premises must be reported to emergency services immediately.
Issues with the organization of the venue were highlighted online last month, when a public petition was launched amid claims of “overcrowding” at Drumsheds events following a surplus of social media posts related to “unsafe queues.” This happened at the 15th anniversary celebration for U.K. bass label UKF, which took place on Dec. 13 and was headlined by Pendulum, Nero and Knife Party.
As per Mixmag, however, the review findings from the meeting have stated that the venue will not have to reduce its capacity, nor implement mandatory ID scanning and “bomb detection dogs.” It isn’t yet clear how the new measures will impact upcoming events at Drumsheds. The first scheduled event following the review, billed as Red Bull’s Culture Clash, is set to be held on Mar. 8. The line-up features London DJs Jyoty, Kenny Allstar and Teezee.