Touring
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Once upon a time, most artists performed live to promote new albums. For most acts, the real money was in music sales, so they went “on the road” with schedules and strategies to maximize them.
These days the live business is a juggernaut of its own, with higher ticket prices, adjacent businesses like merch and VIP seats, and schedules, plus strategies of its own. So creators at all levels of popularity are starting to realize that it may no longer make sense to tour the whole country, or world, to promote a new release. In some cases, there isn’t one; in others a tour can boost an entire catalog. The old model of touring focused on building an audience, which meant artists would play cities where they weren’t so popular. Now touring is a revenue stream, so many artists double down to play more shows in cities where they’re already big.
The economics of touring means that acts run up costs every day they are on the road but only bring in revenue when they perform — so it makes sense to play bigger shows, in fewer places, with fewer days off. Metallica’s M72 tour consisted of two-night engagements and a no-repeat pledge to motivate fans to see both. The international legs of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour involved more shows in fewer places — she covered Asia with four shows in Tokyo and six in Singapore and the Nordic region with three in Stockholm. The natural end of this thinking is a residency, or a few of them, and Adele took the summer off from her Vegas residency to play 10 shows in Munich at a custom-built venue with a capacity of 74,000. Why go to fans when fans can come to you?
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As it happens, this solves another problem with the touring business. As increasing competition for concert dollars inspires more elaborate productions, costs are skyrocketing — and many of them involve transportation and setup rather than a performance itself. For Metallica, much of the cost is in “load-in” — moving and building a doughnut-shaped stage with standing room in the middle, plus eight towers of speakers and monitors that weigh 11 tons each. The resulting expenses, which involve 87 trucks and several days of setup, make single shows difficult. Adele’s Munich show used what’s said to be the world’s biggest video screen, plus fireworks, confetti, smoke, fire and a string section. As expensive as that must be to build, imagine the cost of moving it and setting it up again a couple of times a week? How many venues even have room for a 220-meter-wide screen?
Doing more shows in fewer places also makes it practical to deliver events, rather than just concerts. Touring artists have to compete with festivals, which offer fans a lot of acts for their money, plus an experience to remember — and, not incidentally, share on social media. A memorable production, whether that means the world’s biggest screen or 11-ton speaker towers, can do the same. Personally, I don’t think Metallica or Adele needs any of this — I’d be just as happy to see either in a club, in front of a brick wall — but bigger productions seem to create a sense of FOMO.
Fans have certainly demonstrated their willingness to travel. When I saw Metallica last year in Hamburg, most concertgoers came from other German cities to see both shows. Swift’s European tour debut in Paris was filled with fans from the U.S. and Canada who realized that tickets there and a trip to France cost about the same as tickets back home. To some fans, Swift’s show is a vacation — Paris is just something to see on the way there.
In crude economic terms, concert travel essentially reallocates expenses from acts to fans — artists travel less, so concertgoers travel more. Most people don’t want to pay more than a certain amount for a concert ticket, but they seem more willing to spend on related travel. (I just spent about $300 to go to Stockholm to see Bruce Springsteen, an amount that seems too high to spend on a ticket, even though I essentially went to see the show.)
There are other costs and benefits, too. Younger fans can’t always travel alone. And as several European publications pointed out in their coverage of the Adele residency, this isn’t exactly good for the environment. (I think it makes more sense to tax travel rather than to object to a specific type of travel.) Residencies can also be more pleasant for artists — there are no songs about how nice it is to cross the U.S. in a tour bus. The flexibility is nice, too: Munich is a lot nicer in the summer than Las Vegas. Playing a few nights a week makes it easier to have a family life.
As much as I loved the Metallica and Adele shows, I think I still prefer the old model — although it’s easier for me to say that because I’m fortunate enough to live in a major city. I think there’s still long-term value in building a fan base the hard way. And I worry that fans who spend more money traveling to concerts will end up seeing fewer shows as a result. None of that changes the economics of touring, however, and organizing a profitable and artistically effective tour means understanding that.
Samantha liked that attending Electric Forest took some planning – that it wasn’t one of those festivals that a person just attended on a whim.
“You can’t just buy tickets the night before and decide you’re going the next day – it’s more complicated than that. There’s camping, there’s travel, there’s making sure all of the LED lights on your outfit have the right batteries and are still working from last year,” she said, laughing.
In the 12-month span between Electric Forest 2023 and 2024, which ran June 20-23, Samantha (not her real name) left a “toxic” relationship and was involved in a serious car accident that required intensive physical therapy making it very difficult to walk or stand for long periods of time.
“Knowing that I had to heal my body in order to attend my tenth Electric Forest is what got me through my physical therapy,” she told Billboard. “After the year I had, there was no f***ing way I was going to miss the festival.”
Samantha was one of more than 50,000 fans who attended this year’s sold-out Electric Forest festival in Rothbury, Mich. Produced by AEG and Insomniac on the grounds of the Double JJ Ranch, the 13-year-old event has remained the largest camping festival in the jam and electronic music scene, an impressive feat in a market saturated with smaller, low-cost options targeted at casual fans.
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“Our success begins and ends with the community of fans and supports that make Electric Forest a regular part of their lives,” says Alicia Karlin, vp of global touring and talent at AEG Presents, who serves as the talent buyer for the festival.
That’s impressive considering how much the festival has moved away from the Electric Forest model. A decade ago, festivals like Coachella and Bonnaroo were compelled to offer camping because attendees needed a place to stay for three days. But the shift toward urban centers, and the increasing costs of providing tens of thousands of fans with bathrooms, showers, trash collection and access to medical care has made camping costs prohibitive for many event organizers.
Electric Forest, on the other hand, is 99 percent camping and located in a fairly remote part of the state – the city of Rothbury, which hosts the festival, has a population of less than 450 residents. Attendees bring everything they need for the festival – from camping gear to food and luggage, undergoing rigorous security checks and driving as much as 500 miles in each direction.
Electric Forest 2024
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And while most festivals rely on their headlining artists to move tickets, this year’s festival featured Pretty Lights, Subtronics, Excision, The Disco Biscuits, Umphrey’s McGee and two sets from String Cheese Incident. Moreover, Electric Forest sells out the bulk of its annual tickets before the lineup is announced.
“We have 10 stages and a huge creative team and cast,” Karlin tells Billboard. “The agents and managers we work with trust us to put their artists in the best light and we’ve gotten to a point where many artists black out the entire weekend to play the festival and then attend the show the rest of the week.”
Two of Electric Forest’s biggest draws are the Sherwood Forest and Dream Emporium, each enhanced with actors and volunteers and hundreds of set pieces and custom art displays that change from year to year.
Much of the art pieces featured at Electric Forest are commissioned by the festival, explains Brad Lyman, Electric Forest production manager and creative director, who said the event receives more than 60 commission requests per year and accepts about 5 new pieces including a new Ocular organ delivered for 2024.
The Sherwood Forest separates the festivals main stages and camping areas with dozens of different areas and hidden pockets waiting to be discovered, from a field filled with hammocks to a small chapel where weddings are performed and walkways decorated by hundreds of Thai parasols.
The festival’s complex lightning and laser design is handled by Felix Lighting of Los Angeles while the festival’s walk-through experience – the Dream Emporium, is managed onsite by a team of creative professionals led by Suzanne Down.
“It’s kind of a choose your own adventure,” explains Down, who welcomes visitors to the Dream Emporium into a small lounge set up for UFO karaoke into a mirrored infinity tunnel designed to look like a 1970s car wash. Visitors wander the maze-like complex and stumble upon a skating rink wither roller skates available for rental, an indoor lake with a yacht and a punk dive bar that doubles as a wrestling ring.
Many artists get their start at Electric Forest playing one of the outdoor activations, Karlin explained, or even playing one of the late-night parties within the campground that often draw thousands of fans.
“There is always something to discover wherever you go, and fans tell us they really enjoy and appreciate the opportunity to discover something new each year,” Karlin explains. “That’s what motivates us as well. There’s a tremendous amount of time and resources that goes into Electric Forest but hearing these positive stories from fans year after year really puts it all into perspective.”
In early 2021, Wasserman Music’s Tom Schoeder met with a rising electronic producer at the artist’s London studio. There was buzz around the producer, who had pivoted to making his own music after working the boards for artists like Ed Sheeran, but he wasn’t famous yet, and Schroeder was cautious.
“There was an assumption from the industry and other agents that this was going to be a runaway success,” Schroeder recalls. “I said to [some of these people], ‘You’re thinking the wrong way. No one really cares what producers do, you’ve got to work out what your story is.’”
Luckily, the nascent artist – the now globally-famous Fred again.. – had already figured out the narrative. In the studio, he showed Schroeder short videos of mundane scenes on his phone – the cleaning crew at a stadium, friends with their children – that he had scored with his music, giving the visuals a poignancy they wouldn’t have had on their own. The videos, he explained, would be the basis for the intimate feel and life-as-seen-through-a-phone-screen look of his shows. He also laid out his plan for using social media to engage with fans in a casual, conversational way and then leverage this connection to create momentum around live events.
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“It was like, ‘Wow, this guy isn’t just an incredible musical genius, he’s thinking way beyond that,” says Schroeder, the executive vp/managing executive of Wasserman Music U.K., who signed Fred again.. in August 2021. “You could see the ambition. The confidence was something like I’d never seen before.”
In the three years since, this plan – leveraging an ongoing discourse with fans into excitement around new music and mold-breaking live shows – has led to one of the most innovative and successful touring strategies in electronic music and the broader live music ecosystem. Amid his rise, Fred again.. has played increasingly large festival sets – including headlining slots at Coachella 2023, Glastonbury 2023 and Bonnaroo 2024 – along with historically long residencies at key venues and increasingly big and culturally resonant “pop up” shows that Fred himself announces just days before they happen.
His last pop up – a June 14 show at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum – was announced with just four days notice. It went on to sell 65,100 tickets and gross $6.4 million, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore. The Rolling Stones are the only act with a bigger reported gross at the venue.
“He’s completely changed the game, and the scale only comes later. It’s almost secondary,” says Schroeder of these pop-up performances. “Now he’s changed the game with stadiums, but he changed the game from the start.”
Pent-Up Demand
It was a kind of kismet that Fred again..’s music – emotive, hooky and extremely current sounding electronic productions – gained traction during the pandemic, when live shows were impossible. When audiences could finally see Fred in concert, the pent-up energy created demand. Fred’s first U.S. performances were a pair of buzzy, sold-out shows at 500-capacity Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles in December 2021. That same week in L.A., he played his first U.S. pop-up at a Mid-City Chinese restaurant.
“It was 75 people in a restaurant, but everyone in Los Angeles was talking about it the next day,” says Wasserman senior vp Evan Hancock, who along with Schroeder and senior vp Ben Shprits make up the Fred again.. team at Wasserman. “We just tried to do that again and again.”
The interest around these early shows culminated in a pair of packed, sweaty sets at Coachella 2022, where the earnest sentimentality of the music and relatable iPhone bric-a-brac visuals whipped up big feelings for a crowd that was gathering for the first time since the pandemic. Things leveled up again in July 2022, when Fred’s euphoric set for online streaming platform Boiler Room went viral.
At this point, many artists would announce a major tour. That wasn’t Fred’s plan. “Do I think he’s ever going to put up a predictable tour nine months in advance?” says Schroeder. “No. I can’t see it. Why would he? What he wants to do is things that have never been done before.”
The team leaned into their pre-existing model, playing festival sets in Europe and the U.S. along with sold-out, multi-night runs at venues including Los Angeles’ Hollywood Forever Cemetery in September 2022 and three nights at New York City’s Terminal 5 that October. In early 2023, Fred, alongside friends and fellow producers and performers Skrillex and Four Tet (both also Wasserman clients) created an electronic scene frenzy when they played three pop-up shows in London and a few in New York ahead of a February 15 announcement that they’d be playing a headlining set at Madison Square Garden three days later. That show sold out in two minutes.
“Everyone in London, everyone in Sydney, everyone in Tokyo knew what had happened in New York,” says Schroeder. “We realized we could create these iconic moments and if we executed them at 10 out of 10, we didn’t have to replicate them, because they resonated everywhere.”
“Creating Moments In The Now”
The team agrees that the most crucial element of these pop-ups is less their size and more their immediacy. To wit, on Oct. 27, 2022, Fred announced he was riding a bike through London’s Hyde Park while playing his new album on portable speakers and that fans were welcome to ride with him. Hundreds of people turned up.
“What Fred’s doing is creating moments in the now,” says Schroeder. “He’s not having this ten-month delay [between putting shows on sale and playing them] where people can split up with their girlfriend or change their musical taste. He is living in the moment at a time when society is living in the moment much more than it used to, because the world is more uncertain than it was pre-pandemic. The world has moved to, ‘What are we doing next week?’, not ‘What are we doing next year?’, and Fred’s the best example of it.”
On June 1, Fred again.. and Skrillex sold 25,000 tickets for a show at the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza that was announced four days before it happened and was the first music event to take place at the government run space in years. At one point during the day they went on sale, 65,000 people were in the digital queue trying to buy them. When Fred landed in Australia this past February, 125,000 people attempted to buy tickets for his pop-up at the Sydney Opera House, which holds 2,250. Another seven pop-ups around the country created a sort of national hysteria akin to Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket lottery. “I mean obviouslyyyy we didnt come all this way for one show….” Fred wrote on Instagram when announcing the events, which all sold out in minutes.
The team and most any fan who’s been part of it will attest that the last-minute aspect is part of the thrill. “There’s an excitement in making yourself available, changing your plans for Friday, hunting a ticket down, refreshing Fred’s socials to see what the clues are,” says Schroeder. “What we have with Fred is what I call active engagement, where fans are trying to find from out from Fred what’s about to happen, versus him presenting what’s about to happen.”
But the shows are planned well in advance. Another Planet Entertainment, the team’s partner on the June 1 San Francisco event, applied for the permit in February after Fred’s team reached out about doing an outdoor event in the city. Another Planet‘s president of concerts & festivals Allen Scott says that while producing the show was “definitely a workout” – given that the stage had to be built late at night so as not to not disrupt business at City Hall – the fact that tickets would sell out immediately “was the most known variable in the equation” based on Fred’s touring history and the “pent up demand” for the artist in the Bay Area. He says Mayor London Breed even had a watch party for the show on her balcony at city hall.
Meanwhile, while fans were only given four days notice for the L.A. Coliseum show (though Fred teased it by having “Los Angeles, June 14” printed in the liner notes of the vinyl for his Tiny Desk Concert, released a week prior to the event), it was on the calendar a year out. With these tentpole events in place to work around, the team was able to arrange unannounced Fred sets at EDC Las Vegas in May and Glastonbury in June.
All of this hype also helps feed the model’s residency element. In the fall of 2023, Fred played five shows at London’s Alexandra Palace, three at Forrest Hills Stadium in New York and nine at Los Angeles’ Shrine Expo Hall – the most consecutive shows a single artist has ever performed at the latter two venues.
“I think we originally proposed five or six Shrines,” says Hancock, “and Fred came back and said eight, then 20 minutes later came back and said nine.” Fred announced the shows on his Instagram, and all of them sold out within days. (The final Shrine show was announced the day of.) The Forrest Hils run grossed $2.9 million and sold 42,300 tickets, while the Shrine shows grossed $2.2 million and sold 45,000 tickets, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore.
Still, says Hancock. “I’m not going to say that in the weeks and months leading up I wasn’t like, “What the f— are we doing?”
“Absolutely Huge Risk”
After all, Fred’s rapid growth appears to violate one of the key rules of agenting – when it comes to developing new talent, don’t skip steps. Most agents agree it’s not wise to go from night clubs to stadiums; long-term careers are built with the help of audiences who invest in artists. While hype tends to fade quickly, building a long-term fan base is a slow burn, and most of live music’s largest players are used to moving at a slower pace.
“I’ve been an agent a long time, and we’re used to doing things in a particular way, and the infrastructure around us is used to doing things in a particular way,” says Schroeder, “and at the front of it you’ve had Fred going, ‘I don’t care that that’s how it’s done. I want to do it differently.’”
A crucial element has thus been finding partners who are willing to take, says Schroeder, the “absolutely huge risk” inherent in announcing very big shows at the very last minute and many shows at the same venue all at once with no traditional marketing – “because your marketing means absolutely nothing, because it’s all him,” Schroeder adds. “And you’re going to have to cut a really tough deal, because he’s the hottest act in the world.”
The Wasserman teams also credits the “hive mind” of the entire Fred again.. team, which they say works more collaboratively than many artists they’ve seen. This all-hands-on deck mentality has involved Fred himself speaking with the mayor of Perth, the head of the NYPD and the San Francisco mayor’s office to help coax certain permissions for shows, like taking over control of the lights on San Francisco City Hall for the show. “He’s so confident in his vision for what he wants to do that he’s positive that if he can explain what he wants to do, ultimately they will let him,” says Shprits. “And ultimately that’s what happens.”
“Fred is changing how people see touring and how agents and promoters approach touring, and he’s unsettling a system that’s been in place for 50 or 60 years and turning it on its head,” Schroeder continues. “It’s a complete game changer that the industry isn’t talking about, because they can’t talk about it, because it’s so challenging to them and the status quo.”
Growing Influence – and Future Plans
But conversations on how other artists can replicate the model are currently happening, Schroeder says, “in every single planning meeting that you ever have about every artist.” It’s not a model most artists can pull off, although one can see the appeal, given that it cultivates incredible hype while also offering a solution to the longtime dilemma of artists, and particularly electronic artists, burning out with nonstop touring. “Fred wants a life,” says Schroeder. “He’s never going to do 250 shows a year, so it’s about making very, very special moments… This isn’t a model that’s appropriate for many artists, but it has completely shifted the game.”
But despite the success, the team still sees huge room for growth. Thus far Fred hasn’t played in Asia, has only done a handful of shows in South America, has done just two short runs through Europe and has focused his U.S. touring largely on the coasts. The latter is about to change; on Monday (August 5), he announced the Places We’ve Never Been Tour, which will follow the Sept. 6 release of his fourth studio album, ten days, and take him to stadiums and amphitheaters in the Midwest, northwest and southern U.S. and into Canada this September and October. (The run includes two-night stints in Denver, Seattle, East Troy, Wisconsin and Toronto.) On Instagram, Fred noted that additional dates will be added to this run – and given his track record, it also seems likely that pop-up shows will be incorporated into this and future runs as the touring footprints continues expanding.
“I think Fred is enormously underplayed,” says Schroeder. “Are we going to be able to go to all these countries we haven’t been to? A million percent, and I can’t wait to do it.”
Expanding on their track record of throwing dance-music events in singular spaces around Los Angeles, dance music event promoter Stranger Than has announced it will soon host a series of shows in a repurposed supermarket.
The space will serve as a temporary venue for a four-month run of shows happening September through December, with the lineup thus far featuring parties by Boiler, Carl Craig and Moodymann performing as Detroit Love, Floating Points, Orbital, Luciano, Nico Moreno, Adam Ten and Mita Gami, an afterparty for the Mayan Warrior crew’s Oct. 26 show, a Daytime Warriors party and an event from the Pizzaslime collective. Additional programming will be announced in the coming weeks.
The space, a former California Market in Koreatown, can hold between 1,200 to 3,200 attendees and has also hosted traveling exhibitions. Called The Supermrkt, the venue was soft-launched as a dance space this past May with a 14-hour set from Gordo that started at 6 a.m. and ended at 8 p.m., with organizers planning to continue these daytime hours for some of its upcoming shows. Daytime shows will capitalize on the building’s unique architecture and natural lighting effects courtesy of the sun, while also offering a workaround to the city’s often truncated club hours.
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Gordo plays Supermarkt in May
Victor Hofer
“With L.A.’s time restrictions, it’s really become the city of daytime parties,” Stranger Than founder Tal Ohana tells Billboard. “In the dance music world especially, we find it’s hard for attendees, DJs and ourselves to keep up with the rest of the world’s electronic music scenes where clubs stay open until the morning hours.
“While we can still have eight-plus hour daytime parties in open air parks and outdoor spaces with large dance floors,” he continues, “permitting and neighborhood compliances make it difficult to really tap into the early morning parties that are found in other electronic hotspots globally. With the new space, we wanted to introduce this element to L.A.’s party scene.”
Ohana adds that this flexible schedule will also allow multiple events to happen in the venue during a single day.
The Supermrkt follows Stranger Than shows that have happened at locations including Cabrillo Beach and downtown’s El Pueblo de Los Angeles, with the team focused on unique locations for one-off shows that have been almost entirely outdoors. That changes with The Supermrkt.
“Indoor locations for one-off events at large capacities are very difficult to come around in L.A.,” says Ohana. “There are many safety requirements and regulations that are hard to find for a property with one large room that is also available and empty for production of this type.
“The Supermrket provides a large indoor event space, unique architecture and most importantly a venue that is naturally beautiful for both day and night events,” he continues, adding the venue “will provide a space that is thoughtfully curated towards our house and techno music scene, more specifically aiming to provide elements not typically found in L.A. for fans in the lane.
And after years of producing one-off around town, Ohana says The Supermrkt is “absolutely is a precursor to a permanent venue by Stranger Than.”
The Supermrkt
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As the nation focuses on Tim Walz, the newly named vice presidential running mate of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, a look into his record as Minnesota’s governor reveals that he recently signed a bill designed to protect concertgoers from junk fees and fraud. This past May, Walz signed a bill that increased transparency for […]
Get ready, CARATs! After teasing the RIGHT HERE tour in late July, SEVENTEEN announced the U.S. dates for its global trek on Tuesday (Aug. 6) via fan platform Weverse and its social media accounts. After kicking off the tour with two consecutive dates beginning Oct. 12 at Goyang Stadium in South Korea, the K-pop group […]
Tinashe is taking her body language on the road. The singer-songwriter announced her Live Nation-produced Match My Freak World Tour on Tuesday (Aug. 6).
The pop and R&B star’s 23-date trek is set to kick off on Oct. 14 at the House of Blues in Anaheim, Calif., before making its way to major market stops including Phoenix, Atlanta, Nashville, D.C., Chicago, Brooklyn, Seattle, Toronto and more before wrapping up at the Ace of Spades in Sacramento, Calif., on Nov. 25. The announcement of the tour comes just ahead of the arrival of the “Slumber Party” singer’s seventh album, Quantum Baby.
Though Tinashe has announced only North American tour dates thus far, the tour poster teases that dates for Asia, the U.K., Australia and Europe are “coming soon.”
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Verizon customers will have a first shot at tickets for select shows via the exclusive presale, which runs from 2 p.m. ET Aug. 6 to 10 p.m. local Aug. 8. The Live Nation and Ticketmaster presales will kick off Wednesday (Aug. 7) at 10 a.m. local time, wrapping up at 10 p.m. local time Thursday (Aug. 8).
General onsale begins on Tinashe’s website at 10 a.m. local time Friday (Aug. 9).
For fans who are looking for more than just concert tickets, VIP packages will include access to the soundcheck, an exclusive performance, special merch, early entry, premium tickets and more. These packages will be available via Live Nation’s VIP Nation website.
Since launching her career, Tinashe has landed five songs so far on the Billboard Hot 100, including “2 On” at No. 24 with SchoolBoy Q in 2014, “Slumber Party” at No. 86 alongside Britney Spears in 2016 and “Nasty” at No. 61 in July. Over on the Billboard 200, her 2014 set Aquarius is her highest charting release to date, peaking at No. 17 in October 2016.
See the Match My Freak World Tour dates below:
MELBOURNE, Australia — Roger Field returns to the live music industry with a new venture, Further Afield.
The former Live Nation Asia Pacific president helms the advisory business, which will guide clients looking to interact with live events, with a focus on business development, market insights and industry advocacy.
His approach, Field explains, is built on creating new ways to “connect the previously unconnected.”
Also, the Melbourne-based executive will leverage his know-how on advocating with government on live events.
“My previous role leading an APAC organization of 300-plus people and tens of millions of dollars turnover gave me the privilege of dealing with prime ministers, premiers, politicians, media and peak bodies,” he comments, “leading to a significantly improved appreciation of the capability, scale and value of the live industry.”
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Prior to splitting with LN in late 2023, Field was regularly identified as one of Billboard’s international power players, a key figure in live entertainment who led the concerts giant’s presence across Australia and New Zealand, before taking the reins in a pan-Asia Pacific role.
Field logged 13 years with the company, joining in 2010 at the launch of Live Nation Australia. Two years later, LN acquired Michael Coppel Presents, reuniting the concerts specialists (Field had worked with Coppel in 2003). The promotions would come, with Field elevated from vice president of promotions to chief operating officer, then CEO for Australia and NZ.
Another elevation came in 2020, when Field was appointed LN president, Asia Pacific, a new position.
At the height of the pandemic, in mid-2020, Field was appointed to a leadership role for the Live Entertainment Industry Forum (LEIF), created to help safely reactivate concerts, sports and shows of all kinds as restrictions across the country were eased, and he was part of a music industry delegation that helped secure a A$250 million federal government “lifeline” for the music industry.
During his time leading LN’s affiliate, Field oversaw stadium tours for likes of Taylor Swift, Coldplay, U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers, the business diversified with its VIP offering, brand partnerships with the likes of National Australia Bank, Telstra and American Express, formed strategic partnerships with government and private entities including Secret Sounds, and added a slew of venues to LN’s portfolio.
“The live events industry isn’t particularly easy for outsiders to understand and navigate, and I see this as a huge, missed opportunity,” he says of his new business. “I’m already working with some fantastic clients, and my time away has reaffirmed that there are so many opportunities for adjacent markets, private equity and venture capital to proactively engage with the live events industry.”
Fred Again.. is taking his show on the road across the U.S. and Canada this fall for the Places We’ve Never Been Tour.
As the name indicates, the run bring the London-based producer to markets he’s not yet played across North America, with stops in Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle and locations throughout the Midwest, northeast and southern United States, as well as Toronto, Canada.
The tour launches Sept. 11 at the Ball Arena in Denver. Four stops on this tour — Denver, Seattle, Toronto and East Troy, Wisc. — will feature two nights of shows. General tickets go on sale Friday, Aug. 9, with a pre-sale happening on Aug. 8.
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On Instagram, the artist born Fred Gibson indicated that additional shows will be added to the tour, writing that “obviously this poster isn’t evvvvvery show! It’s jus every one that we’ve confirmed.”
The tour announcement comes after Fred Again..’s announcement last week that he’s got a new album, Ten Days, coming on Sept. 6. The project, Fred Again..’s fourth studio LP, will feature collaborations with Sampha, Skrillex and Four Tet, Jozzy, Joy Anonymous and Emmylou Harris and more, including his previously released Anderson .Paak collab “Places to Be.”
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“It’s ten songs about 10 days,” Gibson wrote on Instagram of the album. “There’s been a lot of biggg mad crazy moments in the last year but basically all of these are about really very small quiet intimate moments.”
The tour announcements follows a recent string of splashy Fred Again.. performances, including a headlining set at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in June, a headlining slot at Bonnaroo and a sold-out b2b performance with Skrillex at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza in early June.
See the Places We’ve Never Been Tour dates below:
Fred Again.. places we’ve never been tour
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Adele‘s 10-night August residency in Munich, which opened Friday night (Aug. 2), could be the biggest concert engagement ever, both in terms of attendance and ticket sales. It almost certainly represents the biggest bet anyone has placed in the live music business this year.
The shows, promoted by Live Nation Germany and the Austrian Leutgeb Entertainment Group, are held in a custom-built venue that holds 74,000, and the production is reported to have cost more than $100 million, including construction cost. Just the 220-meter-wide screen, said to be the biggest in the world, is said to have cost dozens of millions of dollars. And that’s before the string section, fireworks, and the logistics involved in Adele World, which includes a Ferris wheel, a biergarten, and merchandise operation the size of a large boutique.
The engagement, which runs two days a week throughout August, could break the Billboard Boxscore attendance record for a concert engagement, currently held by Coldplay, which drew 627,000 fans to 10 shows in Buenos Aires in 2022. It could also break the box office record of almost $110 million, held by U2 for its first 17 shows at the Sphere, in 2023. (Adele has not generally reported concert grosses to Billboard Boxscore, so the records may stand anyway.)
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Adele, who has been performing the Weekends with Adele residency at the Colosseum Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, has not played in continental Europe since 2016 and has no concerts booked there, so the shows in Munich are a destination event. She had no plans to play anywhere this summer, until Klaus Leutgeb presented her manager, Jonathan Dickins, with the idea for the residency.
Adele performs onstage at Messe München on Aug. 2, 2024 in Munich, Germany.
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Concert residencies are becoming more popular, but they are mostly an Anglo-American phenomenon. In this case, Munich is a relatively small city by international standards, with a population of about 1.5 million in a metro area a bit less than four times that. (By comparison, Los Angeles has 3.9 million in a metro area of 13.2 million.) That implies that most concertgoers are coming from outside the city or the country. (Anecdotally, Billboard met fans from all over Germany at the show, plus a few each from the Netherlands, the UK and Ireland.)
All that tourism will bring an enormous amount of money to Munich. The city’s top economic official, Clemens Baumgärtner, has said Adele’s residency will bring in 560 million Euros ($614 million). The city is an ideal place to hold a residency, given its relative proximity to Austria, Italy and Switzerland; it’s easy to get anywhere in Germany by train and anywhere in Europe by plane.
The promoters told the German music trade publication Musik Woche that 95 percent of the tickets had been sold. (Live Nation Germany did not respond to questions about sales, and the shows are not sold out, although the first show looked close to capacity.) Even if just 85 percent of tickets are sold, this engagement would break Coldplay’s attendance record. Tickets were available at an array of prices, from 79 Euros ($87) to more than a thousand Euros for high-end VIP packages, with some tickets available for 35 Euros ($38) the day of the show; at 85 percent capacity, an average price of 160 Euros ($176) would make it the highest-grossing engagement as well. (Some tickets seem to be available for less than face value on the secondary market, and a half dozen concertgoers were trying to sell extras before the first show, but the promoters apparently sold those initially.)