Touring
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Over just seven or eight months, touring has evolved from an emotional nightmare for small and mid-range touring acts to what many managers and agents say is a booming, healthy business. But the influx of artists hitting the road midway through 2023 continues to cause supply-and-demand challenges — specifically around vehicles and crew.
“Everybody seems to be out on the road and all the shows seem to be doing really, really well,” says Joady Harper, CEO and founder of Rocky Road Touring, the agency for Sisters of Mercy, Killing Joke, Peter Murphy and others. “It’s almost like all the problems are because of how successful everything is. I feel like the clock struck 12 on Dec. 31, and I haven’t put the phone or the computer down ever since. It’s just been go, go, go.”
Late last year, club and theater acts were despondent as they returned to touring after the COVID-19 pandemic. Supply-chain issues meant they had to scramble for backline equipment, personnel shortages made it impossible to track down truck and bus drivers and inflation meant touring artists came home with less money. And while things have improved dramatically — especially in terms of obtaining equipment, which has become much easier this year — some of those problems linger.
For touring acts, the biggest issue remains difficulty in procuring buses, especially on short notice. During the pandemic, many drivers left the business, and bus companies’ fleets were designed for a much lower level of demand. Now, with more acts on the road, personnel and vehicle shortages have led to higher prices. Andy Vickery, tour manager for rockers Boys Like Girls, reserved vehicles and crew for a September club-and-theater tour six months ahead of time, compared to what might have taken a few days ahead of the group’s previous tour in 2016.
Vickery says prices also remain “astronomical” for vehicles and crew. Dave Chavarri, drummer for New Jersey metal band Ill Niño, says bus prices have increased by 40—50% since 2019 — from around $690 a week pre-pandemic to at least $1,200 per week now, not counting a $500-per-day driver and hundreds of dollars in daily fuel costs. And a semi-truck that cost $30,000 per month to haul production equipment pre-pandemic is often “almost double” today, says Vickery. That’s not to mention additional costs for things like maintenance and internet service.
Liam Pesce, manager of shock-metal band GWAR, says some bands lease older buses and save as much as $1,000 per day — but those vehicles tend to break down more frequently, and “you get what you pay for,” he says. “With GWAR, we take what we can get, because there’s a shortage lately.” Inflation has decreased significantly over the past year, but gas prices remain high in much of the United States, particularly on the West Coast and in the Northeast, in addition to the higher costs of drivers and in-demand crew members — forcing small-to-mid-level acts to cut costs. Some have no choice but to set a grueling schedule on the road, often performing five or six nights straight. This can lead to fatigue for artists and crew — particularly singers, who often aren’t able to take needed breaks between shows to recuperate.
“They can’t afford to take days off. You’re still paying your staff weekly,” says Chavarri of Ill Niño, which begins a tour in October with Cradle of Filth and DevilDriver. “But a singer can only do so much with vocal chords. You have to rest.”
Brian Schwartz, who manages Dinosaur Jr. and other touring acts, adds that many bands are reluctant to raise prices due to fans’ own financial hardships as a result of inflation, but the artists still have to pay the increasing prices for hotels, buses and crews. (Managers of international acts say it’s also costly and time-consuming to come up with U.S. visas for touring — and those costs could go up even further this year.) “It’s still very much a reality we’re all having to deal with. It just becomes harder to tour,” Schwartz says.
While megastar stadium and arena acts are able to absorb the higher costs, artists at the club and theater level have had to rethink their businesses — and even create new ones. In response to higher bus prices, Chavarri used his music-business connections to start a bus-rental company, TBA Bus Co., with a fleet of 10 vehicles, along with his wife and a friend, charging lower-than-average prices to customers like Mos Def, Coal Chamber and his own band and tourmates.
Artists are finding a variety of other ways to make the tougher conditions work. Miles Sherman, who co-manages rock band Bad Omens with former Good Charlotte guitarist Benji Madden, says the band’s staff has simply worked harder to manufacture merch, find deals, ramp up production and adapt to adversity. When New Jersey’s Bamboozle festival, where Bad Omens was slated to perform, abruptly canceled in April, the band pivoted to setting up a last-minute local pop-up store and meet-and-greet.
“It’s been difficult but also rewarding,” Sherman says. “All the tours have been selling extremely well and we continue to level up.”
Harper adds that agents and managers have become skilled at planning for tours farther in advance than ever before — unlike late 2021 and early 2022 when vaccines started to kick in and many artists rushed back to the road on short notice. She’s hopeful that “kids who came of age during COVID” are finally able to see the bands they discovered online, creating what she calls “a brand-new, gig-going audience.”
Schwartz, who also manages Dawes and Hiss Golden Messenger, is more cautiously optimistic about the economic future of touring at this level. “We’re in this hybrid space,” he says, “where it’s not as bad as it was six months ago, it’s not as good as it can be, but we’re getting there.”
Since forming in 2015, Dead & Company has been one of the most consistent touring entities, mounting 10 separate tours in less than eight years. The last of those, its 2023 summer outing, wrapped on Sunday (July 16) and set an entirely new standard for the band, just as it is hanging up the mantle. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the Dead & Company Summer Tour 2023 grossed a new high of $114.7 million and sold 845,000 tickets across 28 shows.
The supergroup’s previous best was $53.7 million, earned during its Fall Tour 2021.
Dead & Company established a relatively unfussy format to its tours, much like its approach to setlists and song structure. The band sticks to the U.S. and Canada and plays in brief sprints of anywhere from 10 to 30 shows at a time. Even the name of each tour is plainly stated – Dead & Company 2015 Tour, Dead & Company Summer Tour 2017, Dead & Company Summer Tour 2018 and so on.
Dead & Company is comprised of former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, plus John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti.
Carrying on the legacy of the Grateful Dead, revenue and attendance have been steady as well. Average grosses have mostly stuck between $1 million to $2 million per show, and nightly attendance between 10,000 and 20,000. Routings have seamlessly woven arenas and amphitheaters, with a sprinkling of stadiums in select markets.
That all changed with Dead & Co.’s most recent dates. The announcement of the band’s final tour gave some extra momentum, as farewells are known to do. More than half of this year’s shows were played in stadiums, leveling up in Philadelphia, San Francisco and more.
Dead & Company’s final three shows at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (July 14-16) grossed $24.4 million, becoming the highest grossing engagement of the band’s tenure. A three-show stint at Boulder’s Folsom Field (July 1-3) sold 131,000 tickets, marking its best-selling report ever. Eight-figure grosses continue with double-header stadium stops in Chicago ($11.7 million), Boston ($11.6 million) and New York ($11.1 million).
Across all 28 shows, Dead & Company averaged $4.1 million and 30,200 tickets. Those figures are up by 69% and 46%, respectively, from last summer’s tour, easily setting new peaks for the band. Billboard has reported on many post-pandemic tours that have set new personal highs for a variety of artists. But even amidst the excitement of a farewell, there’s an extra level of skill in doing so after touring every single year (with the obvious exception of 2020) since 2015.
This may feel familiar for Grateful Dead members Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann. The band was one of the biggest touring acts of all time, also a group of habit in terms of routing and revenues. While its touring career launched in 1965 — decades before the advent of Billboard Boxscore — its early ‘90s tours delivered remarkably consistent results, routinely selling between 20,000-25,000 tickets per show. For every year between 1991 and 1995, the Grateful Dead was among the top 10 on Boxscore’s year-end Top Tours ranking, coming in at No. 1 on the inaugural ‘91 list and again in ‘93.
But upon its return in June 2015 (four months before Dead & Company’s first tour), Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead sold more than 360,000 tickets in just five shows, experiencing the full glory of a comeback and a goodbye, all at once.
Now, the Grateful Dead’s latest era ends, as its John Mayer-fronted lineup played its final shows to similarly spectacular results. After 10 tours, plus three editions of the destination event Playing in the Sand, Dead & Company has earned $455.9 million and sold 4.1 million tickets from 212 concerts.
Independent venue executive Andre Perry will serve as the new board president of the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). Announced at the second annual NIVA conference held in Washington, D.C., from July 9-12, Perry was elected after serving as vp of the board since 2021.
“Our NIVA family, our members, represent so many threads of the independent performance world, and it is an honor to be named NIVA’s next Board President,” said Perry in a statement. “We are small club owners, we produce festivals, we run performing arts centers, we are promoters, we are comedy people, we are music heads, we are multidisciplinary performing arts workers, we run for-profits — big, medium, and small 00 and we run nonprofits at a range of sizes, we are government affiliated or part of universities and colleges, or we are part of nothing — committed, brilliant loners who just do what we do for the good of the cause.”
Perry, who also works as the executive director of the Hancher Auditorium and the Office of Performing Arts and Engagement at the University of Iowa, will take over the president role from NIVA co-founder and founding president of the board Dayna Frank, who held the position for the maximum term of three years. Frank will continue her advocacy leadership as chair of NIVA’s advocacy and policy committee and continue to serve on the board of directors.
Frank led the association through the passage of the Save Our Stages Act, which resulted in $16.25 billion dollars in emergency relief for the live entertainment sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, as a driving force behind the Fix The Tix campaign, Frank will continue her critical efforts to protect consumers, artists, venues and festivals against harmful and deceptive ticketing practices.
“NIVA has made history in our three years of existence, and there are many challenges ahead for our industry. However, I know that our Association, chapter leaders, and members are capable of tackling these challenges because we have done it before,” said Frank in a statement. “One of those challenges is predatory ticket resellers. Together, independent venues, festivals and promoters will work with Congress to pass Fix the Tix and continue laying the groundwork to create the industry our fans deserve.”
NIVA’s membership also elected two new independent live entertainment industry leaders to its board of directors: Shahida Mausi and Jamie Loeb.
Mausi is president and CEO of the Right Productions, vp and chief strategic officer of the Black Promoters Collective (BPC) and operator of The Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre in Detroit.
Loeb is the senior vp of marketing at Nederlander Concerts. With more than 30 years of local, regional and national experience, she was instrumental in creating the vision for NIVA’s first two conferences and in planning NIVA’s Save Our Stages Fest in 2020.
“As NIVA embarks on this new chapter, the Association remains resolute in its mission to support, promote, and advocate for independent venues across the country,” said NIVA executive director Stephen Parker in a statement. “The appointment of Andre Perry as Board President, Dayna Frank’s continued leadership on federal advocacy, NIVA’s new slate of Board officers and the addition of Shahida Mausi and Jamie Loeb to the Board, signals a renewed commitment to advancing the interests of independent venues and festivals and ensuring their continued viability in an ever-evolving live entertainment ecosystem.”
Full 2023-2024 slate of NIVA Board Officers:
President: Andre Perry, executive director of the Hancher Auditorium and the Office of Performing Arts and Engagement, University of Iowa
Vp: Audrey Fix Schaefer, head of Communications at I.M.P.
Vp: Jim Brunberg, founder of Revolution Hall, Mississippi Studios; Composer/Performer
Treasurer: Brad Grossman, COO of Helium Comedy
Secretary: Jesica Gerbautz, CEO of Pnk Moon Productions
Continuing their service as board members:
Dayna Frank, co-founder of NIVA, founding president of the NIVA Board and CEO at First Avenue & 7th St Entry
Grace Blake, programming director at City Winery NYC
Kira Karbocus, president/COO at Newport Festivals Foundation
Hal Real, founder/CEO at World Cafe Live
Blink-182 is back together and bigger than ever. The band’s iconic lineup of Travis Barker, Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus reunited for their first shows in nine years, yielding the biggest results of their three-decade career. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the North American leg of the group’s World Tour 2023/2024 grossed $85.3 million and sold 564,000 tickets.
This isn’t Blink’s first reunion tour. The trio went on hiatus in 2005, returning in 2009 with the similarly simply titled blink-182 in Concert tour. At the time, that tour became the band’s biggest on every measurable metric. It was the highest-grossing ($22.5 million) and best-selling (660,000 tickets) tour of its career and set new highs on a per-show level, with $522,000 and 15,345 tickets on average.
Fourteen years later, Blink is pacing $2.4 million each night, multiplying its one-time-peak comeback numbers by four and a half.
These North American shows also set a new high for Blink in terms of attendance, but just barely. The tour averaged 15,664 per show, up 2% from the 2009-10 mark. The band found space to maximize its earnings by playing with pricing. Between 2009 and now, Blink’s ticket prices have exploded, from $34.03 to $151.33.
That quadrupled-and-then-some price is due to several factors. For one, touring simply costs more in 2023 than it did in 2009. The price of concert tickets has also exploded due to resale, dynamic pricing and increasingly creative platinum and VIP models.
Aside from environmental causes, Blink is in a unique position. The band’s 2009 comeback was highly anticipated, but it was still catering to a relatively young audience who had limits to their disposable income. And while that four-year break created heightened demand, 2009 was past the peak of the mid-’00s emo/pop-punk boom that Blink helped inspire. As bands like Fall Out Boy, Paramore and My Chemical Romance geared up for their own extended hiatuses, the new era of Blink’s career flirted with passé, even as the initial comeback was an unqualified success.
Blink’s touring in the 2010s was frequent but littered with asterisks. The 10th Annual Honda Civic Tour paired the band with pop-punk successors My Chemical Romance. Blink’s 20th Anniversary Tour stretched from 2012 to 2014 but stuck to small clubs and theaters in North America. Shows continued in 2016 and 2017, but without DeLonge, the band’s defining guitarist. In 2019, there was another co-headline tour, this time with Lil Wayne. Ticket prices pushed closer to $60 on that run, but attendance dipped below the 15,000-plus high, closer to 10,000 tickets per show on average.
That makes Blink’s recent North American leg the first proper-proper tour for the main lineup since that original 2009 reunion. Not only is its target demo older (and hopefully wiser and richer), but the band is returning in a more welcoming environment. The group’s 2022 single, “Edging,” was its biggest hit on the Billboard Hot 100 since 2004’s “I Miss You.” Further, on the Alternative Airplay chart, the track spent 13 weeks at No. 1, becoming Blink’s longest-running chart-topper ever on the tally, surpassing the eight-week reign of 1999’s “All The Small Things.”
On the live front, My Chemical Romance and Paramore have staged the biggest tours of their own careers by far — 10-plus years removed from their self-imposed breaks around Blink’s first return shows. With its biggest radio success ever on the Alternative Airplay chart, the strength of the current pop-punk nostalgia boom and the added infrastructure of the industry’s bulked-up pricing, Blink was perfectly situated to double, triple and quadruple its previous bests on the road.
After 36 shows in the United States and Canada, Blink-182’s World Tour is halfway done. The band will play 24 dates in Europe this fall before heading to Australia for 17 dates, plus a sea of shows in Latin America (a mix of festival engagements and five headline shows). Those concerts mark the band’s first hard-ticket headlines in Oceania since 2004, and its first major Latin American run ever. While there is no direct precedent for Blink’s international success, its North American total suggests a big nine months ahead. With another 36 shows before wrapping in April, earnings will quickly hit nine figures, ultimately heading toward $150 million.
MELBOURNE, Australia — Mushroom Group’s talent booking division welcomes MBA, a new agency operating across Australia and New Zealand for live bookings, strategy, touring and partnerships.
MBA is a partnership with Guven Yilmaz, founder and managing director of Vita Music Group.
With offices in Sydney and Melbourne, the new agency represents a slew of artists from the Vita roster, and boasts a lineup at launch that includes Peking Duk, Bliss n Eso, Conrad Sewell, Skin on Skin, Winston Surfshirt, BIG WETT, Kaylee Bell, Milan Ring and Tasman Keith.
“Mushroom has been esteemed as the independent leader in the Australian music and entertainment industry. Partnering with a company that not only emphasises but promotes an independent entrepreneurial culture was essential to me,” comments Guven in a statement.
Mushroom Group CEO Matt Gudinski is said to be keen to grow his independent music company’s booking capacity. MBA, he says, boasts some of the best in the business.
“We’re delighted to have Guven join the Mushroom family,” Gudinski comments. “He’s a very well respected agent and operator, with an incredible track record to boot.”
Supported by a “first-class team” including Shelley Liu, Sam Rogers, and Matt Thomson, Gudinski continues, “I am excited about the offering we are going to create for the talent we represent.”
For those artists repped by MBA, Mushroom’s doors will remain open for talent to work with the group’s production specialists to help build and design their live-show, in addition to accessing the Mushroom Creative House and the brand’s sprawling network.
Mushroom Group this year celebrates its 50th anniversary with a “once-in-a-lifetime” all-star concert and the release of a documentary, Ego, a study of the indie powerhouse’s former chairman Michael Gudinski, who at 21 years of age, founded the company.
Today, the Melbourne-based group numbers more than two-dozen affiliates active in every conceivable area of the music and entertainment industries, from touring to publishing, merch and marketing services, venues, exhibition and events production, neighboring rights, branding, labels, talent management and more.
The late Gudinski formed Mushroom Records in 1972 but had had learned the ropes by booking artists in the region years earlier. In 1970, he established the Consolidated Rock agency, which evolved into the Premier Artists/Harbour Agency.
Mushroom Group cut ties with Harbour Agency in 2021, following an investigation into claims from former Harbour Agency staff on past management behavior and workplace culture.
MBA sits alongside Premier Artists, which reps Jimmy Barnes, Vika & Linda, Marcia Hines and others.
The U.K. live music industry enjoyed a post-pandemic boom in 2022, resulting in a windfall for the country’s economy, according to new figures published Tuesday (July 18).
According to a new report from umbrella trade organization UK Music, more than 37 million people attended live concerts and festivals in the country last year, contributing £6.6 billion ($8.6 billion) to the local economy. It was the first full calendar year that the U.K. live music industry was open for business after months of intermittent COVID-19 restrictions led to the cancellation of thousands of concerts.
The report, called “Here, There and Everywhere,” also found that the resurgence of live music events such as the Glastonbury Festival — which returned in 2022 after two years away — and sell-out tours by big-name artists like Harry Styles, Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran and Stormzy helped attract more than 14 million international and domestic tourists to British gigs last year, reports UK Music.
Included among the 14.4 million “music tourists” — which UK Music defines as someone who has traveled at least three times the average commuting distance for their region — were 1.1 million overseas visitors.
Overall, the report found that more than 30 million people went to concerts in the United Kingdom last year — spanning everything from arena shows to tiny grassroots gigs — while 6.5 million music fans attended festivals.
“Here, There and Everywhere” is UK Music’s first report measuring the economic benefits of music tourism since its 2020 “Music by Numbers” study, meaning that accurate comparable numbers for preceding years are not available. According to 2020’s “Music By Numbers” report, which covered the prior 12 months, 33.7 million people attended U.K. live music events in 2019, including around 850,000 overseas visitors, contributing £4.7 billion ($6.1 billion) to the economy.
In 2022, 56,000 jobs were sustained by live gigs, said the London-based organization. The £6.6 billion ($8.6 billion) in music tourism spending for the year encompasses money spent on ticket sales, food and beverage sales, merchandise, venue parking, camping fees, accommodation, travel and additional spending outside of venues.
On a regional basis, London was the United Kingdom’s most popular destination for attending gigs, drawing 4.9 million music tourists who contributed £2 billion ($2.6 billion) in spending. The North West of England, a region which includes the cities of Manchester and Liverpool, was the second most popular destination for traveling music fans, with 1.9 million people visiting for live shows and spending £696 million ($907 million).
UK Music chief executive Jamie Njoku-Goodwin said in a statement that last year’s figures were a “testament to just how important a thriving musical ecosystem is for our towns and cities,” but warned that the sector still faces huge challenges as it continues its post-COVID-19 recovery.
“With a venue closing every week, one in six festivals not returning since the pandemic, and many studios facing huge economic pressures, it’s vital that we protect the musical infrastructure that does so much for our towns and cities,” added Njoku-Goodwin, citing research from the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) and Music Venue Trust (MVT).
Ricky Martin jumped for joy when he saw his twin sons, Matteo and Valentino, join him on stage during his show in Switzerland on Monday (July 17).
In a video the Puerto Rican superstar posted on social media, his 14-year-old boys take the stage to hype up the crowd and start jumping along with their father, whose facial expression says it all. “What a beautiful surprise! When my twins jumped on stage with me for the first time in Locarno, Switzerland,” he captioned the short clip with a crying emoji.
The “Tiburones” singer has been touring in Europe with shows in Spain, Switzerland and Monaco, where Martin posted another video with Matteo and Valentino writing, “Bonding time w the twins, before the show tonight.”
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Earlier this month, Martin and Jwan Yosef announced in a joint statement that they are divorcing after six years of marriage. “For some time, we have considered transforming our relationship, and it is after careful consideration that we have decided to end our marriage with love, respect, and dignity for our children — preserving and honoring what we have experienced as a couple all of these wonderful years.” Martin and Yosef share two kids: daughter Lucia, born in 2018, and son Renn, born in 2019. Before meeting Yosef, Martin welcomed twin sons Matteo and Valentino in 2008.
Following his show dates in Europe, Martin will co-headline The North America Trilogy Tour with Enrique Iglesias and Pitbull. The 19-date arena trek is set to kick off Oct. 14 in Washington, D.C., and will make stops in major cities such as New York, Miami, Houston and Las Vegas before wrapping up Dec. 16 in Vancouver, B.C.
Watch Martin’s sweet video of his twins joining him on stage.
A whole generation of live music fans is being trained to expect the worst when it comes to purchasing tickets for concerts, according to National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) president Dayna Frank.
“It’s imperative to the future of live music, especially for the emerging class and the emerging artists, to be able to make buying a ticket and going to a show at even club level venues easy and simple,” Frank said at the NIVA ’23 conference in Washington, D.C. “It’s devastating what we’ve trained young people to expect when they go buy a ticket: how hard it is, you’ve got to be online at a certain time, you might not get it, you might pay $85 when there are $25 tickets available.”
Frank was speaking on the panel “Fix The Tix: How We Stop Predatory Ticketing Practices from Harming Fans and Artists,” which was held at The Anthem on July 10. Appearing alongside her was Lyte CEO Ant Taylor, who agreed with Frank’s assessment of the bleak ticket-buying process for music fans in 2023.
“The thing that we forget about or that we frequently don’t talk about is that on the other side of all this bulls— is the fan,” said Taylor. “How many fans aren’t even coming to an onsale anymore because they’ve given up because of all the points of friction?”
Since concerts restarted following COVID-19 lockdowns, obtaining tickets for high-profile artists like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé has become a game of uncertainty and chance due to factors including bots, unscrupulous brokers and high demand from fans who have waited years to see their favorite artists. And while neither of those superstars will have their livelihoods affected by ticketing issues, smaller artists, venues and promoters in the live music ecosystem can be severely impacted, particularly by brokers who scoop up tickets and place them on the secondary market at markedly higher prices. Because fewer fans are willing to buy tickets at those higher prices, post-pandemic “no-show” rates — or the percentage of people who buy tickets but don’t attend a show — have remained frustratingly high.
“I don’t know how many folks are tracking how many of their tickets are on the secondary markets the day of the show, but we’ll easily see 20-30 tickets just sitting there, unsold,” said Frank, who also owns famed independent venue First Avenue in Minneapolis.
Frank stated that a common no-show rate was around 7% prior to the pandemic. Now, even though no-shows have gone down from their pandemic high, independent venues are continuing to see rates of 12-15% regularly. That means fewer bar and merch sales, which can often be the revenue that makes or breaks a show for small artists and venues.
The current state of concert ticketing in the United States was a major concern for attendees of the second annual conference that hosted independent venues, promoters, agents and ticketers from July 9-12 in the nation’s capital. The “Fix the Tix” panel focused on issues facing the ticketing industry and possible solutions – many of which can be found in the Fix the Tix Act NIVA is lobbying for the federal government to pass. The legislation would ban the sale of speculative tickets (tickets that brokers don’t have in their possession) and the use of bots, as well as require up front pricing and caps on resale prices while providing funds for enforcement.
“The Fix the Tix proposal says that promoters and artists should be able to put terms and conditions on the tickets as they transfer hands,” said Frank, who added that brokers have been lobbying the federal government to make non-transferable tickets illegal for well over a decade. The brokers’ argument, according to Frank, is that they own a ticket and have the right to do anything they want with it — but live music professionals believe the ticket is actually a license, she says.
“That ticket can change hands 25 times, but ultimately the product is the show that we’re responsible for,” Frank continued. “As the people responsible for the product, we should be able to have terms and conditions on this license…Our product involves people coming into our houses which we are legally responsible for. We have to have oversight of how those tickets are transferred.”
Fellow panelist Frank Riley of High Road Touring agreed. “The only way to put this genie back in the bottle is to regain control of who’s in charge of the ticket, and that’s been the artist and the promoter,” said Riley. “Any other solution that’s out there will not work.”
Riley said that putting a cap on how much a ticket can be resold for would be a major hit to brokers on the secondary market. “If you eliminate the profit motive out of the secondary market [as we know it], it will disappear,” he said.
As NIVA, the National Independent Talent Organization, Universal Music Group and many other music industry entities who have signed on to the Fix the Tix legislation are fighting for federal regulation over ticketing, University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor of economics and entrepreneurship Eric Budish suggested that transparency about where the funds go could bolster those efforts.
“Congress or somebody else should figure out who made how much money on the Taylor Swift tour. Taylor Swift made a lot of money and good for her,” Budish said. “But if a ticket got resold for $2,000, there’s 35% fees on that, give or take, so the resale platform probably made more on that ticket than Taylor Swift did. The broker made more money on that ticket than Taylor Swift did. The search engines made a bunch of money in aggregate on those tickets. I’d love to see that money added up. I think that could be really persuasive to a large number of consumers.”
Another approach to tackling the issue came from panelist Neeta Ragoowansi, executive director of Folk Alliance International and president of Music Managers Forum in the United States. Ragoowansi explained that selling fake tickets or listing tickets that a seller does not actually own constitutes copyright infringement, since the seller is using the name of an artist and/or venue to sell an item without permission. She suggested taking legal action against brokers or search engines who are allowing them to operate these illegal practices, similar to how the National Music Publishers’ Association filed suit against Twitter for copyright infringement over its failure to license music.
Naming NIVA, NITO, Music Managers Forum and the Recording Academy, Ragoowansi said, “There’s a variety of interested parties that have members who have standing to file suit there. File suit on mass, class action or even just 15-20 parties who have a variety of causes of action.”
A class action against the brokers or search engines could make substantial headlines, says Ragoowansi, adding it would “allow for the parties to come to the table and start talking about settlement and creating a precedent so that others don’t come in.”
From show-stopping vocals to eye-popping choreography and production, Beyoncé‘s Renaissance World Tour is one of the grandest shows happening right now. In the midst of all the show’s opulent elements stands one special surprise for select dates: a dance performance by Grammy winner Blue Ivy, the eldest daughter of the superstar and husband Jay-Z, and grandma Tina Knowles-Lawson couldn’t be prouder.
“Well, this is a heels family. You’re trained early to walk in heels,” Knowles-Lawson, mother to Beyoncé and grandmother to Blue Ivy, told People. “She’s having the time of her life, and I couldn’t be more proud of her because she really worked hard.”
Blue Ivy, the second-youngest Grammy winner in history, seamlessly fit into Beyoncé’s crew of seasoned dancers, featuring ballroom powerhouse Honey Balenciaga and renowned dancer-choreography Aliya Janell.
At the tour’s Paris stop (May 26), Blue surprised the sold-out stadium with some dazzling dance moves set to a pair of her mother’s most empowering anthems: “My Power” and “Black Parade,” both from 2019’s The Lion King: The Gift (Deluxe Edition). Blue’s flawless execution of the “My Power” choreography went viral and sparked a dance trend on TikTok.
Knowles-Lawson, a credited costume designer for the Renaissance World Tour, told the publication, “She is 11 years old, and she had one week to prepare, and she’s just getting better and better. So I’m the proud grandma, always.”
Blue is the eldest Carter child; she is the big sister to 6-year-old twins Rumi and Sir Carter. According to her grandmother, the tween’s confidence has soared “to the sky” since joining the Renaissance Tour. The young dancer made her debut on the tour’s North American leg at the Philadelphia show on July 12.
Blue Ivy has earned one entry on the Billboard Hot 100: 2019’s “Brown Skin Girl” (with Beyoncé, Wizkid & SAINt JN), which won the 2020 Grammy Award for Best Music Video and peaked at No. 76.
Bruce Springsteen was 34 in 1984 when he released “Glory Days,” a deceptively upbeat song about looking back at the high school years rock songs cast as the prime of our lives. He was almost 50 when he reunited the E Street Band in 1999 and gradually turned what seemed like it would be a celebration of his past into the second half of his career. Now, at 74, he’s taken some time to look back – in his memoir, during his one-man Broadway show, and on his album Letter to You – but his July 15 concert at the Volksparkstadion in Hamburg, Germany was a joyous celebration of the power of rock n’ roll.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Yes, Springsteen has slowed down a bit. Concerts on this tour clock in at less than three hours, with relatively stable set lists, and he doesn’t slide across the stage on his knees anymore. Who could? It’s inevitable. But he still delivers the greatest show on earth. He’s not playing the kind of concerts he did four decades ago, but — let’s face it – no one else is, either.
The band endures. Video segments during “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” honor late band members Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, but the band tours on. That seems to be the point of these shows, many of which open with “No Surrender” and its vow of dedication, followed by “Ghosts” and its salute to a lost bandmate. It’s a look back, but in Hamburg, Springsteen leaned into its statement of purpose: “By the end of the set we leave no one alive.”
Springsteen played four songs from Letter to You during the show, which (along with his spoken introduction to “Last Man Standing”) were presented with German subtitles onscreen. The implication was clear: These are the important ones. (They’re probably easier for foreigners to understand than any of his lyrics about the New Jersey turnpike.) Really, though, they’re all important. Some went by fast (“Working on the Highway”), while Springsteen stretched others into extended jams, including “Out in the Street,” during which he showcased the horn section; “Kitty’s Back”; and “Backstreets.”
Springsteen is one of the only rock musicians – truly one of just a few figures in pop culture in general – to chronicle the arc of his life in an art form usually obsessed with teenage concerns. Over the years, he’s turned his creative attention from escaping the life he grew up with (Born to Run) to the difficulties of building his own (Darkness on the Edge of Town) to the challenges of sharing it with someone else (Tunnel of Love) – then, later, to the brotherhood he finds with his band. Over the last few years, his attention has turned to his own mortality, in a way that’s free of the hope-I-die-before-I-get-old mythology but still cast in his usual rock n’ roll terms.
The band endures – even, perhaps, beyond its members. Before he played “Last Man Standing,” from Letter to You, Springsteen told a story about his first rock band – the same way he might have on Broadway, only to about 70,000 people – and how he’s the last one of the members still alive. He compared the situation to standing on railroad tracks, looking at the headlight of an oncoming train and how it “brings a certain clarity of thought, of purpose.” Back then, he remembered, life was full of hellos and “later on there’s a lot more goodbyes.”
Any resignation was immediately followed by defiance in the form of “Backstreets,” which could be about the time he formed that first band, followed by “Because the Night” and soon “Badlands” – both of which are essentially about seizing the day. Springsteen is old enough to confront the idea of hanging up his rock n’ roll shoes, but he’s not ready to do it. It seemed the crowd could relate: Sounds of recognition greeted the line in “Thunder Road” about how “you’re scared and you’re thinking we ain’t that young anymore,” a line Springsteen wrote almost half a century ago.
The concert paused there, then continued with a six-song encore – “Born to Run,” a Born in the U.S.A. triple-header of “Bobby Jean,” “Glory Days” and “Dancing in the Dark,” and then that joyous, extended “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” His final song was more subdued: “I’ll See You in my Dreams,” a goodbye about goodbyes, “For death is not the end.” At once stark and hopeful, it circled back to “No Surrender” and the start of the show. “Now young faces grow sad and old,” Springsteen sang just after he took the stage, “And hearts of fire grow cold / We swore blood brothers against the wind / Now I’m ready to grow young again.” Then he spent the next two hours and forty-five minutes doing exactly that.