KID ROCK – FREEDOM 250 TOUR

He hasn’t had a hit in eons.

Even for the show tonight, at the Dos Equis Pavilion, it’s a sea of blue dots on the Ticketmaster app. I’d put it at around 30% unsold.

Now it is an amphitheatre, with its attendant bonus charges…i.e. drinks/food/merch/parking, and it is run by Live Nation (but owned by the city of Dallas), so that means Live Nation may be able to eke out a profit. However…

Odds are not good.

But I will say, at amphitheatres, you must not overlook sponsorship deals/fees. The promoter guarantees a certain number of shows per year, upon which the sponsor makes his deal. So every show does not have to make a profit, the sponsorship fees can make up the difference.

But these are piss poor numbers.

But Kid Rock is a right wing icon you say…

Welcome to the modern era, where big time press is detached from the street. Kid Rock is in the national news on a consistent basis, more than almost everybody in the Spotify Top 50. His house is being buzzed in a flyby by the military, he’s going on an Apache helicopter with Pete Hegseth… But press doesn’t sell tickets. Yes, press might help with awareness, although most of that comes online on other sites, but it doesn’t get people excited to go. You either want to go or you don’t.

Yet half of nation is red, or close to it. But is that a reason to go to the show? This isn’t a political rally, it’s a concert…with some political verbiage.

But it’s not only the press that’s out of touch, it’s Kid Rock himself.

There’s unlimited money/adulation/perks from Republican insiders if you’re a right wing entertainer, because there are so few of them. Rock is in a bubble, he too has lost touch with the street.

And he hasn’t had a bonafide hit since 2008.

This ain’t the Eagles… “Peaceful Easy Feeling” may be forever, but “Bawitdaba”?

Live by the hit, die by the hit. Which is why so many of today’s Spotify Top 50 will be unable to sell many tickets when their chart numbers decline. But it’s even worse, the music doesn’t mean the same thing in the culture.

And don’t confuse Kid Rock with metal. Metal has a bedrock audience based on alienation, being the other, that no other mainstream music possesses. So hits are not as important, and the length of time since your last hit is not  as important.

POST MALONE/JELLY ROLL

Rocker goes country!

That’s not a new paradigm, but the difference is Post Malone does a good job of selling it live and on record, he delivers.

But the truth is before he switched genres all his numbers were going in the wrong direction, he hadn’t had recording success in eons.

But it feels like Post Malone is a superstar, because that’s the way the press treats him (assuming you’re paying attention to the press).

So Post’s previous audience, do they really want to go to this stadium show? It’s not their kind of music…or they fear the set list won’t be their kind of music.

As for the new audience, the country audience, Post does not have a string of country hits, he’s not fully accepted in Nashville.

So who wants to overpay for a stadium show?

Not many!

A stadium show is less about the music and more about a celebration. You just want to be there, feel the vibe. But this requires hard core fans. And if Post has any, that number is not large, and then you have the switching genre issue above.

As for Jelly Roll, who is also on the bill… He’s been everywhere, and has been very likable in interviews, but he’s still a novice act, without a string of hits. I don’t think sales have been hurt by his use of the n-word, but it’s head-scratching how his multiple use of this word has not hurt him in the way Morgan Wallen’s one utterance has.

So what we’ve got here is a sea of blue dots. There’s no way this show is making money, as a matter of fact, they just canceled a concert in Waco… He says it’s to finish new music, what a laugh. No one wants to buy tickets!

Well, some people do. But there are fixed costs and an advance and… I don’t know how much dough they’re guaranteeing Post, but there’s no way in hell they make money on so many of these shows. Deals are predicated on the promoter giving almost all of the face value of the ticket to the act and making their profit on the ancillaries, i.e. food and drink/merch and ticket fees. But for these shows, there are already tickets on sale for below face value!

And that’s the reason I’m writing this screed. We can debate all day long whether Live Nation guaranteed concerts with Ticketmaster deals, or the lack thereof if there was no deal, but there is this canard that if the two are just broken up, ticket prices will plummet. That they’re artificially high and the public is getting screwed.

But the truth is no one puts a gun to a person’s head and tells them they must buy a ticket, that’s a personal choice. And until the on sale, there’s no guarantee the ticket sales will be good. It’s a bet. With a lot on the line, all the startup/production costs for the act, the guarantee by the promoter to the act, it’s a crapshoot. And for every high demand show with tickets resold at exorbitant prices online, we’ve got this tour, where they’re offering student discounts and… In other words, the prices are going DOWN!

It’s all the law of supply and demand. Prices can come down as well as go up. And when they’re up, that means demand outstrips supply… How come nobody not in the business can’t understand this?