The #MAYHEMERA is here and Lady Gaga is actively promoting her 7th studio album across several magazines and publications
Do not get lost in the MAYHEM, I got you covered!
Dive into this collection of several interviews where Gaga shares details on the album's creation process, Coachella, her personal life, LGBTQIA+ rights and much more
Las Culturistas
NRJ France
HugoDécrypte
W Magazine
Entertainment Tonight
Extratv
Access Hollywood
Good Morning America
Black Girl Nerds
Vogue Magazine
“I allowed myself to be contradictory,” Lady Gaga says of her new genre-spanning new album. “We are all asked to define who we are and expla
Stereogum
Rolling Stone
Lady Gaga discusses making 'Mayhem,' tapping into her dark 'gothic dreams' roots, and resilience amid chaos.
Billboard
Lady Gaga talks to Billboard about the creation of her long-awaited album 'Mayhem,' the success of 'Die With a Smile' and more in a new inte
Consequence
Lady Gaga's new album, Mayhem, arrives on March 7th ahead of an appearance on SNL. She talks about all that and more in this interview.
Spotify (join the waiting room)
Them
The pop legend on trans rights, ‘Mayhem’s’ “gothic dreams,” and the death of Jo Calderone.
Entertainment Weekly
Lady Gaga looks back on her 2005 'Boiling Points' episode 20 years later, telling EW in an interview for her new album, 'Mayhem,' that she '
It's not just the Black Keys. Why are so many big tours selling poorly?
It's not just the Black Keys. Why are so many big tours selling poorly?
Stereogum | June 11, 2024 | by Zach Schonfeld
long (and US focused) but still quite interesting article on the current state of concert touring, why tours are getting cancelled or downsized, and what's up with ticket pricing. (my selected excerpts/highlights under the cut)
[excerpt, all highlights mine]
[Eric Renner Brown, a senior editor at Billboard] adds, “I do think [The Black Keys] are an artist that can fill those rooms still. I think the demand is there in terms of people who want to see Black Keys. But perhaps at that price point, the demand was not there.”
Ostensibly, agents and promoters should have access to data that can give them a better sense of demand. But they often place outsized importance on raw streaming numbers.
“The data is very confusing,” says the anonymous booking agent. “There’s a lot of passive listeners for data. You can have millions upon millions of streams, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna turn into tickets. The opposite is, there are some artists who don’t have many streams at all and they can sell like 2,000, 3,000 tickets.”
[..]
It’s worth noting that the Black Keys have released four albums since returning from hiatus in 2019, and toured arenas as recently as 2022. This may be a case of oversaturating the market.
The band’s 2019 and 2022 arena runs weren’t exactly sold out. In between, the band left their longtime manager in 2021, signing with Irving Azoff and Steve Moir at Full Stop Management. Some sources speculate that Azoff, a former CEO of Ticketmaster, may have encouraged ambitious touring plans. On Thursday, Billboard reported that the group has now parted ways with Azoff and Moir. (The management company did not respond to a request for comment.)
“Essentially, you have some very big managers that are out of touch with the granular finesse and nuance of ticketing,” says another anonymous booking agent. “And they have these large expectations and they tell their agents what they want. And the agents are probably texting each other on the side, going, ‘This man is out of his fucking mind.’ But they do it anyway because, in the case of Black Keys, they’re not gonna challenge Irving Azoff.”
[..]
One contributing factor to instability in the touring industry is the rising cost of… well, everything. It’s part of why ticket prices are so high; it’s also part of the reason some acts are backing out of touring commitments.
Bands at all levels have been sounding the alarm about this for years. In 2022, for instance, Animal Collective canceled European tour dates and explained, “We simply could not make a budget for this tour that did not lose money even if everything went as well as it could.”
Industry insiders say that’s not uncommon. “Everything is ridiculously expensive,” says a tour manager who works with major acts and asked not to be named. “There’s not enough gear for everyone to share, so the vendors are having to pay high amounts for equipment. A single bus for a six-week tour can cost $100,000. Multiple that by multiple buses, and then trucks, and then crews are at a minimum, so they’re getting top rate right now because there’s not enough crews.”
COVID, of course, exacerbated this crunch. “What happened after the pandemic is, everyone was ready to tour at once,” the tour manager says. “There’s not enough gear to cover all of that. A lot of bands have had to cancel tours because they don’t have gear or they couldn’t afford the gear,” the tour manager continued. “I was on a tour with somebody last year where we had to book a private jet because there were no buses available. For the first week of the tour, we had to charter planes.”
Acts are thus incentivized to book bigger venues to recoup the costs of touring. The catch-22 is that bigger venues necessitate more elaborate stage production, which makes for a more expensive tour.
“There’s the expectation to have that production,” says the tour manager. “If people went back to having just two trusses of lights and a P.A. and no frills, it was just about the music, they can afford to tour. But everyone wants to see those flashing lights. Everyone wants to see that video.”
“So much of the economics of these big tours is completely invisible to fans and consumers,” says Kevin Erickson, director of Future of Music Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group. “You can sell out a tour and come back in the red if there was a cost overrun or a miscalculation.”
For mid-level acts with sizable followings, these frustrations are compounded by a lack of suitable mid-sized venues.
“For a band that maybe has assessed its demand in the market to be in the 8K range or something for capacity, where are they going to go if that sort of venue doesn’t exist?” says Brown. “And if, say, the local theater that seats 3K or 4K can’t accommodate two or three nights, it can only put them for one night on the tour routing. That’s a real concern.”
[..]
At the end of the day, it all comes back to price. The average ticket price for one of the top 100 tours rose from $91.86 to $122.84 between 2019 and 2023. Concerts are too damn expensive, and there’s a growing sense of consumer frustration with shows that cost as much as airline tickets.
