Touring
Bonnaroo Organizers Tap Phoebe Bridgers, Brittany Howard & Sylvan Esso For Nashville Make-Up Show
This year’s Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, which was slated for Sept. 2-5 at Great Stage Park in Manchester, Tenn., was cancelled on Tuesday after the waterlogged areas and campgrounds flooded by the remnants of Ida made it impossible to stage the event as planned. “We are absolutely heartbroken to announce that we must cancel Bonnaroo,” organizers said in a statement. “While this weekend’s weather looks outstanding, currently Centeroo is waterlogged in many areas, the ground is incredibly saturated on our tollbooth paths, and the campgrounds are flooded to the point that we are unable to drive in or park vehicles safely. We have done everything in our power to try to keep the show moving forward, but Mother Nature has dealt us a tremendous amount of rain ...
Arnold ‘Arnie’ Pustilnik, Bill Graham Disciple Who Managed Train & Santana, Dies at 75
Over three decades, Pustilink worked alongside Graham to transform the promoter’s namesake company into the premier rock concert promotion outfit of the 1970s and ‘80s. He eventually rose to co-head of the management division alongside Mick Bridgen, and, following Graham’s death in a helicopter crash in 1991, helped keep the promoter’s legacy alive by continuing to steward the company’s management clients into the next decade. Born in 1946, Pustilnik left his native New York sometime in the early 1970s for the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived as “a hippie selling sandwiches on the streets of Berkeley,” Brigden tells Billboard. Pustilnik, who is remembered for sporting a flowing ponytail around the office in his younger years, linked up with the already-established Graham around that ...
Bonnaroo Cancellation Tests New Festival Pandemic-Era Payment Terms
The new agreements require AEG and Live Nation to pay 10% of the artist fee for a festival if the event is canceled 30 to 60 days before the event, either for weather or pandemic-related issues, and 50% of the artist’s fee if an event is canceled less than 30 days in advance. By limiting the event’s liability in case of cancellation, these arrangements are allowing promoters to move ahead with booking shows without having to pay artists’ full costs and are likely to factor into risk evaluation as the pandemic rages on. On Aug. 8, the AEG-promoted Jazz Fest in New Orleans canceled its two weekends planned for Oct. 8-10 and Oct. 15-17 — just one day before the 60-day mark prior to the start of the event, limiting the promoter’s liability to artists. Up...
Wave and Riot Games Bring Virtual Metal Band Pentakill to Online Stage
“Riot Games is an ideal Wave collaborator as they have been an innovator in using music and emerging technologies to build and extend their worlds beyond games,” Wave COO Jarred Kennedy said. “Wave has sat at the intersection of music and gaming since its inception, and we’re excited to work with Riot to help shape the future of virtual performance.” The Los Angeles-based Wave has hosted more than 50 virtual concerts, called “Waves,” with artists like Dillon Francis, Alison Wonderland and Tinashe, where artists perform as avatars in imaginative virtual settings. The company names Warner Music Group an investor and China’s Tencent Music Entertainment a strategic partner. Meanwhile, Riot Games has been steadily making inroads in the music indust...
Tame Impala Insists Fans be Fully Vaccinated For U.S. Concerts
The Australian maestro explains, “I have talked about this with my cohorts extensively and whilst the last thing I want to do is divide people based on what they believe and don’t believe, now is not the time to be putting everyone at risk for the sake of being nice.” Parker knows only too well the downer of seeing tours canceled, rescheduled, and scrapped again. The multiple award-winning act’s Australian arena tour in support of The Slow Rush was originally booked for April 2020, then pushed back to December 2020, and is now settled on dates a full year later, from December 2021. U.S. dates are due to kick off Sept. 4 with a set at Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, TN. “There’s still time to get fully vaxxed before most of the shows (and a single J&J jab before all of them),” Parker w...
D-Nice Brings Club Quarantine to the Hollywood Bowl with Common, Isley Brothers and More
In-concert version of the popular Instagram Live series coming next to Brooklyn and Atlanta One of the most uplifting events to take root during COVID-19’s stay-at-home mandates was D-Nice’s Club Quarantine. The DJ’s game-changing live sets became a culture-raising fixture on Instagram for celebs and music fans alike over the last year, attracting millions thanks to his masterful curation of R&B, soul and hip-hop classics. Last night (Aug. 29), D-Nice brought his online party to the Hollywood Bowl — and kept the house rocking for three hours. The first stop in a road show series staged in partnership with Live Nation Urban (next up: Brooklyn, Sept. 2; Atlanta, Sept. 3), Club Quarantine Live at the Bowl co-starred Common, the Isley Brothers, Deborah Cox and Trey Songz, among others. Don...
Los Bukis’ 25-Year Reunion Tour: Here Are 7 Chart Hits in the First Show’s Setlist
The Una Historia Cantada tour crosses off another milestone for Los Bukis, as Friday’s (Aug. 27) first date sold out within minutes, as reported by Live Nation, also making the act the first Latin band to sell out the 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. A second show, also sold out, is set for Saturday (Aug. 28). Seven more shows are scheduled: Sept. 4 and 5 at Soldier Field in Chicago (sold out); Sept. 15 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas; Sept. 18 at NRG Stadium in Houston; Sept. 25 at the Alamodome in San Antonio; and Oct. 1 and 2 at RingCentral Coliseum in Oakland (sold out). Notably, most ticket buyers for the first two concerts were among 25-35 years old, according to Live Nation, a relatively youthful range given the band’s 1975 formation by Solís an...
My First Show Back: Resound Presents’ Graham Williams on Texas’ Summer Concert Boom
With the Wale shows, it was the last weekend of July. Things were just picking up, and then a week and a half, two weeks later, when we had our next round of shows, things got more intense with the COVID numbers. We had to pay more attention to things surrounding that. In May, the first shows I went to just check out — at the beginning it was weird, but by the end of the show it felt normal. It felt like every other show. At this point, I was assuming everyone was vaccinated and the Delta variant hadn’t really popped up yet. People weren’t wearing masks. Everyone was like, “We got the vaccine. Everything’s fixed.” People were just so anxious to get back to some form of normalcy, but since then I would say there’s a lot more masking. ...
Supplemental Shuttered Venue Grant Program Now Underway
“The SBA has awarded approximately $9 billion in crucial relief to approximately 11,500 performing arts venues and other related businesses so they can continue to anchor our neighborhoods and define our communities. We know many of these businesses still need assistance to fully recover from the unanticipated expenses and debt caused by the pandemic,” SBA Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program director Matthew Stevens said in a release. “These supplemental grants will go to the hardest-hit Shuttered Venue Operators Grant awardees to ensure they can get back on their feet and get back to the business of driving our nation’s economy.” The supplemental awards also allow SVOG recipients to extend the time to use their grant funds for expenses accrued through June 30, 2022 and lengthen their ...
Tomorrowland Forms Dance Label With Universal Music Germany
Through the partnership, Tomorrowland will enjoy direct access to a collective pool of UMG’s international label divisions, including Virgin Records and Astralwerks in the U.S. Leading the partnership will be Berlin-based Virgin Records executives Alexander Neipp, Daniel Schmidt and Magnus Textor, and Tina Adams at Virgin Music Label & Artist Services. Over the past 15 years Tomorrowland has built a reputation as one of the world’s leading festivals and electronic music brands by consistently expanding and evolving their relationship with music fans,” Frank Briegmann, chairman and CEO, Universal Music Central Europe and Deutsche Grammophon, said in a press release. He added that the partners had created a “uniquely flexible model” that will “help drive success and create global hits fo...
Kiss Concert Canceled After Paul Stanley Tests Positive for COVID
Ahead of the band’s announcement, Stanley took to Twitter to shoot down rumors about how severe his symptoms were. “PEOPLE!!! I am fine! I am not in ICU!” Stantey tweeted. “My heart allows me to do 26 miles a day on my bike! I don’t know where this came from but it’s absolute nonsense.” In a subsequent tweet, he wrote, “I had been sick with flu-like symptoms and was tested repeatedly and was negative. As of late this afternoon I tested positive. The crew, staff and band have all tested negative once again. More to follow.” The glam rockers are currently on their End of the Road Tour, billed as their final trek ever, which kicked off in January 2019 and then had to reschedule dozens of 2020 dates due to the coronavirus pandemic. They resumed t...
MSG Entertainment Revenues Soar, Still Way Down From 2019
Investors welcomed the improvement that exceeded the consensus revenue of $71.5 million, according to FactSet (per MarketWatch). Shares of MSGE rose 8.7% to $67.87 on Monday morning, after hitting a 52-week low of $60.26 last Thursday. Full-year results show a broader effect of the pandemic: for the 12 months ended June 30, total revenues fell 76% from the fiscal year prior, from $762.9 million to $180.4 million. Despite the last quarter’s improvement, the entertainment division’s revenues dropped 86% from $585.2 million to $82.3 million over the same period. The entertainment division — which houses such venues as Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall — improved its revenues to $31.1 million from $8.6 million, showing the concert business improved but was f...
