Search Results for: Bonnaroo

A month after promoters declared the concert industry healthier than ever, big summer tours such as Ozzfest, Fleetwood Mac, the Dead and Lollapalooza have run into a concrete wall of slow sales. “Ticket sales are mixed, and in some cases they appear to be substantially off from the past,” says Alex Hodges, executive vice president of House of Blues Concerts, one of the three major U.S. promotion companies. The summer’s success stories so far are big-buzz superstar events such as Prince and Madonna, plus low-cost packages including the long-running Warped Tour, Alanis Morissette/Barenaked Ladies and No Doubt/Blink-182. Also, the three-day… Read more »

Ticket sales are down, and big tours are scaling back to smaller venues. It looks to be a long, hot summer for the touring industry. On the cusp of the industry’s peak period, a number of high-profile tours and festivals have already hit snags, among them highly touted outings from Mariah Carey, the Field Day Music Festival, Lollapalooza, and Beck and Dashboard Confessional. Faced with a crowded tour market combined with high ticket prices, permit hassles, a sluggish economy and poor buzz, these tours and a handful of others have either had to scale back the size of the venues… Read more »

As an independent band that manages to sell more than 300,000 copies of your self-released albums, signing with a major label might seem like the most logical move to the next level. But O.A.R. bassist Benj Gersham tells Billboard.com the Maryland-bred, Ohio State University-brewed group’s decision to ink with Lava/Atlantic was anything but simple. “We had been going over the decision for at least two years before we finally made it, because we wanted to do it when the time was right,” says Gersham. “And all of those numbers are great but we didn’t do it because of that. We… Read more »

Southern rock outfit Kings Of Leon will release its RCA debut, “Youth and Young Manhood,” July 7 internationally and July 22 in North America. The group completed a U.K. tour last week at London’s tiny Madame Jo Jo’s Club in front of a packed audience that included members of Australian rock quartet the Vines. Kings Of Leon, now based in Nashville, features the brothers Nathan, Caleb, and Jared Followill and cousin Matthew. The foursome hails from an itinerant Pentecostal church family background. “We tell everybody we’re from Memphis, because that’s the only place we had as a home,” drummer Nathan… Read more »

The Donnas have nothing on the Bens. The three members really are named Ben, and you may have heard of them: Ben Folds, Ben Kweller and Ben Lee. The solo singers officially became a group, or at least a side project, when they recorded four songs together in Nashville last month. “There’s some new wave on there, a piano ballad that Folds sings, a countryish song,” Kweller said Saturday backstage at Coachella. “It’s just all three of us writing songs; there’s not any one particular sound. It’s all three of us singing, big harmonies.” After the three-day studio session, the… Read more »

Cult rock duo Ween will put off the recording of its next studio album in favor of a summer North American tour. Dates begin Friday (April 19) in Asheville, N.C., and are booked through a June 23 appearance at the Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tenn. Ween will also drop in May 25 at the Mountain Aire Festival in Calaveras County, Calif. “We plan on hitting many cities where we haven’t played in a few years – places like Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, etc.,” group member Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo writes on Ween’s official Web site. “Our plan is to… Read more »