And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #197: Live Nation v Lady Gaga naysayers

By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 7 March 2014

Right, everyone, stop saying that everything Lady Gaga does of late is a flop. For one thing, says Arthur Fogel, chairman of Live Nation’s global touring division, it’s just not true.

The latest rumour that everything is going wrong for Gaga seemingly came from a post by a contributor in Milwaukee to the US site Examiner.com which claimed that, despite the fact that barely anyone had bought tickets to see the pop star perform at the city’s Marcus Amphitheater, she’d come and play it anyway. “This is such a shame”, wrote the contibutor, “especially since Lady Gaga was a major concert attraction just three years ago”.

But commenting on this rumour, Fogel, as Gaga’s tour promoter, told Billboard: “When something like Milwaukee specifically comes up, that show has sold 14,264 tickets, the gross is $961,000, and it’s at the end of June. I just don’t know how this shit gets any traction without people doing their homework”.

Now, that show is someway off selling out – the venue has 25,000 seats – though, as Fogel says, there’s still plenty of selling time left. And anyway, even if no more tickets are sold, a million dollars of revenue sounds alright. After all, if you can bring in a million a night over 29 US shows, that’s pretty good, surely? Actually, Billboard reckons the trek is currently averaging sales of $900,000 a night. But still all good, right? Except for another rumour doing the rounds, that Live Nation is set to lose $30 million on this tour.

“Just a complete fool would say something like that”, continued Fogel. “And it could only come from somebody who has an agenda, because it makes absolutely no sense, on any level. Forget [the] $30 million, if it were actually true, you’d say ‘pull the plug'”.

The mega-million losses allegation relating to Gaga’s upcoming tour mirrors another rumour last year (also beginning on the Examiner) that the singer’s label Universal/Interscope was set to lose $25 million on her ‘ARTPOP’ album release. As unlikely as it seemed, that story spread fast online, prompting Gaga to write on her Little Monsters fansite that, while there were people in her team who had “betrayed” her, things were all fine with Interscope and no such losses had been made.

Given the figures in these rumours are usually so wide off the mark, that such gossip spreads is probably to do with the rather ambiguous definition of the word ‘flop’.

Back at the beginning of the year, Billboard’s Jason Lipshutz wrote an article calling on the world to stop using the word for projects that had actually been comparatively successful; that is to say, compared to the industry at large, rather than to any one artist’s previous endeavours. Sure worldwide sales of ‘ARTPOP’ are so far only just over a third of what Gaga’s previous album ‘Born This Way’ achieved, but 2.3 million album sales is still no mean feat in today’s record business.

Sometimes a thing an artist does isn’t as successful as another thing they did. That’s just how things work. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the less successful project isn’t any good (though ‘ARTPOP’ does have some right clangers on it), nor that the project in itself is automatically a failure, artistically or commercially, short term or long term.

Quite how artists, labels and promoters should quantify ‘success’ was something 4AD boss Simon Halliday discussed at the by:Larm conference in Oslo last week, when he spoke candidly about the last Deerhunter album.

“The last Deerhunter album [‘Monomania’] sold considerably less than the one before”, he revealed. “A lot of established bands saw their sales halve [last year]. But that Deerhunter record’s great. We’re just thinking, ‘time will be good to us’. It was a financial failure, but not an artistic failure. Great artists have these albums that are a lost album or a hidden gem. It’s difficult to think big picture sometimes when you’re having a bad time financially in the moment, but if you think long term in terms of career artists then it’ll work out”.

So, if there’s hope for Deerhunter, then I think we can have hope for Lady Gaga. Maybe they should collaborate.