Swedish House Mafia has canceled five more shows on its upcoming 2022 Paradise Again arena tour on Friday (July 22) after months of anemic sales, despite promoter Live Nation’s best efforts to move tickets at discounted rates.
The newly canceled shows include July 31 at the Amway Center in Orlando, Aug. 2 at Madison Square Garden in New York, Aug. 9 at TD Garden in Boston, Aug. 11 at Verizon Arena Washington D.C. and Aug. 17 in Detroit at Little Caesars Arena.
The tour’s poor ticket sales and struggles to generate interest have been widely known in the live music business, and many arena acts are facing sluggish ticket sales, especially at the arena level where a number of first-time tours are playing to half-empty houses. Festivals too have struggled amid a wave of oversaturation and reduced consumer spending.
In April, the electronic dance music trio — which announced a two-year residency deal with Wynn Las Vegas earlier this week — canceled three U.S. shows, including an Aug. 30 stop at the Footprint Center arena in Phoenix that had so far sold only 250 tickets to the 15,000-capacity arena. At the time, a spokesperson for the group told Billboard that no further dates “are being rescheduled and the tour is proceeding as planned.” The rep did not respond to Billboard’s request for comment for this story.
With eight shows canceled so far, sources tell Billboard more cancellations are expected in the weeks to come. That likely includes the group’s Sept. 9 Los Angeles show at Banc of California Stadium where only about 25% of tickets have sold so far. Other major markets like Seattle, Vancouver and Dallas are just 50% sold with only one date — Sept. 16 at the Chase Center in San Francisco — close to selling out.
As of Thursday, only 40–50% of the approximately 300,000 tickets for the 22-date North American leg of the tour — starting July 29 in Orlando — have sold. The sales figures would have been worse had it not been for deep discounting and risk-taking ticket brokers who bought up the tickets early hoping to make a profit, only to dump the tickets at a steep discount.
The tour’s 23 European dates — beginning Sept. 29 in Manchester, U.K. — are selling stronger and could help offset some of the losses in the U.S. The lack of demand for an arena tour by Swedish House Mafia has caught many in the concert industry by surprise – when the band announced in October that it was reuniting after a multi-year hiatus, few people knew what to expect. The electronic music world had significantly grown and changed since the group had played what many had thought would be their final show at Ultra Music Festival in 2013. A source said much of the 2022 tour was booked by the group’s former manager Ron Lafitte, but its new manager Sal Slaiby — whose management firm SAL&CO is a joint venture with Live Nation — negotiated a headlining slot at Coachella to help launch the tour.
Under Slaiby’s management, Swedish House Mafia scored a major coup when, in October 2021, they were announced as performers for the AEG and Goldenvoice-owned 2022 Coachella music festival. It was believed that the buzz around their Coachella appearance would garner the media attention needed to unveil their 45-date Paradise Again tour.
Announcing the Coachella appearance and the tour that close together meant that both Coachella and Live Nation would have to agree to waive their respective radius clauses for the double announcement to happen, something that usually is only done for acts with serious selling power.
Then, two weeks before Coachella was scheduled to open in Indio, California, after a two-year hiatus, headliner Kanye West announced he was dropping out of the festival. Days later, Swedish House Mafia were elevated to co-headliner status with SAL&CO’s most famous client, The Weeknd. Instead of celebrating the career standout moment, however, Live Nation dropped the price of tickets for the band’s L.A. show — to zero. Less than 12 hours after wrapping their set, an email was sent to three Soul Cycle franchises offering free tickets to anyone who showed up to a Swedish House Mafia spinning class.
“The tour never did well – the face value they were originally asking for turned a lot of people off,” says one ticket broker, speaking on condition of anonymity, who says he’s expected to lose money on the tour.
“Obviously an arena tour for a dance act is not the right fit,” the ticket broker continued, telling Billboard that general admission venues between 3,000 to 5,000 seats would have been a better fit. But the success or failure of a tour like Paradise Again is difficult to predict — the trio had not toured in nearly a decade and there wasn’t much data publicly available to help gauge demand.
Pricing the tickets would be even more difficult, but it didn’t take long after tickets went on sale Oct. 29 for fans to reject the exorbitant prices, with only about 25-30% of tickets for the tour sold after being on sale for six months.
In May, Swedish House Mafia was one of hundreds of acts to participate in Live Nation’s $25-all-in ticket promotion created over a decade ago. Unlike most tickets sold on Ticketmaster, these tickets have no added fees. Live Nation sold thousands of tickets in the upper sections of many touring arenas through the promotion, marking down tickets priced between $60 to $80 with fees included to just $25.
As a result, many stops on the tour have sold a large percentage of the upper-level tickets at a steep discount, while floor tickets priced at $350 with fees included and lower bowl seats close to the stage priced at $215 with fees included remain unsold.
The band has stayed silent on the cancellations so far — the last tweet from the Swedish House Mafia Twitter page is from Wednesday and shows a picture taken from the band’s stage of its lighting rig with the text reading “We’re coming for you.”
“No you’re not,” one fan responded. “You just canceled a bunch of tour dates we are done with you for good this time.”
