The series continues as promised. As mentioned before, I’ve had a number of people ask me to chime in with my professional knowledge and opinion on what was the last 10 days or so. Hence the birth of this three part PR 101 series.

Part One: The Tour can be found here.

Presales, On Sale & AiW

Presales are not a mandatory thing. Some shows and some venues don’t have them. Most tours nowadays however do to help engage fans early and get buzz going.

That being said, the number of tickets allotted for these vary by how many presales are going to happen, the max capacity (or max cap) of the venue and what’s been allotted for industry and tour holds. This was not a typical mix we had for this tour as you had three to four different presale opportunities: email blast list, Facebook, LiveNation/Venue which was twofold via the web and the online app. Considering the scale sizing of these venues, the allotments could not have been large by any means. If a venue is say a max cap of 500, you’re talking presale numbers were potentially in the dozens tops. And that could scale up or down between presales too depending on variables (how many emails go out on Darren’s specific list, what’s LiveNation’s distribution in the markets he’s playing, how many Facebook likes on Darren’s page, etc.).

With a presale, the instructions, codes and timing need to be approved initially by his team/management, then agreed upon by LiveNation before either LiveNation’s ticketing platform, Ticketmaster or TicketFly would “build” out the event. This would mean there’s info on the back end that none of us see, to make the event on their websites happen with the different price points, presale options and if applicable, seat locations. So when there were issues with the presales not going live and not being available, this wasn’t ultimately a Darren and his team thing, there were a lot of working parts involved with this.

On sale still held the majority of the ticket inventory, despite how fast they were gone. Take into consideration how many people were trying to get for those tickets then. Yes, a solid chunk went to scalpers and we all have heard the stories rumbling around the internet about ‘well I know 2-7-14 people trying and they didn’t get, it all went to the bad people.’ It’s something that happens across the board with whatever show goes up on sale; this is just again magnified in our little corner of fandom.

In TOTAL across the 16 dates, max cap for all the venues (minus AA because no one knows what’s happening with that since it’s a freebie) comes to 20,310.

Up on StubHub (as of 3:20p on 5/3) there were 2,780 tickets – that’s not counting the eBays, the CraigsList and the creepy ticket brokers. Out of those, we know StubHub has a verification system to the tickets, the others could be fakes/counterfeits or reprints that won’t be valid – so that’s what I’m using in my math right now.

Take that total max cap (20,310) and divide the total number of StubHub tickets into it (2,780) and you get .13687. So you’re talking about 14% of his TOTAL TICKET INVENTORY is on StubHub. That’s average folks.

Example: Bruno Mars’ summer tour has practically sold out across the states. When he’s in NY Metro, he’s playing Prudential Center as first major in market play which now will probably max cap out at about 14,000 for his show. There are 1,604 tickets up on StubHub (as of 3:20p on 5/3) so he’s running at a .11457 – about 11%. The big folks on tour this summer – let’s pull Bieber numbers. He’s also playing Prudential as first plays in NY Metro market. Two dates in July max capping out at about the same 14,000. So times two is a total inventory of 28,000. That’s running 6,826 tickets total on StubHub for the two shows, so that’s .24387 – about 24%. Now, that – that’s a high number.

I cannot stress enough – please please please do NOT go running to these folks yet. This is where you use the breadth and reach of fandom. There are plenty of folks on tumblr and on Facebook that are trying to help with who has an extra ticket here or what have you. If we hold out on jumping on these other outside secondary and tertiary ticket brokering places, it shows the demand dipping which in turn (more times than not) will have the prices dipping as well.

Onto VIP now. I was one of the ones who questioned straight off the bat why your promoter, who has their own VIP experience segment, didn’t buy into that portion of the package. It would have made the most sense, all one stop shopping, folks who have done this before, etc. However, those packages are mad cash and are, in best terms, cattle call VIP experiences. Anyone who had the chance to do VIP for TSK Space or Apocalyptour knows that first hand (or at least a good chunk of the cities were that way).

That’s not what we now know thanks to AiW that Darren wanted to have for his VIP. He wanted more time; he wanted things to not be the astronomical pricing that you get with a lot of these big tour big name packages. We all knew there had to be a reason somewhere in here on why them – this is a huge piece of it.

Now, knowing that I do not think AiW was prepared for the onslaught that would be the onsale nor how much they would be bombarded on this. Poor planning on their part – they should have done some due diligence research or been provided said information by management. Fandom power man, they kill servers. If you’ve been on their site, you know they’re handing some serious other heavy hitting names (Jonas Brothers, Manson, Demi Lovato) – and something just got lost in translation on this one. They’ve been trying, but 2 +2 didn’t equal 4 this go around. This is going to be, and has been a learning experience for them and for Darren’s team.

And last: Media Support