Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds tour sets new bar

ATC Live agent Alex Bruford has spoken to IQ about Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ ongoing Wild God Tour, as it lights up arenas across Europe.

Their most extensive tour to date is being organised by promoter Simon Jones at AEG Presents, with the help of a host of local partners around the continent.

“The 2017 tour was across 29 dates and sold 250,000 tickets, and we were due to tour the Ghosteen record in April 2020, which got pushed back to 2021 and was then eventually cancelled due to Covid, but that would have been across 32 dates,” Bruford tells IQ.

“For the current Wild God Tour, we announced 27 arenas and added second shows in Amsterdam, Berlin, Antwerp, Copenhagen, London, and Dublin, taking the total number of shows to 33.”

Now more than 40 years into their career, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have armies of fans around the world, but Bruford – who plotted the band’s 2022 UK and EU festival headline tour – reveals that ATC is utilising all its powers of research to strategise routings for the band.

“We’ve sold over 100,000 more tickets on this run than in 2017”

“When we started working with Nick in 2018, we did a deep dive into the data from all social and streaming sites, album sales, and ticket sales to analyse where the audience are located,” he explains. “We compared this to when he’d last played some of these locations, and we had some interesting results. For example, Lisbon, one of the highest performing cities, had not been visited for over a decade. The show was added to the tour and was one of the fastest selling arenas when we went on sale.

“We used this approach to refine the list of cities and continue to grow the audience, and we worked closely with Nick’s management, tour production team, and promoters, AEG, to deliver the most efficient and effective routing possible.”

And the results have been seismic.

“At the mid-way point of the tour, we had passed the 350,000 sales mark, meaning we’ve sold over 100,000 more tickets on this run than in 2017,” finishes Bruford. “It’s the band’s biggest tour to date by quite some way, and the show is phenomenal.”

Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.

Read More Like This

News|17 Jun 2024

Bad Bunny concert allegedly targeted by mass shooter

The rapper's Atlanta shows were targeted by a man who planned to stage a mass shooting in the hope of inciting a "race war"

News|10 Sep 2024

Billy McFarland sets date for Fyre Festival II

The American entrepreneur says tickets for next year's sequel to the calamitous 2017 event will cost up to $1.1m

News|22 Oct 2024

Singer Diljit Dosanjh sets new record at The O2

The Indian singer, actor and film producer recently delivered three sold-out shows at the London venue