Fact #155783
When:
Short story:
On their 2013 Summer Tour, Full article:
Adam Wilkes (President, AEG Presents Asia Pacific) : In 2013, we got the approvals for Metallica to play Shanghai and my team was checking the metrics on the band’s popularity to determine if demand was enough for an arena show in this developing market that hadn’t had hard rock artists play at an arena level.
Normally we use Chinese language social media, streaming, and other statistics to measure an artist’s popularity as those platforms are very China specific. However, the fans in China do not actively engage these platforms to listen to or interact with Metallica but despite the numbers, somehow, we felt that the audience was there.
Cut to a few months later when we were five minutes before on-sale, and I got a call to discuss projected ticket sales with our LA office. We were expecting sales to go well, maybe we’d sell out in a few weeks but I could not have expected what happened next.
Usually during the initial on-sale period the office is a bit hectic, but minutes after the on-sale it was unusually quiet. I went to our ticketing director to find out what was going on, had tickets gone on sale or were things delayed for some reason? Turns out the show had sold out in just seven minutes. No international show in China, up to that point, had sold out that quickly. I was shocked and could only think of one thing to do. I called management to tell them the good news and we added a second show.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, Sept 2017)
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Normally we use Chinese language social media, streaming, and other statistics to measure an artist’s popularity as those platforms are very China specific. However, the fans in China do not actively engage these platforms to listen to or interact with Metallica but despite the numbers, somehow, we felt that the audience was there.
Cut to a few months later when we were five minutes before on-sale, and I got a call to discuss projected ticket sales with our LA office. We were expecting sales to go well, maybe we’d sell out in a few weeks but I could not have expected what happened next.
Usually during the initial on-sale period the office is a bit hectic, but minutes after the on-sale it was unusually quiet. I went to our ticketing director to find out what was going on, had tickets gone on sale or were things delayed for some reason? Turns out the show had sold out in just seven minutes. No international show in China, up to that point, had sold out that quickly. I was shocked and could only think of one thing to do. I called management to tell them the good news and we added a second show.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, Sept 2017)