Lilith Fair Dates Canceled Due to Sluggish Sales

Posted on Jun 25th 2010 1:15PM by Emily Tan
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As previously reported, Lilith Fair has been experiencing slow ticket sales. Now it seems that the situation has gotten so bad that the all-female music festival has officially canceled its shows in Nashville and Phoenix.

Not only have dates been slashed, but some of the acts have also backed out of their sets. Norah Jones, who was scheduled to play five shows during tour's last leg in August, will no longer be performing, according to Canada's Globe and Mail. Although the Go-Go's were ready to play a farewell tour that would kick off with Lilith Fair's San Diego stop on July 7, guitarist Jane Wiedlin's hiking injury forced the band to cancel as well.

While all the Canadian shows are still scheduled to go on, three of them are being moved to smaller venues, which festival co-founder Terry McBride said is due to inconvenient locations and environmental conditions opposed to ticket sales. However, McBride doesn't deny the soft sales and blames the recession for it.

"The whole summer's soft -- it's not just Lilith," McBride told the CTV Toronto. "We're in the middle of a recession. The interesting thing is we're stronger than most, but tickets are soft. Stateside has definitely been hurt a lot more. Canada, I think, has been affected by the recession, America has been slammed by it."

While Lilith Fair has tried to help music fans out by slashing prices at some venues and selling some seats for as low as $10, many tickets range between $50 to over $250. "There's expensive tickets, and there's really cheap tickets," he said. "I would love to make the tickets cheaper, but it means the artists would have to demand less, and I'd have to get more sponsors. There's like an economic puzzle. We're not charging any more than what we need to charge to make it work."

McBride revealed that Lilith Fair will return in 2011 and just look at the current financial situation as "lessons learned."

"Well, I mean, if I could roll it back, I'd go, 'OK, do I really want to do 35 marketplaces?" he said. "Do I want to start off a little bit smaller? I definitely would've looked at that. ... [But] Lilith will probably end up being the most successful tour -- festival-wise -- this summer. Even with all of the issues and the uphill climb that we're facing. That's the reality of it."

Lilith Fair kicks off on June 27 in Calgary.