Dallas's Granada Theater on Greenville Avenue opened on January 16, 1946, as a movie house, with Mildred Pierce on the screen. It's closing in April 2027, sold to Bathhouse, a New York spa brand. Mike Schoder and Julia Garton have owned it since 2004, and they say they turned down developers who wanted hundreds of apartments and "searched for a way to keep the music playing." Their reason for selling at all: "Rising costs, shifting audiences, and corporate consolidation have made life increasingly difficult for independent venues." Ray Wylie Hubbard, The Linda Lindas and a Rhett Miller benefit are all still on between Friday and Sunday, so if the Granada was your room, this is the week.
The Long Take
Why concert tickets got expensive years before streaming arrived
Nobody needed a new record for System of a Down to turn one 2027 Rose Bowl show into four, three of them sold out the week they went on sale, and that's the part worth explaining. Streaming didn't create the money in touring. In the U.S., ticket prices broke away from inflation around 1996, years before streaming, and the explanation that fit the data best for the economists who measured it is that once file sharing cut what albums paid, acts stopped keeping tickets cheap to help sell records. They called the real cause "something of an open question," and that caveat belongs here too.
Marie Connolly and Alan Krueger worked through Pollstar's box office reports for U.S. shows and found prices rising 4.6% a year from 1981 to 1996, against inflation of 3.7%, then 8.9% a year from 1996 to 2003, against 2.3%. The pace nearly doubled in the middle of the 90s, and nothing on the cost side lines up with it: they looked at production costs, Clear Channel buying up promoters and scalping, and found that none of them explained the jump.
Their best fit was the record business: if a bigger crowd sells more albums, a tour is worth underpricing, and if file sharing takes the album money away, so does that reason, which is consistent with rock and pop tickets rising 99% between 1996 and 2003 while jazz tickets rose 20%. If they're right, the habit of pricing a show closer to what the room will pay started with what happened to album sales in the late 90s, not with your streaming subscription.
Streaming showed up after that break, and prices kept climbing through it: Pollstar's top 100 tours worldwide averaged $96.17 a ticket in 2019 and $135.92 in 2024.
Every one of those numbers is a price or a gross, though, and none of them is what a band keeps. Frank Turner has played well over 3,000 shows in 28 years, and he's stepping away from touring indefinitely at the end of 2027, with his last North American date at Irving Plaza on May 20; one of the reasons he gave is that "the economics of touring have gotten harder."
This Week in Shows
Turnstile on the National Mall. An estimated 60,000 people came to Turnstile's free benefit show at the Washington Monument on Saturday, and the band played 19 songs in 75 minutes with Brendan Yates on a hurt ankle. The fundraiser with Human Concern International, for relief in Palestine, Sudan and Lebanon, set out to raise $100,000 and had passed $220,000 by Sunday. "This is a scene that raised us," Yates told the Washington Post, and Fugazi played free shows near the same monument in the 1990s, so the Mall has seen this before.
Christina Aguilera at the Shrine. Chappell Roan's surprise guest on the first of two nights of her Super Graphic Spectacular benefit at the Shrine Auditorium was Christina Aguilera, who sang "Beautiful" and then joined Roan on "Coffee." Stereogum called Roan "delightfully awestruck," which is as close as most of us will get to watching someone meet their hero on their own stage. Both nights raised money for Roan's Midwest Princess Project, which supports trans and LGBTQ+ kids in the Midwest.
Macklemore's benefit in Dublin. Macklemore opened his three-city Free Palestine Tour at 3Arena on Monday with Hozier and Kneecap on the bill, and the proceeds go to Anera, Gaza Soup Kitchen and Medical Aid for Palestinians. It comes after he was removed from Ed Sheeran's tour following pro-Palestinian remarks at MetLife Stadium in September; Sheeran has said venues threatened to cancel and the promoter made the decision. Hozier played a six-song set closing on "Take Me to Church," and Beoga, who left Sheeran's tour in solidarity, played too. Paris is Thursday and London is Friday.
System of a Down, times four. Last week we pointed you at registration for what System of a Down billed as their only North American show of 2027. It's now four nights at the Rose Bowl: June 5 and 6 with Pierce the Veil, June 10 and 12 with Gojira. The first three went on sale Monday and have sold out, and the fourth, billed as the final one, went on sale Tuesday.
The Venue Report
Bottom of the Hill isn't closing. In January its owners said 2026 would be the San Francisco club's last year, and we ran that news here in March. Now SFist reports they've sold the club to Michele Bronson, a biotech scientist who moved to the city in the early '90s for a PhD in molecular biology and has been a regular ever since. She plans to keep the staff, book the shows herself and keep the club's policy of taking no cut of bands' merch money, and she's looking into bringing back the Sunday barbecues from the early years. The current owners keep the building, close out their run with a week of shows at the end of the year, including Shannon Shaw, Man or Astro-Man? and Mark Eitzel, and then the club shuts for a month to redo the kitchen. The person who saved it has been standing in that crowd for three decades.
Glastonbury's capacity, and the 2024 festival still sold out in under an hour.
Fan Debate
A mother took her 10-month-old to the barricade at a show by Sleeping With Sirens, baby in noise-protection headphones, and the photos drew a wave of criticism, summed up by one Facebook commenter: "Why was this allowed? Where was security?" Her account, as Vice reports it, is that she started near the back, other fans invited her forward, she was at the barricade on the far right and never in the pit, the baby slept through much of it, and security and the people around her kept the area safe. One fan even held up a sign asking people not to crowd-surf near them. A crowd making room like that is the best version of a rock show, and I'm still not sure the barricade is the place for a baby. So which is it: the scene working, or the scene taking a risk it shouldn't?
The Practical Bit
If you bought a Glastonbury 2027 coach package, check your email. See Tickets oversold some coach departures, and affected buyers have until Saturday, Oct. 31, to say they want to keep their coach seat; anyone who doesn't is switched to a general admission ticket and gets the coach fare refunded to the original card. Neither the number of people affected nor which departures were oversold has been made public.
B-Sides
- Sam Fender scraps front standing: every standing ticket on his 2027 UK stadium tour is now one £85 tier before fees, after he called separate front-standing areas "bollocks."
- RHCP go back to the Slovak years: at the Silverlake Conservatory benefit on Oct. 17, the Chili Peppers played "Organic Anti-Beat Box Band" and "Blackeyed Blonde" for the first time since 2000.
- Hum are touring again: twelve dates from March to July 2027, their first tour since 2015, with the presale Thursday and the general sale Friday.
- Field of Vision might not come back: the promoters behind King Gizzard's and Pretty Lights' festivals at Meadow Creek told Chaffee County they won't hold events in 2027 without a change to the security plan, and commissioners meet again Nov. 10.
- Pulp go back to the pub: for their Sheffield Walk of Fame induction on Friday, they're taking over the Hallamshire Hotel, home of their first pub gig in 1980, with a quiz, a raffle, karaoke and fancy dress. No set has been announced, which makes the karaoke the headliner for now.
- Jay-Z argues with the screenshots: closing JAŸ-Z30 at SoFi with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Too $hort, after posts about cheap and free seats went around, he told the crowd, "People will tell you that nobody was in here tonight, but you got eyes."
The Bit
Twenty years ago this month, on the second-to-last night of their co-headlining tour, John Mayer walked out in a full bear suit while Sheryl Crow was singing "My Favorite Mistake," and she nearly forgot the words. On the last night she got him back, walking out during his set in a lilac bikini.
Halloween's on Saturday. Go see a band in a room you'd miss.
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