When the Mall Was the Venue: Tiffany and the Shopping Mall Tour

In the summer of 1987, a 15-year-old from California stood alone on a temporary stage in the middle of a shopping mall and sang to a prerecorded backing track. There was no band and no ticket. Most of the people walking past had never heard of her.

By one MCA executive's count, about a dozen people stopped to watch at her first mall. Within a year she had two No. 1 singles, and record labels were sending other young acts down the same corridors.

Her name was Tiffany, and for a stretch of the late 1980s, the food court was a launchpad.

Taking the singer to the audience

Tiffany didn't look like an obvious bet. She was unknown, still in high school, and too young for the club circuit that usually broke new acts. A club tour was also expensive for an artist nobody would pay to see yet.

So MCA flipped the problem. Instead of trying to get teenagers into a venue, it took the singer to where teenagers already spent their weekends. Her manager, Brad Schmidt, told the Los Angeles Times the plan was to go where 12-to-18-year-olds hang out: "America's playgrounds, the malls."

The run was billed as the "Tiffany Shopping Mall Tour '87." Before it began, the Los Angeles Times announced a June 23 start at Bergen Mall in Paramus, N.J., with a specially built stage and stops including Great Northern in the Cleveland area, Woodfield in suburban Chicago, Southdale outside Minneapolis and Southwest Plaza near Denver. The paper's verdict on a label sending a new artist on a mall concert tour: it "sounds like a first."

The shows were free and scheduled for summer so they wouldn't interrupt school. When the tour reached Woodfield Mall at the end of July, the Chicago Sun-Times listed seven sets across one weekend in the mall's Grand Court. "She performs alone on stage with a pre-recorded music track accompanying her," the paper reported. Tiffany was realistic about where she stood. "I'm not a big star yet by any means," she said.

She wasn't singing into a vacuum, either. According to Susan Orlean's 1988 Rolling Stone profile, "The Selling of Tiffany," she joined a sponsored mall tour that was already running, "Beautiful You: Celebrating the Good Life Shopping Mall Tour '87," organized by a company called Shopping Center Network, with sponsors including Toyota, Clairol and Adidas. Exactly who first thought of putting Tiffany in malls became a point of dispute, with competing accounts from MCA and her own camp in that same profile.

From a dozen people to a strategy

The crowds grew as the summer went on. By the end of the year, the Los Angeles Times was describing the tour as MCA's "novel way" of introducing her: three months of mall dates, "a dozen shows at each mall," and audiences of hundreds of teenage girls. People magazine dubbed her a "teenage mallflower."

A year later, MCA's Larry Solters laid out the math. "She was the first to do malls," he said. Around a dozen people watched at the first stop. By the end, after roughly 100 shows, crowds were reaching about 1,100.

The singles climbed the charts. By the spring of 1988, the Providence Journal was reporting that her debut had gone triple platinum and her first two singles had both hit No. 1. The idea, the paper said, had been "mentioned jokingly at first." Now it was being called "the most modern of musical marketing strategies."

It's worth being precise about what was new. Malls hosted entertainment long before 1987, and Tiffany joined a sponsor tour that was already underway. What contemporary coverage treated as a first was a record label using a national mall circuit to launch an unknown pop artist.

Everyone tries it

Once it worked, MCA ran it again. In late 1988 the label sent Boys Club, a duo featuring Gene Hunt of the Jets, through malls with free shows and record-store autograph sessions. "If the shopping mall circuit worked for Tiffany, will it work for others? MCA Records is counting on it," the Deseret News wrote ahead of the group's March 1989 weekend at the Ogden City Mall. "When an unknown teenage singer named Tiffany embarked upon a nationwide tour of shopping malls, most people snickered."

By then MCA had built an event marketing operation around the idea. Its 1989 "Magic of Hollywood" mall campaign mixed exhibits for MCA's records, movies and home video with live Boys Club sets, run by an executive who had come over from Shopping Center Network.

The same story showed the first cracks. The Boys Club kickoff at Topanga Plaza in Los Angeles drew a lukewarm crowd of a few hundred. Tiffany, who appeared only to accept a platinum award, was already worried about being typecast forever as the "mall girl."

The teen-pop comeback

The mall came back in a big way during the late-'90s teen-pop boom, and this time the crowds were bigger than anyone planned for.

On May 7, 1997, Hanson played Paramus Park Mall in New Jersey, in the same town where Tiffany's tour began ten years earlier. According to the Tulsa World's year-end review, the band had to be "rushed off the stage because the place was mobbed by a frenzied crowd topping 6,000 people." Fans took the laces out of Taylor's shoes. That November, "nearly 30,000 people" crammed into a shopping mall in Columbus for a free Hanson performance.

Britney Spears did a mall promotional tour in 1998, as her career was just getting started. She later told Pollstar it helped prepare her for a major tour.

And on May 6, 1999, *NSYNC drew about 20,000 people to Mall of America outside Minneapolis. That one was an autograph signing, not a concert, but Minnesota Public Radio reported it as the biggest crowd in the mall's history at that point.

The 2000s encore

Even established stars found a use for it. In early 2004, Avril Lavigne, already a multi-platinum artist, went out on what the Globe and Mail described as a tour of North American shopping malls to promote her second album. The shows were free and acoustic, with guitarist and co-writer Evan Taubenfeld, and times and locations were released only 48 hours ahead. At Toronto's Fairview Mall, where as many as 2,500 kids had turned up for her previous visit, the general manager expected twice that.

The same article noted that Hilary Duff had played Fairview the year before, and that there was still "that stigma surrounding mall tours." Seventeen years after Tiffany, the mall still worked, and artists were still a little embarrassed to be there.

Where you found the music

Mall concerts were never really a single era. They were a tactic that kept coming back whenever labels needed to put a young artist directly in front of a lot of teenagers, cheaply and fast.

For a while, the mall wasn't just where you bought the record. It was where you heard it first.

If you were in one of those crowds, whether it was twelve people in Paramus or thirty thousand in Columbus, that counts. Who was it?