Somebody bought 5,430 tickets to a Pitbull show in Syracuse in September 2024, close to a third of the amphitheater's estimated capacity, and the Justice Department says it was one company. On referral from the FTC, it's suing broker REPS & Company and three of its executives under the BOTS Act, alleging they used thousands of accounts to buy more than 18.5 million tickets to at least 83,500 events, spending over $1.3 billion and making at least $120.8 million on resale. The complaint says the same approach got 7,624 tickets to Beyoncé in Kansas City in October 2023, against limits of four to eight per buyer. REPS president Brian Archibald told TicketNews, "REPS does not do any of that." If the complaint holds up, part of the answer to "how did it sell out in a minute" has a San Diego address.
The Long Take
What the sound engineer decides and what the room decides
Olivia Dean was three songs into the last night of her tour on Saturday, a sold-out show for more than 40,000 people at Auckland's rebuilt Western Springs Bowl, when the sound went, and it stayed gone for almost 40 minutes.
The band decides what gets played and what comes off the stage. What you actually hear is a balance one person sets live: the front-of-house engineer, standing at a desk out in the crowd. And whether that mix reaches your seat depends on the speakers, the room and a volume limit the engineer often didn't pick, and at plenty of club and theater shows all three belong to the venue.
Dean's own engineer, Callum Lloyd-Williams, told TPi this summer that he just sticks her vocals up front and goes for coverage over volume, trying to make every seat sound the same. Those are his calls to make every night, and they're the ones that decide whether you hear the words. "Trying" is the right word, though, because a lot of what decides your seat isn't on his desk.
When Panic! at the Disco toured theaters in 2014, they brought their own consoles but played through whatever PA each venue had, and their monitor engineer told ProSoundWeb that some nights he got 15 minutes to tune it. Blue Öyster Cult's engineer, Steve La Cerra, wrote in Mix about an amphitheater where his desk sat at the bottom of the bowl, out of reach of the main PA. So the person mixing your show can be standing in a spot where it sounds very different from your seat.
Then there's the limit. Hyde Park's summer concerts have run under a licence that caps the sound measured outside the park, and when Arcade Fire played there in 2011, fans said it was too quiet and NME put it down to the restrictions. That's a ceiling written into a licence, and the most anyone at the desk can do is work under it. Two summers later a new system there got the crowd up to 6dB louder without breaking the limit, by mapping the site and aiming the speakers at the people. The Skrillex fans arguing this week over whether his Head Trip set sounded broken or perfect were, at least some of them, describing where they stood.
None of which explains Saturday. Dean's promoter said the Auckland outage was the tour's own production, not the brand-new venue, which is the one place everyone would have blamed first. A band can bring its own engineer and its own rig and still lose the sound completely, with no room or limit involved.
When she came back she said, "We're going to give you what you paid for," and played the whole set, finishing about 50 minutes late.
This Week in Shows
Twenty One Pilots' longest show, at home. Twenty One Pilots played 38 songs at Ohio Stadium in Columbus on Saturday, the longest show of their career, with the Ohio State Marching Band coming out for "Seven Nation Army." "Goner" opened a show for the first time and "Isle of Flightless Birds" got its first full play since 2014, per Kerrang's Ohio Stadium recap. Hometown, biggest room in town, and they played like they didn't want to leave.
Billy Joel on what a show costs him. Billy Joel told The Hollywood Reporter he doesn't know when he'll play again, and that his neurologist told him "every time you do a show, it's like you're getting a concussion." Joel, who has normal pressure hydrocephalus and cancelled shows in 2025, says he has to take a series of tests before he knows, per Joel's health update. It's about as plain a description of what a show does to a body as you'll hear.
Tini's same-day Miami cancellation. Tini called off her Kaseya Center show in Miami on Sunday, the day of the show, saying the arena was handed over late and unfinished, with sound, lights, video and communications not working and safety inspections not done. "This was not a simple technical issue," she wrote, and her promoter, Ake Music, backs her, while the arena hasn't commented, per Consequence's Tini report. Refunds go back through the point of purchase and there's no make-up date, which doesn't cover anybody's flight.
Miley Cyrus answers night one from the stage. Miley Cyrus played her first headline shows in years at the Hollywood Bowl last weekend, with Wayne Coyne joining for "Do You Realize??" and the debut of "Let's Get Married" with her fiancé Maxx Morando. Her last full headline tour was in 2014. On the second night she answered the online criticism of the first: "One thing I will not stand is any question about where my heart is when I'm on the stage," per Stereogum's Bowl recap. That's an artist answering the internet's verdict before the run was even over.
The Venue Report
World Stage in Philadelphia, which opened in 2004 as World Cafe Live, closes on Halloween with a party that night. CEO J. Sean Diaz didn't dress it up: "It has proven near impossible to sustain an independent small to mid-sized live performance venue," he told the Inquirer, pointing to the lease, legacy debt, the lack of institutional and philanthropic support, and how much of the market Ticketmaster, Live Nation and AEG control. The lease with Penn ended in a bankruptcy-court settlement after talks on a new one failed. WXPN, which shares the building, will keep its Friday Free at Noon shows there, so the station's lunchtime sets outlive the venue. It's the second Philly room to close this autumn, after The Fire.
The longest Grateful Dead show on record, at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., on June 10, 1973.
Then
Thirty years ago this Halloween, Phish walked into the Omni in Atlanta and played Talking Heads' Remain in Light front to back as their second set, with Karl Perazzo on percussion and Dave Grippo and Gary Gazaway on horns. Fans found out at the door, from a Playbill handed out on the way in, and the band had stopped letting fans vote and picked the album themselves, per the Omni setlist page. It came out later as Live Phish Volume 15. The fall tour ended Oct. 12 and the next run is New Year's at the Garden, so this Halloween there's nothing to wait up for.
Fan Debate
Paul Cauthen stopped "Prayed for Rain" twice in Grand Junction, Colorado, last week and wouldn't start again until security walked out two people who'd been talking through it. He'd warned them first, said he could hear their argument through his in-ears, and told the room "people pay money to be here," per American Songwriter's account. Most of the reaction online backed him. I'm with him on the in-ears part: if the singer can hear you, everybody near you definitely can. But stopping the song costs the whole room the song. Would you rather the artist stop the show, or let security handle it and keep playing?
The Practical Bit
System of a Down are playing one North American show in all of 2027: the Rose Bowl on June 5, with Pierce the Veil. Ticketmaster registration for the presale closes tonight at 9pm PT, the artist presale is Oct. 23 and the general sale is Oct. 26, per JamBase's Rose Bowl story. If you're flying in from anywhere else on the continent, that's your whole planning window.
B-Sides
- Chappell Roan at the Forum. Charli XCX brought out Chappell Roan for "Boom Clap," the song's first appearance on this tour, plus PinkPantheress, The Dare and Adéla across two nights in Inglewood, per Stereogum's Forum recap.
- Big Thief's tape room. Big Thief opened a free live archive modeled on the Grateful Dead's, with ten full shows and a new one added the second Tuesday of every month. If you were at one of those ten nights, you can go back and hear it.
- Dylan, still rewriting. Bob Dylan opened his autumn tour in Oslo with live debuts of Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" and Guy Clark's "Dublin Blues," and brought "Tangled Up in Blue" back for the first time since 2018 with rewritten verses, per Stereogum's Oslo recap.
- Emmylou sings Gram. Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello and The Black Crowes lead "A Song for Gram" at the Troubadour on Nov. 11, three days before Gram Parsons' Hall of Fame induction, with tickets on sale Oct. 22.
- Dickinson, offstage. After a fan's flare filled the stage with smoke in Quito, Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson told the crowd "I cannot sing at all if you light flares! I cannot breathe," then sang from backstage out of view.
- The Ramble barn in court. Amy Helm has sued to retake control of Levon Helm Studios, home of the Midnight Ramble, while the studio's own suit accuses her of misusing funds, which she denies. Two August Rambles were postponed.
The Bit
Adele, dressed as Morticia Addams for Halloween weekend 2023 at her Las Vegas residency, broke off "When We Were Young" with "Oh my God Colin!" and went to hug a man in the crowd. Her explanation to everyone else, per CNN's report: "That man delivered my baby."
If you're at World Stage before Halloween, stay for the last song.
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