AP Fall Ball

Last night I was at the Avalon in Hollywood for the Alternative Press Fall Ball Tour, featuring (in order of appearance) You Me At Six, The Secret Handshake, Set Your Goals, Mayday Parade and The Academy Is..., which led me to this whole train of thinking about the music magazine business as well as the formulation of lineups for tours.

A little bit of background and basics about AP and all the bands. Alternative Press is a popular music magazine, specializing in the pop/punk/hardcore/emo genres - think Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, Paramore, Green Day. With the boom of the internet leading to the demise of print media, the magazine has suffered in subscriptions and has also slowly begun to loose some of its clout in the music industry. The magazine, while always a very feature-driven publication, has nonetheless developed its online presence by driving readers to exclusive online content, including first-listens, timely photo stories and shorter and more frequent feature pieces. Although readership may be decreasing, getting on the cover of AP is still a big deal for a band, and a feature in the magazine will still be displayed prominently in your press kit/clippings. So despite when people say "who the hell reads AP anymore these days," it's still kind of a big deal?

Moving onto the bands on the AP Fall Ball: Mayday Parade co-headlining with The Academy Is... Mayday Parade, just a mere couple of years ago, was the unsigned band following Warped Tour all summer, not playing Warped Tour mind you, but working the lines and selling their CDs outside the venues. Fast forward a couple of years, they landed a record deal with Fearless Records and have just released their second LP. The Academy Is..., pop-punk darlings from about 2005-2007 (at least I would say), have 3 albums under their belt and a newly released EP. Set Your Goals --> bay area pop-punk/melodic hardcore band --> a solid and growing fan base. The Secret Handshake - synth pop, sang to a backing track and wayy overused auto-tune live. Not interested. You Me At Six, British pop(-punk) imports, kind of the All Time Low of the UK.

Set Your Goals is a band that I think doesn't fit in to this tour - all the other bands on the bill fall way more on the pop side of the pop-punk scale. The hardcore SYG fans don't give a shit about The Secret Handshake and vice versa. Now the question: why put a band like this on a tour like this? Is it a good thing that they don't sound like all the other bands? Is this an opportunity for SYG fans to perhaps discover something new, and an opportunity for Mayday Parade fans to discover SYG? Possibly. There will definitely be some people who will discover a new band they like. There will also be a lot of people who don't stay for the rest of the show after Set Your Goals play, or don't show up until Mayday Parade plays. There are also people who are Set Your Goals fans who won't buy tickets to the show because they don't care about the rest of the bands in the line-up. Does this hurt ticket sales? If so, how much?

Are tours with varied line-ups a good risk or a bad risk? The AP Fall Ball is far from an extreme example, but let's take a look at a couple of the artists they have up for the vote for their spring tour - The Cab, Every Avenue, Fun., Good Old War, Never Shout Never, Frank Turner, Sing It Loud. We could go extremely pop here or go the more indie/acoustic route. What if it were Good Old War, Every Avenue, Never Shout Never? Would the tour sell? Does having a varied bill of artists fragment your audience (and cash flow) or does it coalesce into one nicely diverse crowd?


(note: festivals, whole different ball game. more artists, more stages, more all-around experiences.)