JP Saxe Says Tour May Be Canceled ‘If I Don’t Sell 20,000 Tickets in Two Days,’ Addresses Challenges in the Live Market

JP Saxe has done what many artists in his position tend to avoid: in a post captioned “fuck being cool about this,” he’s coming clean with fans about the fact that if more tickets aren’t sold before the launch of his tour in September, he’ll have to cancel the entire trek.

“I’m extremely embarrassed to tell you this, but I’m going to tell you anyway,” he said in a TikTok posted on Monday, giving a refreshing sense of realism and lack of self-pity about the situation. “If I don’t sell 20 or so thousand tickets to my tour in the next 48 hours, it’s going to be canceled.” Tours often sell strongly at on sale, then hit a lull in the months or weeks leading up to the actual shows, when hemhawing fans purchase last-minute tickets.

The singer, who was nominated for song of the year at the Grammys in 2021 and has become a go-to songwriter outside of his solo career, told fans that if they were thinking of buying a ticket to his show closer to its launch on Sept. 9, there likely would not be a show to attend.

“If we’re just not in the place yet to sell out these 2,000, 3,000-cap venues, that’s fine,” he continued. “It’s always been my goal to connect deeply not widely and I stand by that. But just in case you were waiting until the week of or night of to buy a ticket, that approach just isn’t going to work because there won’t be a show to buy a ticket to.”

It’s a revealing and respectable position to take as a working touring artist, as many musicians who come up short on sales have largely opted to quietly cancel their tours or entirely downscale them, often avoiding the reason being that ticket sales may have played a crucial part in those decisions.

Over the past year or so, the Black Keys and the Fugees opted for a quiet cancellation, with Ticketmaster serving as the only source of truth that the tours had been called off. (Ms. Lauryn Hill did acknowledge the next day that it was due to low ticket sales; the Black Keys addressed it much later.)

Just last week, rapper Ken Carson appeared to have quietly canceled his tour that was set to launch yesterday, as venues notified fans and Ticketmaster listed almost all the shows as canceled. In June, Jonas Brothers downsized six of their stadium shows and rebooked them for the same dates in smaller venues without giving much of an explanation.

Saxe is one of the few mainstream artists who has been upfront about low ticket sales being a true threat to a tour’s vitality. His “Make Yourself at Home” tour, named after his June album, is still slated to begin on Sept. 9 at Edmonton’s Midway Music Hall, with planned stops across Canada and the United States including Los Angeles, Nashville and Brooklyn. In subsequent TikToks, he said that there’s a chance the tour could be saved following the response to his initial post.