MNEK Cancels Tour Over Poor Sales, High Costs — SkimNews
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- MNEK cancelled his upcoming UK and European tour for his second album Bulldozer!!, citing insufficient ticket sales and the show not being "ready to the standard" he wanted.
- MNEK said he joins other recent artists in cancelling due to "high production costs" and "over-ambitious planning," with tickets having started from about £30.
- The Pussycat Dolls called off almost the entire US leg of their reunion tour earlier this year following poor ticket sales, cited in the same report.
- Booking agent Joe Booley told BBC Newsbeat that shifts in post-Covid consumer spending are "definitely a contributing factor" to widespread tour cancellations.
- David Rowntree, chair of the Featured Artists Coalition and Blur drummer, told the BBC it was "virtually impossible now to make touring pay for itself."
- Zara Larsson, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, and Becky Hill publicly supported MNEK in his Instagram comments, with Hill noting "touring is devastatingly expensive."
- Fans waited eight years between MNEK's 2018 debut Language and Bulldozer!!, which was released last month and earned him a Grammy nomination for his work on Zara Larsson's Midnight Sun.
Why it matters: MNEK's cancellation is part of a growing wave of tour pullouts — the Pussycat Dolls scrapped most of their US reunion dates earlier this year — that industry figures like Joe Booley and David Rowntree link to post-Covid shifts in consumer spending and soaring production costs. For mid-tier and even Grammy-nominated artists, the economics of touring now appear to require either downsizing venues or scrapping shows entirely.
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