JP Saxe performs at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena in March, 2023.Arthur Mola
JP Saxe was ready to roll across North America this fall on his latest concert tour, but those plans are now hanging by a thread as the Grammy-nominated musician confronts sluggish ticket sales and the soaring cost of life on the road.
The Toronto singer-songwriter took to his social media earlier this week with a plea to his fans, saying that if he didn’t sell about 20,000 tickets to his upcoming Make Yourself at Home tour within 48 hours, it would likely be cancelled.
“I thought we could maybe do it,” he said in a video interview with The Canadian Press.
“It’s looking like maybe we can’t. And that’s sad, but also just part of what it means to be an artist.”
While a definitive call hadn’t been made on his tour’s fate by Wednesday evening, he said the prospects weren’t looking good.
Saxe is scheduled to play more than 25 dates across North America, including Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, where most venues hold a couple thousand people. Tickets start at around $50, which is on the low end of prices for musicians of his calibre.
Live music is under massive pressure compounded by a shaky economy, years of inflation and concert ticket prices that in many cases skyrocketed by hundreds of dollars this year.
“We tried to keep the prices as low as we possibly could,” Saxe said.
“(It’s) more than a movie ticket but a hell of a lot less than going to the Rogers Centre to see the Weeknd.”
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Saxe is best known for his 2019 smash pop single If the World Was Ending with Julia Michaels and since then, he’s released a consistent flow of popular tracks, including Hey Stupid, I Love You and I Don’t Miss You.
But he says activity on streaming platforms doesn’t necessarily translate into a profitable touring model.
“My last tour was mostly sold out in every city and we lost about $200,000,” he said.
“Touring is really expensive unless you do it in the most bare bones way, you know, if you want to be in a van with two people, play solo and have no lights. (This time,) we didn’t do anything crazy expensive. It was basic stuff, like a bass player.”
“The basics are expensive,” he added. “A bus is expensive.”
Saxe’s experience offered rare insight into a corner of the music business for artists who are popular but not among the elite superstars who fill arenas and stadiums.
Typically, when tours aren’t selling well, musicians bow out by blaming illness or scheduling conflicts.
“Artists don’t want to look like they’re falling off,” he said.
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Saxe said that while others advised him against sharing that ticket sales have fallen short, he felt there was no other option but to tell the truth.
“As a general rule, I’m always trying to practice sincerity in failure rather than the facade of success,” he said.
“I think it’s really tempting as an artist, or as anyone, to always be projecting that everything is great at all times. And I find that uninteresting and disingenuous.”
Like many musicians, Saxe reaped the financial benefits of his deal with a major record label. Often, labels sign new artists with an agreement to cover the costs of their first tours in exchange for a larger share of other facets of their career, such as streaming revenues.
Saxe said he is at the end of a three-album deal with his label. As part of it, the label wasn’t going to cover this tour, which meant he “couldn’t lose that much money,” as in the past. He said that meant he needed to book larger venues to offset the costs.
“We put so much time and effort … to get it to a place where it would break even,” he said.
“Even if we can do this tour, it won’t make money, but we won’t lose money. That was kind of the goal.”
Saxe said this experience has been “a reminder of how powerful it can be when you’re just transparent about what it looks like to be an artist.”
His initial video has racked up 1.5 million views on TikTok and more than 10,000 likes on Instagram.
A second one posted on Tuesday showed a crowd singing along to his song A Little Bit Yours with the message: “I thought it was impossible, but there’s a chance you’re saving this tour.”
Whether his tour goes forward or not, Saxe said it won’t much change his approach to his music.
“My goal in the broader sense is to continue to make art in the most transparent way possible,” he said.
“At the end of the day, I didn’t get into making music to hide from anyone. It was quite the opposite.”