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Arcade Fire
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Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
Arcade Fire
The Suburbs
Arcade Fire
Everything Now
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Arcade Fire Reportedly Playing to Smaller Crowds Than Expected

Arcade Fire
Jason Tate

The Globe and Mail are reporting that Arcade Fire are having trouble filling arenas on their current tour:

Blame it on the new album or the marketing campaign for it, or on ticket prices and the popularity of rock music in 2017. Whatever the case, Arcade Fire is struggling to fill arenas on its North American tour.

Just 4,263 fans showed up for the Canadian band’s Quebec City show, 4,004 in Tampa, 5,614 in Austin, Tex., and 5,051 in Dallas, Billboard and Pollstar boxscore figures show. All of the venues have a capacity to seat roughly 10,000 to 20,000 people.

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Review: Arcade Fire – Everything Now

Craig Manning

When Arcade Fire won the Album of the Year Grammy for The Suburbs, it felt like the beginning of something. Six years on from Funeral, the record that made the band torchbearers of the critically acclaimed indie rock scene, here they were, finally being recognized on the big stage. The records they beat—pop juggernauts from Katy Perry, Eminem, Lady Gaga, and Lady Antebellum—were all more indicative of what the radio sounded like in 2010. But Arcade Fire’s victory showed that, maybe, the pop world was finally ready to embrace something darker and more nuanced. Maybe they were ready to let a rock band back into the fold.

Looking back now, the Grammy win feels more like the end of something. Future Grammy winners didn’t sound or look much like Arcade Fire. Neither did radio stars. Instead, on 2013’s Reflektor, Arcade Fire started looking (and sounding) a lot like the pop insiders. Just like most of the other marquee acts that released albums that year—Daft Punk, Justin Timberlake (x2), Jay-Z, Eminem, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga—Arcade Fire made it clear that they were going for a capital-B Blockbuster. The rollout was excessive and overblown; the album was long and ambitious; the hype stretched on for months. And the songs…well, they didn’t have that much to offer, at the end of the deep, deep rabbit hole that Arcade Fire dug for fans. Writing for Grantland, Steven Hyden called 2013 “The Year Music Failed to Blockbust.” He wasn’t wrong, and Arcade Fire was at the center of it.

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When a Once Great Band Gets a Forever Pass

Arcade Fire
Jason Tate

Chris DeVille, writing at Stereogum, talks about how since Arcade Fire released great music in the past, they have become too big to fail:

The mighty would have fallen by now, but their reputation is propping them up. That’s how it goes when your rock band becomes too big to fail. You grab enough people by the heart when they’re young and impressionable, you get to be a big deal forever, whether your moment of excellence lasted well over a decade (like U2 or the Rolling Stones) or just for an album or two (like Weezer and the Strokes). Call it brand loyalty, wishful thinking, whatever. It’s a fact of the music business. Creative death can’t kill the world’s biggest rock bands — only actual death, and sometimes not even that.

I’ve only heard a couple songs on the new Arcade Fire album, so I can’t comment on that directly, but I do think this is an interesting phenomenon in general. When an artist’s prior work creates an unstoppable gravitational force of fandom.

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