Weak ticket sales undo 16-city Lollapalooza tour

The organizers of the Lollapalooza rock festival on Tuesday surrendered in the face of fan apathy and called off their entire 16-city tour, which had included July stops in Chula Vista and Ventura and was led by venerable alternative rock heroes such as the Pixies, Morrissey and Sonic Youth.

It was a crushing defeat for the brand-name festival that helped mold the alt-rock success of the early 1990s and also created a template for ubiquitous multi-act road shows such as Ozzfest and the Warped Tour. In the end, it was those competitors and an overall summer malaise in the concert business that forced the shuttering of the tour.

“I am in utter disbelief that a concert of this stature, with the most exciting lineup I’ve seen in years, did not galvanize ticket sales,” Lollapalooza co-founder Marc Geiger said in a statement on the festival website. “I’m surprised that given the great bands and the reduced ticket prices that we didn’t have enough sales to sustain the tour. Concert promoters across the country are facing similar problems. Many summer tours are experiencing weak ticket sales.”

Concert industry observers agreed with those appraisals but also saw some built-in weaknesses within the planning of this Lollapalooza tour that made it especially vulnerable. Ray Waddell, the editor of concert touring coverage for Billboard magazine, said the two-day shows, some scheduled midweek, posed the festival as a “very youth-aimed” venture whose headliners Morrissey, the Pixies and even the Flaming Lips did not match up with.

“Pixies fans and PJ Harvey fans are older now, they have kids and jobs and they would probably rather go see them at a theater than at an eight-hour show in the sun,” Waddell said. “The name of the show can’t carry it. But these guys are some of the most creative minds in the touring business, so I don’t think this is a death knell for Lollapalooza.”

The franchise began 13 years ago when Geiger and Perry Farrell, the lead singer of Jane’s Addiction, created the festival as a traveling carnival of eclectic rock with a mix of big-name acts and newer artists with boutique allure. Among the groups that were stars of early Lollapalooza tours: Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine.

The tour went on a six-year hiatus that ended last year and Farrell said Tuesday that the franchise would return again.

“Unexhausted is our virtue,” he said in a statement through a publicist. “We are taking Lollapalooza back and plan on rebuilding and re-creating the festival in surroundings more conducive to the cultural experience we’ve become known for.”

Gary Bongiovanni of the concert industry trade publication Pollstar said the singularity Lollapalooza enjoyed in 1991 no longer exists. Now there is a glut of multi-act concert options, whether radio-station shows such as the KROQ-FM (106.7) Weenie Roast or massive, one-off festivals such as the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, or Lollapalooza-inspired tours such as Warped.

“There’s way too many tours out and too many with tickets that cost too much, and a market correction is coming,” Bongiovanni said. Lollapalooza tickets bucked that big-dollar trend -- the Ventura stop was $50 per day or $75 for a two-day pass -- but it could not escape the industry’s soft sales. The other shows not only compete for fans’ ticket money, their headline acts sometimes overlap.

Refunds will be given at the point of purchase and fans can check the tour website, www.lollapalooza.com, for more information.