NEWS
Jonas Brothers onstage during their Jonas Brothers: The Remember This Tour on Sept. 16, 2021.
Tammie Arroyo via Mega AgencyBillboard has recently recapped a series of 2021 tours that made their millions in 2019, with dates that went on sale before COVID and then were postponed to this summer and fall. Here, we see the Jonas Brothers back on the road with one of the first true post-pandemic stage shows.
The JoBros announced the Remember This Tour in May during a post-vaccine and pre-delta-variant sweet spot, just as music fans were considering a return to large, public, in-person gatherings. Playing amphitheaters in 40 cities across the U.S. between Aug. 20 and Oct. 27, Joe, Kevin and Nick brought in $42.5 million and sold 529,000 tickets, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore.
The tour’s inarguable highlight -- in terms of gross and paid attendance -- was the group’s Oct. 1 play at Boston’s Fenway Park, grossing $2.6 million and selling 31,400 tickets. The date calls back to the Jonases' first-ever Boxscore report: a Sept. 20, 2006 show at Boston's Axis venue. Very much not a stadium, the sellable capacity at the club was 650, but the show only sold 236 tickets and grossed $2,800. Over the band’s 15-year touring career, they’ve grown their selling power in Boston 133 times over, and by elevating their ticket price beyond 2006’s $12 general admission price, they've boosted their earnings power 932 times.
The Boston baseball park has also been home to post-COVID home runs by Guns N’ Roses, Billy Joel, the Hella Mega Tour and Zac Brown Band, all within a one-week window (Aug. 3-8), packing in a relatively full concert season into an abridged timeframe as venues slowly reopened late in the summer.
Beyond the Boston show, the Remember This Tour hit highlights at the Hersheypark Stadium in Hershey, Pa., with 20,000 tickets sold and at the closing date in L.A., with just over $2 million earned at the Hollywood Bowl.
Overall, the Remember This Tour averaged $1.01 million and 12,600 tickets per show. It’s the band’s third tour to pace more than $1 million per concert, following World Tour 2009 and 2019’s Happiness Begins Tour. And it is their fifth run with a five-figure sales number, following the 2008-09 Burnin’ Up Tour, World Tour 2009, World Tour 2010 and Happiness Begins Tour.
The newest reports send the Jonas Brothers past two significant Boxscore milestones: Their career totals have crossed the $300 million ($318.8 million) and 4 million tickets (4.39 million) thresholds. The Remember This Tour was promoted by Live Nation and supported by Kelsea Ballerini. The band is represented by UTA.
NEWS
No matter what you thought of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake battle, there was only one undisputed winner by the end of it all: the reaction community in the worlds of streaming and YouTube. Your favorite content creators broke down the bars, reacted to all the most shocking moments, and helped this showdown become one of hip-hop's most culturally significant and resonant moments in a long time... For better or worse. See, the battle's technically not over yet, but only because the 6ix God's idea of victory is clearly quite different. In his federal defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group – his label – for releasing K.Dot's "Not Like Us," he named various content creators who allegedly helped boost the track's widespread popularity and, as a result, its supposedly defamatory nature.
Furthermore, the specific allegation that Drake brings up in this highly controversial lawsuit is that UMG "whitelisted" copyright claims for YouTubers, streamers, etc. concerning "Not Like Us." This means that they would be able to monetize their content without facing a copyright claim from UMG over "Not Like Us," and this isn't really an allegation because various creators have backed this up. But a few important (alleged) caveats that people are talking about online need to be clear. First, "whitelisting" supposedly happens on behalf of a record label behind a song like the West Coast banger, and UMG is instead the distributor of that track. Secondly, as rapper and online personality ScruFaceJean brings up as seen in the post below, tracks like "Push Ups" were also "whitelisted" by its team.
Along with Jean, many other of your favorite content creators spoke out against this Drake lawsuit. Zias! and B.Lou, for example, spoke with their lawyer about the possibility of countersuing for emotional distress, as they found the Toronto superstar's accusations and his implication of them very disturbing and misguided. NoLifeShaq also dragged The Boy through the mud, calling him "soft" and positing that, whether "whitelisting" happened or not, they would react to "Not Like Us" accordingly as they did to his own tracks.
In addition, it's important to bring up that many others fans have pointed to how Drake excitedly used streamers to generate hype and reaction clips for his own diss tracks against Kendrick Lamar. The most direct example is with Kai Cenat, whom he texted to "stay on stream" before dropping "Family Matters." Ironically, the Twitch giant appears in this clowned-upon defamation lawsuit as an example of what the OVO mogul's accusations and implications are. And one more thing: there is no direct link between monetization and algorithmic boosting on sites like YouTube. With all this in mind, content creators seem to feel almost insulted at the idea that they only reacted to the two biggest rappers in the world beefing with each other because one of them would allow them to make money. If Drizzy knew the first thing about the reaction community, maybe he wouldn't have included this...
