Advertisement

Why don’t certain bands and tours come to Tampa? Here are five reasons

 
Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Sons performs live on stage at Autodromo de Interlagos on March 12, 2016 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by Mauricio Santana/Getty Images)
Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Sons performs live on stage at Autodromo de Interlagos on March 12, 2016 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by Mauricio Santana/Getty Images)
Published Sept. 18, 2017|Updated Dec. 7, 2021

Richard Reed Parry has never been to Tampa. You don’t need to remind him. He knows.

"We didn't start out playing in Florida at all," said the multi-instrumentalist for Montreal indie rockers Arcade Fire. "We didn't get offers down there, and the tours that we booked just didn't hit Florida. So we kind of missed it."

Fans in Tampa are well aware.

When you love a band, it can feel like a personal slight when they don't bring their tour to town. Some artists skip major American markets for decades at a time; others never visit at all. Barbra Streisand made her first trip to Tampa last fall. Queen, Peter Gabriel, Daft Punk and Adele have never come.

This week, two major bands are playing Tampa Bay for the first time: Mumford and Sons on Wednesday at Amalie Arena, and Arcade Fire on Friday at the USF Sun Dome. Both share an enviable cool factor, having reaped enormous critical and commercial success and headlined every major festival in the world. Tampa, however, has eluded them.

RELATED: What authors, restaurants and events is Tampa missing out on?

Every city faces challenges in trying to attract certain bands, and Tampa is no different. Here are five reasons why:

1. Geography.

Planning and executing — or "routing" — a tour can be expensive, and getting to far-flung cities eats up extra time and money. The hassle of getting buses into and out of a peninsula like Florida scares many bands off.

"If you look at the southeast U.S., if you come to Florida, you lose a day traveling in, and you lose a day traveling out," said Kevin Preast, senior vice president of event management at Amalie Arena. "They can hit New Orleans, hit Birmingham, hit Atlanta and hit Charlotte in a seam of days. Sometimes the promoters or agents are given 40 dates in 60 days to figure out the most efficient routing, where they're going to maximize their audience as well as their time, and sometimes (Florida) doesn't play into it."

But isn't Florida the third-most populous state in America? Isn't it full of major cities?

Yes, but that brings us to...

2. Orlando.

A lot of acts don't want to cannibalize their audience by playing two shows within a 90-minute drive of one another. That's why you might see Jay-Z or Metallica playing Orlando but not Tampa, or U2 or Lady Gaga playing Tampa but not Orlando.

“When I first got here, a lot of times I heard, ‘Well, Tampa got it last time, so it’s going to Orlando,’ or ‘Orlando got it last time, so you’re getting it this time,’ " Preast said. “If you’re talking about the 11th-largest market and the 18th-largest market, if we were in different states, you wouldn’t see them as an either-or.”

The venues booking these acts sometimes don't mind a crowd. Ruth Eckerd Hall, for example, has coordinated tours with performing arts halls around the state to help entice an artist who might otherwise be reluctant to play Florida. "Piggybacking helps," said Bobby Rossi, the hall's executive vice president for entertainment.

Planning your weekend?

Planning your weekend?

Subscribe to our free Top 5 things to do newsletter

We’ll deliver ideas every Thursday for going out, staying home or spending time outdoors.

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Explore all your options

Preast said less than 3 percent of Amalie ticket buyers come from Orlando. Plenty of acts this fall will play both cities — Mumford and Sons, Bruno Mars, Katy Perry — and he'd like to see it happen more.

"You look at it on a map, and it's maybe an inch apart," he said. "Come drive I-4. See how far that inch really is."

3. The venues.

To book an artist, you have to have the right venue. And not every city does. From the '70s into the '90s, many tours through Central Florida played the Lakeland Center, as neither Tampa nor Orlando had a top-flight arena to match it.

"For a long, long time, this market wasn't on the radar as a must-play market," Rossi said. "To think that Carole King wouldn't have played Tampa Bay with her success until 2004, when we brought her in, is mind-boggling to me."

Today, Orlando doesn't have a huge amphitheater, which means major outdoor tours come instead to Tampa's MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre. Orlando has two large rock clubs, Hard Rock Live and House of Blues, in a capacity class (2,500 to 3,000) that Tampa Bay lacks.

4. National perception.

For all its hip neighborhoods and booming craft breweries, Tampa Bay still isn't a mecca of cultural coolness. Parry said that while Arcade Fire might easily draw 20,000 in New York, the crowds go way down in smaller cities.

"When you're a club band, you're just going where anyone will give you money to play, wherever you can draw enough people that it makes it worth the while of doing it," he said. "Once you get to a level where you're doing a big show, it becomes kind of restrictive."

One of Preast's goals at Amalie is to preach the gospel of Tampa Bay's economic and demographic development over the past 20 years.

"Tampa in 2017 is totally different from what Tampa was in 2007, and if you go back to 1997, it's night and day," he said. "There's still some perception out there that Florida has an influx of snowbirds and stuff like that — the demos are older, or maybe not as dynamic in a musical sense. We're telling stories now and showing them real data that's breaking those myths."

RELATED: Here are the biggest bands that have never played Tampa

5. Artists don't come here because ... well, they've never been here.

As Parry said, once you get into a habit of not playing a market, it's easy to keep skipping it.

"It's a bit of a snowball effect," he said. "If you start playing in a place that you do well in, then you continue to go back to that place and play there."

That's been the case with the Brian Setzer Orchestra, whose popular annual holiday tour Rossi has tried to bring to Ruth Eckerd Hall for more than a dozen years. It's coming for the first time on Nov. 28.

"You only have a limited window," Rossi said, and as an artist, "you want to return to (cities) that are successful. So they can only add one, maybe two a year."

Artists generally try to reward cities with patient, loyal and vocal fans.

"You try, throughout your career, to hit every spot, instead of going to the same major cities all the time," said Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas of the pop/R&B group TLC, which hasn't played Tampa since the '90s.

On early tours with MC Hammer, she said, "we would go to small places like Macon, Ga., and be in a really small place, and he was like, 'It doesn't matter. Fans are fans. It doesn't matter if there's 10,000 or 500. They're fans, and they love you and they deserve a great show.' I was like, You know what, you are so right. That's how I think, because it's true. Everybody can't get to those major cities, for whatever reason, so you go to them."

Arcade Fire found that out in 2013, when, after years of fan outcry, they played their first Florida concert, in Miami.

"For somewhere that we had randomly not played for ages, we really loved being there," Parry said. "It felt fresh, so we were like, 'Geez, we're jerks. How come we've never played more in this state?' It's got its own cool thing."

Contact Jay Cridlin at cridlin@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8336. Follow @JayCridlin.

FIND CONCERTS: Search hundreds of upcoming shows in our database

FOLLOW: Soundcheck on Twitter