The Black Keys had a bit of a rocky 2024 thanks to the cancellation of their arena tour, reportedly due to poor sales, as well as backlash to that weird crypto show. Now, in a new interview with Rolling Stone, core members Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney spoke for the first time about the various fiascos.
“The essential thing that we learned here was how many management companies are directly connected to a company that runs every single aspect of promotion in this country,” Carney not-so-subtly said of The Black Key’s last year. “This whole industry is so intertwined from ticketing to promotion to the management company. But essentially as artists — and this is the thing that we care the most about — it’s almost impossible to talk about this…. You’re dealing with management companies that co-own festivals with this other company. You’re at the [whims] of these people who have other interests.”
When discussing the cancellation of their “International Players Tour,” a debacle that resulted in the band firing their management and public relations teams, Carney and Auerbach blamed the bleak state of the music industry. Without ever mentioning specific names or corporations (because, as they put it, “It’s all very fucked up, and the bottom line is that we can’t even really talk about it because we won’t be able to work”), the duo alleged that their management prioritized their industry partners and relationship with a powerful ticketing company (context clues tell us it might rhyme with Cricketblaster) over the interests of the band.
“We kept having to move shit around for a Manchester show because there was a venue that our management company co-owned and wanted us to play, and it wasn’t ready,” Carney explained. “There’s a concentration of connectivity that eliminates competition… Our tour, we had about 10 [arena] shows that were not doing great. They were just in rooms that they shouldn’t have been in. So in any situation like this tour, we might’ve had to take one on the chin and find new venues to play in certain cities, but instead we were advised to cancel the whole tour. We were told … there were other venues being booked, and it was all going to get into more intimate rooms, and it would be great. But that wasn’t accurate. That didn’t exist.”
“The thing that most people don’t understand is that when you control ticketing, promotion, and all this stuff, and then you get into owning the venues and then having shared interests with management, it just becomes harder and harder [for artists] to do business,” Carney continued, touching on the dangers of consolidation in the music industry.
Later in the interview, the band defended their decision to play the “America Loves Crypto” concert, an Akron event organized by the Stand with Crypto Alliance political action committee, as a necessity after losing out on the revenue of the “International Players” tour.
“It was very simple: We had lost all of our income for the year,” Carny said. “We had retainers for people that we were working with. We got offered a lot of money to play a show, and we saw that the Black Pumas had done the same event and we were like, ‘Book it.’ It’s that simple, bro.”
“Of course we saw all the shit coming in, but it was like, ‘What are you going to do?’ We were told it was a bipartisan thing. It was what it is. It was very small. It was in our hometown, so we got to go home and see our folks. I’ve definitely seen my name in bad light in the press before, so it wasn’t anything fucking new … If us playing a concert for 300 people is going to sway the whole state’s vote, then we have bigger fucking problems, bro.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Auerbach and Carney addressed criticism over their high ticket prices, refer to the events of 2024 as “trauma,” and discuss their plans to learn from the experience and move forward.
Earlier this week, The Black Keys announced a new run of dates. The “No Rain No Flowers Tour” will see the band performing at more modest theaters and previews the band’s next album of the same name, which they said will be released later in the year.