History TroubledProduction / MusicConcertsToursAndFestivals

*** For starters, based on 2018 winner Netta's cheer of "Next year in Jerusalem!" as she took the trophy (meant mostly as a tongue-in-cheek reference to a Jewish saying spoken at the end of the Passover seder), Prime Minister UsefulNotes/BenjaminNetanyahu and his loyalists immediately declared the 2019 contest would be held in Jerusalem, just as the previous two Eurovisions held in Israel were. This posed some immediate problems: Jerusalem didn't have a large enough indoor arena to host the contest, and contest rules forbade hosting outside for fear of inclement weather. The city isn't known for being particularly liberal, and concerns about observing the Jewish Sabbath when rehearsals needed to be held on Saturdays made rabbis immediately condemn hosting it there. But the biggest hiccup was Jerusalem's disputed status as the capital of both Israel and Palestine, which raised concerns for both tourists and broadcasters and made members of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement immediately condemn the event should it be held in Jerusalem. It was clear that hosting in Jerusalem would be seen as a power move to have it recognized as solely a part of Israel, and while [[Administrivia/RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment we aren't gonna get into that]], the political and logistical implications made it seem like a poor choice of host city. Tel Aviv, who initially hadn't even planned on bidding due to Jerusalem's ambitions seeming a done deal, readily took up the challenge, having a more suitable venue and liberal environment. Nevertheless...

* Djent band Monuments had a hell of a time supporting The Contortionist on their Language Spring 2016 headlining tour. Bad booking and management on their end led to not all members performing at shows (usually missing then vocalist Chris Barretto) and them being in such a financial hole that they dropped off the tour before they lost any more money. This ended up effecting the band in the long run, as Monuments went on hiatus after the tour until 2018 when they dropped their third album, ''Phronesis.'' It should be noted that the remainder of the tour went off smoothly for the other bands on the bill (The Contortionist, Entheos, and sleepmakeswave). Wanting to avoid another disaster like their previous tour in the states, Monuments preemptively canceled a headlining tour in 2019 as their booking agency (the same one they used for The Contortionist tour) failed to secure the necessary visas.

* Music/MinorThreat, as mild mannered as the band was, faced extremely troubled shows. They faced the usual problem of rowdy punk fans starting fights, but they also had to deal with the difficulty of dedicating themselves to all ages venues and being mocked for vocalist Ian [=MacKaye's=]straight edge lifestyle. On the road to Canada they were once stopped by border patrol, thinking they were smuggling drugs, only find boxes of over 800 packages of bubblegum. They also struggled to feed themselves. It was one of the many factors that led to the band's demise.

*** Speaking of Ron [=McNair=], he should have recorded the same piece of music earlier for Jarre's new album ''Rendez-vous'', thereby playing the first piece of music ever recorded in space. [[AuthorExistenceFailure Neither were possible anymore]]. On the album, he was replaced with Pierre Gossez, and his concert replacement was Kirk Whalum.

** At one show in Newport, Kentucky, where they opened for Music/BigBlack, the power cut out before they even started. Even though it was just a fuse that went out, vocalist Mark Arm thought it was an attempt to sabotage their shows set up by the club because they were not able to draw as big of a crowd as Music/RedHotChiliPeppers, who were just playing across town. Arm then violently threw the microphone into the audience, prompting Big Black's vocalist Music/SteveAlbini to tell them to leave.

** Because their "bus" had broken down, they only got as far as Southern California and had to cancel the rest of their Fall 1985 tour. Luckily the band survived, but it shook them up.

* Grunge originators, Music/GreenRiver went on a tour in October of 1985 that was rife with drama:
** The band became known for their rock star antics even though they hadn't earned the right to act as such. They engaged in reckless behavior, making bafoons of themselves.
** The band's "bus", which consisted of a truck cheaply rigged up to a trailer, proved to be uncomfortable and dangerous to drive.

** When they played in Detroit, bassist Jeff Ament wore a pink shirt that caught the negative attention of a female audience member who kept spitting at him. Ament put his foot at her face in an attempt to get her to stop. This caused her boyfriend to yank Ament by the leg into the audience and the boyfriend beat Ament. Arm then jumped in to get Ament out, which caused Arm to get beaten himself.

** On their way back to Seattle, the band's "bus" ended up veering into a ditch. Allegedly, guitarist Stone Gossard was talking about lighting his own farts on fire, he attempted it and the sudden ignition of fire startled Arm, who was behind the wheel. Arm denies this happened. Luckily the band survived, but it shook them up.

* In a lesser example compared to most here: Music/{{U2}} frequently showed live footage of [[UsefulNotes/TheYugoslavWars war-torn]] Sarajevo during the Zoo TV Tour, while promising someday they would perform there. Once things had calmed down in Bosnia and they decided to keep their promise (during the tour of ''Pop'', [[TroubledProduction/{{MusicAlbumsArtistsS-Z}} listed here]]), it was enough for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U2_concert_in_Sarajevo a detailed article on The Other Wiki]]. Sponsors tried to cancel the concert, border control kept the road crew out of Bosnia for hours, the band had to rehearse in a damaged theater and sleep in a bullet-ridden Holiday Inn, and during the concert Bono started losing his voice (forcing him to [[AudienceParticipationSong request for crowd help]], and The Edge to [[StepUpToTheMicrophone take over lead vocals in a few tracks]]).

** One of the biggest reasons for Altamont's failure was that, since it was in the Oakland area, that chapter of the Hells Angels had to do security rather than the San Francisco chapter, who had already successfully done so at the large festivals and Grateful Dead concerts there and had a reputation of being quite mellow and easy to work with. The Oakland chapter, by comparison, was known to be more violent and were not as in to the music being performed as their San Francisco counterparts usually were. They were promised that all they would need to do was sit back on the edge of the stage and drink the free beer they were paid with while making sure no serious incidents occurred.

** Technical difficulties not only interfered with performances but put the show over ''three hours'' behind schedule, resulting in shorter later sets. Unlike its N.Y.C. counterpart it wasn't broadcast live but taped for later, but time-consuming taping of intros and outros for sets made matters worse. Much of the crowd and even some of the performers who'd already gone on were filing out of the stadium long before the show was over. The Salon article predicts there was maybe four hours of performances out of a twelve-hour "concert."

** Sadly, like many other events, this hit the planned 2020 contest in Rotterdam hard. Initially, the organization was anything but troubled: the Dutch broadcasters had a more-than-suitable venue in a major city that wasn't Amsterdam (which the Dutch tourism board was encouraging to slow the over-tourism that was wreaking havoc on Amsterdam), great plans for the Eurovision Village and interval acts, and a great stage design. Compared to the drama surrounding Israel's hosting the year before, it was looking like smooth sailing. Then, COVID-19 happened. After debating several work-arounds as cases began to mount in Europe at the tail-end of the national final season (the effects were already showing: Denmark held theirs in an empty arena), once cases began to turn up in the Netherlands, there was no other choice but to take the unprecedented move of canceling the 2020 contest, ending a heretofore-uninterrupted 64-year streak of contests. This left many broadcasters scrambling to figure out how to fill time, and how to reach compromises with the artists who had their months of work come to nothing. Fortunately, some sensitive programming was created to give proper showcases to the 2020 contestants and spread unity, and Rotterdam has been confirmed as the host city for 2021.

** What really broke the crowd was the vendor costs. Water cost $4 a bottle and single-serving pizzas cost $12. There were bus routes to the nearby city of Rome, New York where people could presumably go to get supplies, but that didn't work because shops quickly became overcrowded and ran out of food.
** There also were not enough toilets to accommodate the large crowd. What was there quickly became unusable. Water fountains were also vandalized by people who became frustrated by the long lines.

** The bad mood eventually spilled over into all-out violence when people began lighting bonfires using material from the (supposedly indestructible) security fence. People began destroying the [=ATMs=] and looting the vendor booths. MTV removed their entire crew and ceased coverage of the event. Finally, there were multiple accusations of rape at the festival. New York State Troopers eventually cleared the site, bringing the festival to an end.

** Michael Lang, who with his partners at Woodstock Ventures wasn't trying to create the defining experience of a generation, just make enough money to build a recording studio, got the idea from some of the small folk-rock concerts held in fields around Woodstock, NY, where he was living at the time. The original plan was to hold a modest, one-day event in them with about 25,000 fans expected in those fields. Lang had helped organize and promote the Miami Pop Festival, one of many that led up to Woodstock and had for the most part pleasantly surprised observers for the low amount of violence and general tidiness kept by attendees.

** That week was when things really did start to go haywire. Attendees, about 25,000, not all of them with tickets, started arriving and setting up tents six or seven days beforehand ... before the spaces designed for them had been finished, or the festival site fenced off as originally intended. Thus, on the first day, with all those people there literally tearing down the fences that ''had'' been set up to get in, the promoters basically kissed their likelihood of any profit goodbye by declaring the concert free ... thus attracting even more people to it, up to 300,000.

** Several acts that were supposed to perform dropped out of the show shortly before the festival: Music/TheMoodyBlues were listed on the poster, but backed out at the last minute to play in France. The Music/JeffBeck Group were also signed up to play, but then Beck broke up the band a few weeks before. Iron Butterfly were all ready to play...but got stuck at the airport because of the traffic and their manager made an unreasonable demand to get them to the festival by helicopter (interestingly, they were going to be paid more than the Grateful Dead, Music/{{Santana}} and Music/JoeCocker combined!). As a result, there were several holes in the schedule. One was filled by Havens' long set. Another by moving British folk group The Incredible String Band from Friday to Saturday. John Sebastian of Music/TheLovinSpoonful was only at the festival as an attendee, but was coaxed to play in order to fill an empty space following Santana's set.

* Woodstock '99, which had the worst production problems of any of the festivals. A bit of background: the 25th Anniversary of the festival had been criticized in the days leading up to it, but was highly successful (over 350,000 people attended), so plans were made for a follow-up festival that would celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the original. However, [[https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/19-worst-things-about-woodstock-99-176052/ those logistical problems all came to a head and ended in disaster.]]
** The tickets cost about $150. This may not seem like much today, but that was a pretty significant cost at the time. Subsequently, lots of people were sneaking in with fake passes - or at least trying, as a report had 50 counterfeits being confiscated hourly in one gate!
** Unlike the previous two installments, held in farms, Woodstock '99 was in a disused air base, an environment which does not dissipate the July heat very well. And given that the festival was scheduled in the same weekend as the Baseball Hall of Fame's yearly induction ceremony, basically all rooms in Upstate New York were taken; even artists had problems getting where to stay.
** What really broke the crowd was the vendor costs. Water cost $4 a bottle and single-serving pizzas cost $12. There were bus routes to the city where people could presumably go to get supplies, but that didn't work because shops quickly became overcrowded and ran out of food.

** Regardless of how you feel about specific acts, the festival did them no favours by booking them on an eclectic schedule that led to frequent MoodWhiplash. Melodic ConsciousHipHop group The Roots found themselves sandwiched between Music/{{Buckcherry}} and Music/InsaneClownPosse, while Music/AlanisMorissette was immediately followed by Music/LimpBizkit. The acts also frequently suffered from poor audio engineering and often complained about it on-stage; Music/TheOffspring's set suffered the worst from this. There were two main stages, but they were over a mile and a half away from each other, making travelling between the two to see your preferred acts highly impractical even if you didn't need to walk across tarmac in the July heat. Whereas the emerging artists stage was located in an aircraft hangar, the two main stages took place in open air, which when packed with tens of thousands of dancing festival-goers is a recipe for a heatstroke epidemic. The festival had one death, caused partially by hypothermia.
** Several of the bands did not capture the "peace & love" theme of the festival. Limp Bizkit in particular was criticized for playing songs like "Break Stuff" which actually started some of the violence in the crowd. It probably didn’t help that Fred Durst began encouraging the crowd to become angry partway through.

** With bad press and a lower attendance (only 200,000 or so showed up), the organizers [[FranchiseKiller retired the Woodstock brand]] until 2019, when they announced the festival would return for its 50th anniversary year. However, that event has [[https://pitchfork.com/news/woodstock-50-is-canceled-unless-its-notheres-why/ also been a troubled production]] itself, including a disputed cancellation and several legal, permitting and financial difficulties.

** The contest only came into existence because the Turkish broadcaster wasn't happy with how the 50/50 jury-televote system had impacted their success at the contest,[[note]]While they still managed top-four finishes in 2009 and 2010, their 2011 entry was the first Turkish entry to not qualify - largely because the juries ranked it lower than the televote, who would've qualified it - and their 2012 entry finished top five with the televote but bottom-five with the jurors, leaving it in 7th place[[/note]] the status of the Big Five countries,[[note]]The five highest-paying members of the EBU - France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom - who get an automatic pass to the grand final every year along with the host country and who each vote in one of the two semis[[/note]] and - most controversially - the contest's modern liberal values, which they disapproved of.[[note]]Post-withdrawal, they had still planned to broadcast the 2013 contest, only to decide against it when Finland's act featured a same-sex kiss between Krista Siegfrieds and one of her backing singers, deeming it [[UnfortunateImplications "unsuitable for young viewers."]] Conchita's victory for Austria the following year only confounded their displeasure.[[/note]] They decided to take an extended absence from Eurovision and develop their own contest to celebrate the various Turkic nations and regions, as well as countries and regions with significant Turkic populations. An interesting idea, in theory. Actually pulling it off was another matter.
*** The contest was a co-production of TURKSOY (the main Turkic cultural organization) and [=TMB=] TV (a Turkish broadcaster). The idea was to host Turkvision in each year's Turkic Capital of Culture, which is decided by TURKSOY every year, thereby placing the first contest in Eskişehir, Turkey. The final line-up of participants wasn't confirmed until two days before the semi-final round. The voting for the semi-final round was never disclosed except for the qualifiers, and the sound and lighting was visibly poor. In pretty much every respect, it felt like an off-brand Eurovision, and did a disservice to the unique concept.
*** The following year continued the tradition of hosting in the Turkic Capital of Culture, taking the contest to Kazan, Tatarstan (an autonomous region in Russia). The singer representing Northern Cyprus wasn't permitted entry into Russia because his passport was a Northern Cypriot passport, and that area of Cyprus isn't recognized as an independent nation by any other country except Turkey themselves. Speaking of Turkey, they themselves came under fire after the semi-final round for representative Funda Kılıç wearing shorts (not a big deal at Eurovision, where plenty of entrants - Turkish acts included - have worn even less at different points, but controversial among the Muslim-majority contestants), possibly explaining her staggering drop from finishing second in the semi-final round to dead-last in the final. Finally, after initially only qualifying twelve entries for the final, the finalists were expanded to fifteen when it turned out Turkmenistan committed voting fraud and awarded their own entry five points (the deduction of the five points led to them finishing fifteenth, so this would seem to be the solution that'd allow the entries finishing above Turkmenistan to pass as well as not removing Turkmenistan's representative from the final just because of the jury's actions).
*** The 2015 contest was initially going to be held in Mary, Turkmenistan, only for it to change to their capital city Ashgabat, then once again to Istanbul, Turkey. The final host city wasn't confirmed until August, with the contest due to take place in December.[[note]]This may seem like a fair amount of time, but for an event of the scale Turkvision was aspiring to, switching host countries with five months to spare is ''insane''. Comparatively, Austria decided on Vienna as the host city of Eurovision 2015 in August of 2014, which was a long enough time to get the arenas set up for the contest in May.[[/note]] Additionally, with only about a week to spare until the contest, every Russian region who'd prepared to participate again withdrew due to bad relations between Russia and Turkey over a drone strike attack the Turkish military had taken out on a Russian plane. This led to the cancelation of the semi-final round.
*** The contest was due to take place again in 2016, but shortly beforehand, it was postponed to March 2017 on account of the December 2016 Istanbul bombings. Astana, Kazakhstan was due to take it on instead, but these plans fell through as well. A new, online-only edition was held in 2020. Did it improve on the past track record? Well...
*** ...while the contest wasn't announced until October 2020, it didn't take long for a lineup to be confirmed (although some countries weren't confirmed until the running order was announced, and a bunch of them released no information about their songs whatsoever prior to the show). Some entries were picked through a national broadcaster or cultural group, others through direct submissions. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, entries were filmed remotely in front of green screens, but given the mix of professional organizers and amateurs, the video quality varied wildly. COVID restrictions in the Netherlands also meant that their planned debutant couldn't even film his entry and had to withdraw. The final broadcast was riddled with technical issues and misinformed presenters, betraying that TMB TV was unaware of how big an audience the contest would have (largely thanks to Eurovision fans in need of a fix when their own contest was canceled). It was simultaneously livestreamed on TMB TV's [=YouTube=] channel and several broadcasters, but the show ran so long (it wound up being ''five hours'', two hours past its planned runtime) that the broadcasters mostly cut it off when it went past the planned time. This was exacerbated by the fact that due to the judges taking their time in voting and the graphics team needing to come up with the scoreboards for each country, the broadcaster needed to fill time. The solution? They ran a recap of the twenty-six competing entries ''ten times'', which is excessive even before considering that unlike at Eurovision, where the purpose of the recaps is to remind voters at home of each entry, there was no open vote at Turkvision, so multiple reminders of the competing songs wasn't needed. It got clowned by the bemused Eurovision fans on Twitter and earned a reprimand from the Turkvision Facebook group started in conjunction with the contest. There are plans to return in 2021, but the organizational issues have yet to be solved effectively.

* An awesome example is Music/TheRollingStones' 1969 tour, which was being documented by a film crew. The crew just happened to be on hand to capture the planning for and performance of the infamous free concert at the Altamont Speedway. This was intended to be the Stones' SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome, but things started to go wrong very early, giving the whole proceedings [[DoomyDoomsOfDoom an aura of doom]]. The event just barely got pulled together, and was marked by fighting in the crowd. The cameras were able to capture the whole fiasco, including an attendee pulling a gun on a Hells Angels guard and getting fatally stabbed. The production was intended to be a standard concert film, but became ''Film/GimmeShelter'', a dark documentary that shows how what was intended to be an answer to Woodstock became seen by some as the event that marked the end of the hippie era.

** The show had been the Music/GratefulDead's idea, intended as a sort of West Coast Woodstock. It was supposed to have been in Golden Gate Park, but increasing animosity between the SFPD and the Haight-Ashbury hippie community led the city to drag its feet issuing permits, so they looked elsewhere. Sears Point Raceway in Sonoma County, north of the city, was willing, but they wanted the Rolling Stones to put up a $100,000 bond, which was a stumbling block. At the last minute, Dick Carter, the owner of Altamont Speedway, offered to host the concert. However, the short time to prepare meant it was impossible to set up proper support facilities like portable toilets and medical tents to the necessary extent.

* Music/TheJacksons' 1984 Victory Tour was infamously anything but, as recounted in J. Randy Taraborelli's ''The Magic and the Madness'' among other things. Music/MichaelJackson was riding the wave of ''Music/{{Thriller}}'''s super-popularity when his brothers, who were financially struggling, approached him in 1983 to record and tour with them again. Having established himself as a solo act who no longer had to answer to his abusive father Joe, he only agreed to it when his mom pressured him to do so. From there...
** The original tour promoter had apparently just backed out when Chuck Sullivan, son of New England Patriots' then-owner Billy Sullivan, met with an executive at Epic Records. His goal was to get a date at Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro, where the Pats were not just the home team but the owners. He'd earned a lot of respect in the NFL for his role in helping his father regain control of the team after a mid-'70s boardroom coup (which led to a class-action suit the elder Sullivan ultimately lost). Since he'd promoted concerts in college and Creator/BobHope USO tours in the Army, he knew a little about the business and had started promoting shows at Sullivan to make extra money. When he learned the Jacksons were seeking a tour promoter, he put together a bid.
** His original partner, 49ers owner Eddie [=DeBartolo=] Jr., backed out. He won the gig by promising the Jacksons ''83.4%'' of the grosses -- way over the usual rate for touring artists at the time. And not only that, it was for "gross potential ticket sales", i.e. the Jacksons would be paid as if every show sold out regardless of whether or not it actually did. He promised them a $36 million advance, and paid for the first installment by borrowing $12 million against the team and stadium. But while he was able to get some of the other NFL owners' stadiums to agree to sweetheart deals (notice how many—26 of 55, in fact—of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Tour_%28The_Jacksons_tour%29#Tour_dates the dates]] were in stadiums that were at the time the home venues of NFL teams), and got a lot of freebies from other stadiums because, after all, this was the ''Jacksons'', the overhead was way more than he anticipated. He had to renegotiate the deal two weeks into the tour because he couldn't deliver the balance of the advance.
** The stage Michael had designed was so large (it took 30 trucks to move it between stadia) that inevitably some of the seats had to be sacrificed. At some venues as many as a quarter of the available seats were lost this way.
** Ironically, given how Sullivan had gotten involved, the town selectmen in Foxboro refused to allow a Jacksons concert there for [[http://www.thesunchronicle.com/news/farinella-jackson-s-part-in-pats-history-was-real-thriller/article_e8e9f604-5ac2-5339-8ba2-d610c1da295c.html reasons that remain unclear]]. (They cited "the unknown element", which everyone took to mean the rowdiness that constantly plagued both games and concerts at the stadium but had never been cited to stop any of those events.)
** Sullivan was clearly out of his league with a tour of this magnitude. Those more familiar with the business laughed at his requests for discounts on hotel rooms and free advertising. He fought with the Jacksons regularly and renegotiated the contract several times -- at one point near the end leaving his hospital bed to do so after [[HollywoodHeartAttack a mild heart attack]]. At Washington's RFK Stadium, he forgot his pass and was not allowed in. The Jacksons were so embarrassed that they brought back Don King as their primary promoter. King knew little about promoting concerts, but lots about promoting himself. At the press conference announcing the tour, he hogged the spotlight, so the brothers allowed Michael to bring in his own people to share his responsibilities!
** King inked a deal with Pepsi to sponsor the tour, forcing the Jacksons to pass on an even more lucrative offer from Quaker Oats. As a condition of it, Michael had to participate in two TV ads for a product he didn't use. This led to the on-set disaster in which Michael suffered third-degree burns to his scalp when a pyrotechnic effect went awry. He negotiated a huge financial settlement with Pepsi and they enjoyed a professional relationship for years afterward.\\
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The sponsorship created other problems: Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium, where the tour opened, serves Coke drinks at its concession stands by contract. The contract was interpreted to forbid the Jacksons from having the Pepsi logo flash on the screen behind them during the show, so Pepsi had to have helicopters fly over the stadium towing banners. It was a good thing the sponsorship worked out, since Roger Enrico, then the company's director of North American operations (later its CEO), signed the deal without even letting upper management know.
** Initially, would-be concertgoers had to mail in a newspaper coupon and money order for tickets that cost $30 -- significantly higher than what rival superstars (i.e., Music/DavidBowie and Music/BruceSpringsteen) were charging at the time. Worse, the tickets were only sold in '''lots of four''' in a lottery system. (The money would be deposited in a bank account, where it would immediately start accumulating heavy interest. When the price of the tickets was refunded to those who didn't win, The Jacksons would pocket the interest.) The public outcry over the Jacksons shutting out their lower-class black fanbase moved Michael, who hated the idea anyway, to protect his image by implementing a conventional ticket-selling system as soon as possible and making sure that free tickets were set aside for poor children at each stop.
** Then there were health issues. Jackie hurt his leg in rehearsals (supposedly -- his second wife says what really happened was his first wife caught him with another woman and tried to run him over with her car!) and missed the first half of the tour. Michael, stressed out from family tension, was put under a doctor's care at one point. Jermaine's flu resulted in the cancellation of the Phoenix-area shows (the second-to-last stop), although that may have been a convenient excuse to cancel them because of slow ticket sales.
** Michael kept away from the rest of his family as often as he could offstage. Music/JamesBrown turned down his offer to perform with them in New York City, as he too objected to the ticket lottery. And an offer to have one of the shows filmed for TV/video release was one the brothers were willing to take, but Michael nixed it...and then had his own crew film a show with the same intent. It was never released.
** The brothers all stayed on separate floors of their hotels while Michael usually stayed in a separate hotel entirely. Meetings often broke down into side meetings among the factions: two lawyers representing Michael, one representing Jermaine, and the other four by themselves with or without lawyers. Travel arrangements? The brothers agreed among themselves that only they would ride in the van to shows, but early on Michael started letting [[Series/{{Webster}} Emmanuel Lewis]] ride along. The others didn't show their annoyance as they didn't want to spoil the boy's experience (none of them were talking to each other anyway), but when Michael let Julian Lennon ride along with them in their helicopter to Giants Stadium despite a similar agreement, they [[DeathGlare glared at him silently]] for the entire flight. Before the tour was even half over they were all getting their own rides, further increasing the expenses.
** Despite Michael's fame, ticket sales got ''worse'' as the tour approached its end. In September, ticket resellers in Washington D.C. [[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/09/18/tickets-anyonejackson-concert-resale-schemes-backfire/2f152f57-20ea-40ad-bc32-f152e2b9590f/ had to cut prices on their wares]] due to overestimating demand for them, especially from ''adults'' as opposed to children (who naturally couldn't pay as much); by the time the Toronto shows took place that month, 50,000 tickets had gone unsold. Pittsburgh shows were canceled in favor of more dates in Chicago. After the Vancouver shows two months later, Sullivan had to stop his $1.9 million check to the Jacksons before it bounced. At last, too many dates were pencilled in for the final stop in Los Angeles. Knowing how bad half-empty houses would look for Michael, his handlers arranged for free tickets to be given to everyone they could think of. Even then, at the rain-soaked final show at Dodger Stadium large blocks of empty seats were evident.\\
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And the brothers and Joe intended to take the tour overseas, but Michael hated the idea -- so he announced at the end that this was their ''very last'' show. It's been estimated that Chuck Sullivan lost $13–22 million on the tour (Joe and his sons, particularly [surprise] Michael, made what they expected to). [[CreatorKiller He and his father had to sell the Patriots and the stadium as a result]]. Supposedly he wrote several letters to Michael begging him to bail the team out. Eventually the team was bought by Bob Kraft, under whose management it finally won multiple Super Bowls. Kraft keeps a Victory Tour poster in his office as a reminder of how the chain of events that put him in charge of the Patriots began.
** By the way, the ''Victory'' album, released in the summer of 1984 just as the tour launched, was only able to reach #4 on the ''Billboard'' charts and scored only one Top 10 single (the Music/MichaelJackson / Mick Jagger duet "State of Shock"). And in hindsight, the damage the whole experience did to Michael's reputation and health can be seen as the beginning of the ugly downward spiral of his career and life.
* Music/MichaelJackson's solo tours had their own issues:

** Then came the Stones' set, where things took a turn for the tragic. As the Stones performed their set, Meredith Hunter, a 18 year old from Berkeley, got into a scuffle with the Angels, then left to draw a gun he had brought. Despite his girlfriend, Patty Bredehoft, begging him to calm down, Hunter was high on drugs and didn’t listen, and, as he approached the stage, he was stabbed to death by Alan Passaro, one of the Angels. It wasn’t until the Stones had finished their set that Hunter's body was discovered. Passaro would be tried for the murder, but would be acquitted.

* In a lesser example compared to most here: Music/{{U2}} frequently showed live footage of [[UsefulNotes/TheYugoslavWars war-torn]] Sarajevo during the Zoo TV Tour, while promising someday they would perform there. Once things had calmed down in Bosnia and they decided to keep their promise (during the tour of ''Pop'', [[TroubledProduction/MusicAlbumsArtistsS-Z listed here]]), it was enough for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U2_concert_in_Sarajevo a detailed article on The Other Wiki]]. Sponsors tried to cancel the concert, border control kept the road crew out of Bosnia for hours, the band had to rehearse in a damaged theater and sleep in a bullet-ridden Holiday Inn, and during the concert Bono started losing his voice (forcing him to [[AudienceParticipationSong request for crowd help]], and The Edge to [[StepUpToTheMicrophone take over lead vocals in a few tracks]]).

** With just three months to go before the festival, Max Yasgur agreed to lease the promoters some of his dairy farmlands near Bethel, NY, some distance from Woodstock. They had to plan the site and set it up in much less time than they had expected to. Due to unclear jurisdiction, they didn't receive formal approval from the Bethel town planning board[[note]] it was rather new at the time, and the town board thought it had jurisdiction[[/note]] until just a month before the festival date.

** Several of the bands did not capture the "peace & love" theme of the festival. Limp Bizkit in particular was criticized for playing songs like "Break Stuff" which actually started some of the violence in the crowd. It probably didn’t help that Fred Durst began encouraging the crowd to become angry partway through "Break Stuff".

* The Fyre Festival in 2017, organized by rapper Ja Rule and tech entrepreneur Billy [=McFarland=], became the music festival equivalent of [[TroubledProduction/RealLife Dashcon]] before it even ended, and undoubtedly a far higher-profile debacle given the massive amounts of money and big-name celebrities involved. [[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/04/29/the-founder-of-the-disastrous-fyre-festival-has-a-history-of-overpromising-elite-access/ This article]] in ''The Washington Post'' gives a rundown of what happened at the festival itself, [[http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/04/fyre-festival-exumas-bahamas-disaster.html this article]] in ''New York'' magazine provides a behind-the-scenes look, and [[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/21/arts/music/fyre-festival-billy-mcfarland-ja-rule-criminal-investigation.html this piece]] from ''The New York Times'' examines the messy aftermath that lasted for months. Internet Historian also has [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBPg5ftCMv8 an in-depth analysis]] of the festival and its aftermath, and ''Podcast/{{Swindled}}'' has [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skEVYr6youw an episode]] examining Billy [=McFarland=]'s dodgy practices up to and during the festival. In 2019, Creator/{{Netflix}} and Creator/{{Hulu}} both premiered competing documentaries about the debacle within days of each other, which ended up just adding to the nastiness.
** The festival was supposed to be held in Norman's Cay, a private island in the Bahamas supposedly owned by Pablo Escobar.[[note]]In reality, it was owned by his associate Carlos Lehder.[[/note]] This would serve as the lush paradise backdrop for two weekends of luxury living and live music by artists that included Music/Blink182, Music/MajorLazer, Disclosure, Rae Sremmurd, and more, with the goal of promoting [=McFarland's=] company Fyre Media, which was working on an app that would allow people to book major musical talent. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz5kY3RsmKo Advertisements]] featured supermodels and fun in the sun. Tickets started at $450 and went up to $250,000 for the most elite packages. In truth, anybody familiar with the background of the festival's organizers could've detected trouble out of the gate. [=McFarland=] had a history of flashy projects aimed at upwardly-mobile young people that failed to deliver on their promises, with his Magnises "black card" elite membership program subjected to BBB complaints and refunds, while Ja Rule, a one-time rap star, hadn't had a hit single in over a decade by that point.

** Almost immediately, the Fyre Festival went viral in the worst possible way, with many guests comparing it to ''Literature/TheHungerGames'', ''Literature/LordOfTheFlies'', and refugee camps, while the thought of rich yuppies getting screwed over provoked schadenfreude from all over the internet. The government of the Bahamas had to cancel all flights to the island, with the Ministry of Tourism apologizing to everybody who had come for the festival. Canceling flights wound up having the side effect of leaving thousands of people literally stranded without food or shelter, necessitating chartered flights to bring people back to Miami.
** Prior to the festival, Fyre Media had also informed festival guests that the Festival would be entirely "cashless" and aggressively pushed them into dumping thousands of dollars into RFID bracelets that would then be used to purchase things in the festival site. Naturally, there was no place to use the bracelets, thus adding "no money" to the stranded guests' problems. It later transpired that all of the bracelet funds went directly into the Festival's draining funds.

** In January 2019 came the aforementioned documentaries, Netflix's ''[[Film/{{Fyre}} Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened]]'' and Hulu's ''Film/FyreFraud''. The battle between them soon got quite messy in its own right as the creators exposed some shady ethical compromises from both: ''Fyre'' was made in partnership with the same companies that promoted the festival itself which naturally led to downplaying their culpability, while ''Fraud'' shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to [=McFarland=] prior to his sentencing for an exclusive interview (of very questionable use, given the film itself openly calls him a pathological liar).

** The lineup was also not as strong. Woodstock '94 had a variety of performers from old classics (Aerosmith; Bob Dylan; Joe Cocker; Crosby, Stills, & Nash) to established modern acts (Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day) to rising stars (Nine Inch Nails, The Cranberries, Melissa Etheridge). Woodstock '99 tried to do the same but it didn't have near the same effect. Apart from a solo set by Music/TheWho's John Entwistle and Music/GratefulDead drummer Mickey Hart's new world music project, no performers from the original Woodstock showed up, and the organizers were stuck with returning performers from the '94 festival (like Sheryl Crow and RHCP) as well as critically maligned newer acts (like Creed, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and Insane Clown Posse). Limp Bizkit's set was particularly singled out for criticism. There were a few bright spots (mostly non-hard rock acts like Alanis Morrisette, Elvis Costello, G. Love and Special Sauce, The Roots, James Brown, The Tragically Hip and Jamiroquai), though those were few and far between.

** Several billed performers didn't show up, such as Mick Jagger, KISS and Ricky Martin.

** Music/MariahCarey's set came in the wake of her public breakdown and the flop of ''Glitter'' -- which her appearance, tactlessly, still tried to promote.

** Trouble continued after the concert. Jackson recorded the CharityMotivationSong from the finale, "What More Can I Give", as an AllStarCast single. According to the biography ''Untouchable'', Sony wouldn't release it since they were trying to get him to finish/promote ''Invincible'' (see Albums above) and feared it would cannibalize the album's sales. An attempt to distribute it through UsefulNotes/McDonalds restaurants collapsed when parents complained about the chain associating itself with a man accused of child abuse, and the whole project went into DevelopmentHell when the producer's work in gay porn came out. It became legally available in Fall 2003 but, with its cultural moment having long since passed and Jackson's reputation only deeper in the mire, flopped.

* In a lesser example compared to most here: Music/{{U2}} frequently showed live footage of [[UsefulNotes/TheYugoslavWars war-torn]] Sarajevo during the Zoo TV Tour, while promising someday they would perform there. Once things had calmed down in Bosnia and they decided to keep their promise (during the tour of ''Pop'', listed in the Albums folder above), it was enough for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U2_concert_in_Sarajevo a detailed article on]] [[Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]]. Sponsors tried to cancel the concert, border control kept the road crew out of Bosnia for hours, the band had to rehearse in a damaged theater and sleep in a bullet-ridden Holiday Inn, and during the concert Bono started losing his voice (forcing him to [[AudienceParticipationSong request for crowd help]], and The Edge to [[StepUpToTheMicrophone take over lead vocals in a few tracks]]).

** Legal wrangling over the film and recording rights also ensured that those records of the event are incomplete. Music/CreedenceClearwaterRevival gave what many people present considered to be one of the best sets of the festival, but since John Fogerty didn't think so, he refused to allow them to be filmed or recorded. Music/NeilYoung had just joined forces with Music/CrosbyStillsAndNash, but refused to give permission for filming. [[Music/TheWho Pete Townshend]] had no issues with the film or the album, but was horribly cynical about the whole "peace, love and music" thing; at one point, he chased activist and writer Abbie Hoffman off the stage when he came on to berate the crowd about its perceived political detachment. Music/TheBand also did well by the crowd, but didn't let their performance be used in the album or movie because their manager thought they weren't getting paid enough.

** Things began to go downhill before the festival even started. The resulting mess from Alexander and Duncan's Freedom Fest earlier that year caused Evansville and many adjacent Indiana cities and entire counties [[PersonaNonGrata to legally bar the Soda Pop Festival from being held within them]], drowning the two in legal woes and leaving them scrambling to come up with a location for the festival without encountering further legal trouble. On top of that, the Labor Day festival was gearing up to have well more than its projected attendance of 55,000 people due to [[NoSuchThingAsBadPublicity the negative press from the festival's legal woes reaching the public and enchanting rebellious teens]] combined with an advertising campaign by a major radio station GoneHorriblyRight, resulting in upwards of 300,000 people being en route to a festival that didn't even have a set location yet. Alexander and Duncan finally settled on a site known by locals as "Bull Island" just outside the small town of Griffin, Indiana. Due to the site's location along the Wabash River, the site was in Illinois, but on Indiana's side of the river, [[LoopholeAbuse effectively putting the promoters and festival out of Indiana's jurisdiction despite still being on Indiana's side of the river]] but now making the festival Illinois' problem as well. After further legal battles with cities and counties on both sides of the Wabash, however, Alexander and Duncan finally got the permit to have their festival at Bull Island and scrambled to get things set up before the massive crowds arrived.

* Music/SystemOfADown's show for the release of their second album ''Toxicity'' was a complete disaster. The band was slated to perform at 7 PM on September 4, 2001. It was expected for only a couple of thousand fans to show up. Unfortunately, about 7,000 fans ended up coming, more than triple the expected amount. Fearing a riot, the NYPD shut down the performance, and [[SelfFulfillingProphesy the disgruntled fans proceeded to riot]]. Property got damaged and vandalized, equipment got stolen, and some fights broke out. Had the show not been shut down, it would have been overcrowded, but at least there wouldn't have been violence. Serj Tankian commented on the whole fiasco, saying he was disappointed his fans would do such a thing and was also disappointed in the NYPD's poor handling of the situation.

* Music/SystemOfADown's show for the release of their second album ''Toxicity'' was a complete disaster. The band was slated to perform at 7 PM on September 4, 2001. It was expected for only a couple of thousand fans to show up. Unfortunately, about 7,000 fans ended up coming, more than triple the expected amount. Fearing a riot, the NYPD shut down the performance, causing many disgruntled fans to cause a riot anyways. Property got damaged and vandalized, equipment got stolen, and some fights broke out. Had the show not been shut down, it would have been overcrowded, but at least there wouldn't have been violence. Serj Tankian commented on the whole fiasco, saying he was disappointed his fans would do such a thing and was also disappointed in the NYPD's poor handling of the situation.

** Then the festival got started and things went {{from bad to worse}}. Every road from major highways like nearby Interstate 64 to small country roads were backed up with stand-still traffic stretching for miles and miles, to the point that many would-be attendees simply abandoned their vehicles and set out for the site on foot. Upon getting there, a terminal lack of crowd control or security (the police officers who ''were'' there were hopelessly outnumbered) meant that attendees were free to turn the festival into a drug-themed flea market and sell drugs and other illegal substances left and right. There was also no time to put up adequate public restrooms due to everything being set up at the last second, so the site ended up covered in human waste as smashed attendees simply went wherever they felt like it. Most of the lined up performers never even performed and/or simply left due to either Alexander and Duncan not being able to compensate them for the unexpectedly large crowds, fleeing upon seeing the crowds they were performing for, or simply not showing up at all in the first place. Food and drinks at the festival quickly ran out, and the traffic jams on the roads meant that little to no more food could even be brought in. As the days of the festival went on, the mood of the festival grew increasingly more dour due to a combination of the lack of food and facilities, exorbitant prices on the food that ''was'' still there thanks to vendors gouging their prices, and many of the promised band performances never happening. By Sunday, the festival had degenerated into complete chaos as food stations and vendor trucks were raided and destroyed by irate attendees and fights broke out. Alexander and Duncan fled for their lives as the festival drew to a close, and the last few attendees who hadn't left the site yet by Tuesday burned down the stage.

* Of the two big post-September 11th benefit concerts, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concert_for_New_York_City "The Concert for New York City"]] proved a sensation, while "United We Stand: What More Can I Give" in Washington, D.C. proved a debacle. ''Series/TheDailyShow'' brutally mocked it with the correspondent sent to cover it hoping that the proceeds were going to a charity that could get him several hours of his life back. [[http://www.salon.com/2001/10/22/jackson_benefit/ This Salon article]] (calling it "The Worst Benefit Concert Ever!") and [[http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1450229/20011022/story.jhtml this kinder MTV article]] provide the details; among the "highlights" noted:

** Music/BackstreetBoys recycled pretty much their entire set from the Concert for New York City earlier in the week, showing their lack of enthusiasm for the DC outing.