A bad rap: Urban, hip hop acts a bust in city

By Ryan Woodard, Journal staff | Saturday, April 14, 2007

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RAPID CITY — When two hip hop events scheduled to perform at the Rushmore Plaza Civic center were canceled last fall because of poor ticket sales, civic center officials had to return money to those who had bought tickets.

All 150 of them.

Civic center general manager Brian Maliske said fewer than 75 tickets were sold for both Boyz II Men, scheduled to play Oct. 16, and Public Enemy, scheduled for Dec. 20.

Those numbers made the decision to cancel an easy one, Maliske said.

“In the case of those events where they’ve got 75 tickets out n there’s no doubt that there’s really no interest in those events and it’s time to move on,” Maliske said.

Jade Nielsen, who co-promoted the Public Enemy concert with the civic center, said the low ticket sales left him no choice.

“It’s not anything that we ever want to do. It impacts us financially to cancel,” he said. “But in certain instances it’s necessary to do so.”

Nielsen said he loses money when attendance at a show is poor because he still has to pay the act for performing.

In contrast, the most recent act to play the civic center n Three Days Grace n sold out the Rushmore Hall’s 2,500 ticket capacity.

Maliske said the two cancellations and the sellout of Three Days Grace are not a coincidence but a trend, and one that will affect the amount of hip hop available to concertgoers in the near future.

Maliske said it is difficult to predict what concerts will work in Rapid City, since there are so many different groups of people in the Hills area.

For instance, students at Black Hills State University in Spearfish and South Dakota School of Mines & Technology and National American University in Rapid City fit into the young rock/urban youth hip hop category, but the retirement community may prefer The Live Lawrence Welk Show. A third group, the middle-aged, prefers acts such as Cher or John Mellencamp.

Those three groups also make up three of the main kinds of music booked at the civic center, and are all bands that have played the venue, with country music included in the adult group.

Maliske said he books acts based on which types of music are the most popular and will sell the most tickets, with certain genres becoming more popular at certain times.

Although urban and hip hop-type acts were popular from about 2002 to 2004, Maliske said he has increasingly decided to stay away from those acts.

That decision was solidified even more with the cancellation of Boyz II Men and Public Enemy.

Maliske doesn’t believe the cancellations of Boyz II Men and Public Enemy are a coincidence; he believes they are part of a larger trend he has seen recently.

“What we’ve seen in the last year is that type of event in Rapid City has really slowed down,” he said. “I think that has (been) exemplified (with) the Public Enemy and Boyz II Men ... that type of concert has really started to taper off.”

The popularity of music goes in cycles, Maliske explained, and it appears that the popularity of hip hop and urban music in Rapid City has worn off.

“Everything seems to cycle,” he said. “Sometimes, country and western sells well, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the rock ‘n’ roll will sell well, sometimes it doesn’t. The last two years, hip hop has sold really well but now it’s slowed down.”

Maliske said bands more in the vein of the sellout Three Days Grace and Breaking Benjamin show seem to be doing well.

“Those are the things that will get us another act,” he said.

Maliske said that after seeing the popularity of Three Days Grace, agents from other similar genre bands have contacted him about possible dates, although he was unable to be specific.

He also said he will be pursuing more of the same types of acts.

What bands to book?

Maliske said the decision on what bands to book is made easy in a case where a band in a particular genre sells out like Three Days Grace did.

After that concert sold out, Maliske said he was contacted by some other acts in a similar genre, although he couldn’t be specific.

“If a community or an arena has strong ticket sales or strong grosses on a particular type of act then that’s what they will come to you looking for,” he said.

While a big venue such as the Staples Center in Los Angeles is always being offered shows, smaller venues such as the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center get those types of offers much less often.

“They sit at their desk and listen to their phone calls and they screen them,” he said. “They (the Staples Center) can get anybody they want.”

Maliske said he usually has to call promoters and agents to attempt to book events. He bases the type of concerts he goes after on the success of recent events and what he thinks will sell well.

Ticket sales are the biggest determining factor for bringing in concerts and other events. Although Maliske would like to merely comply with people’s requests, it doesn’t work that way.

“That’s the hardest part,” he explained. “People will say, ‘why don’t you bring this or why don’t you bring this or if you brought this I would go.’ We look at ticket sales. We look at where people put their money.”

A self-described AC/DC fan, Maliske wishes it was simply a matter of just bringing in whatever bands people requested.

“It doesn’t matter what my personal preference is because my favorite band is AC/DC and I haven’t bought them,” he said, adding that he has tried but has run into problems with routing and pricing.

How does he do it?

But even if Maliske knows exactly what kind of concert he wants and what will sell well, there are still many steps to actually getting the act to come.

Most of the bands that come to the civic center come on a tour stop, not a one-time show.

Bands usually have to be coming through the area, or at least to another stop within 400 miles. Two common routing locations are Denver, about 400 miles away, and Sioux Falls, which is about 340 miles away, Maliske said.

But even bands that are traveling within the proper distance of Rapid City may not pick the civic center, Maliske said. That’s because there are so many more arenas to compete with.

He said Rapid City, Denver and Minneapolis used to be three of the major routes across the Midwest in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

But within the last 20 years, new facilities have gone up in Fargo, Grand Forks, Sioux City, and Kearney, Neb., which, he said, makes getting concerts more difficult.

“My point is this n there are a lot of options out there that didn’t used to be there,” he said.

So a big part of his job is to “connect the dots,” or convince promoters that Rapid City would be a good stop for a band touring the Midwest.

That also depends on the act, however. Maliske cannot go for acts like the Rolling Stones, because the civic center isn’t big enough.

“What you have to do is say, ‘what’s routing through here, what is in an arena our size?’ What’s playing in the Pepsi Center really doesn’t matter to us, because the Pepsi Center seats nearly 20,000.”

The civic center seats about 6,600 people, with a maximum of 9,000.

Unpleasant surprises

Even when Maliske thinks he has the proper act for Rapid City, after considering the genre, routing and concert size, the act can turn around and surprise him.

One such act was The Live Lawrence Welk Show, which performed at the civic center last year.

“I booked Lawrence Welk for the theater,” Maliske said. “I was positive we were going to sell the theater out — I was positive. We sold 323 tickets. We lost $24,000 on Lawrence Welk.”

John Cougar Mellencamp undersold, as did Toby Keith, Maliske said.

Maliske was surprised that Keith sold only 4,400 tickets for the civic center concert in 2004, the same year the popular country singer was the number one country music act in the country.

While successful acts such as Three Days Grace encouraged similar bands to come to the civic center, an unexpected low seller like Keith can have the opposite effect, Maliske said.

“When they (promoters) saw the ticket sales on Toby Keith they pulled the Alan Jackson date,” he said.

Others have done better than Maliske expected - such as Seether and Crossfade, BB King and The Eagles.

Maliske realized that The Eagles were a good selling act, but having to have $125 tickets because the band cost more than $600,000 to bring in scared him.

“I was scared to death on The Eagles at $125,” he said. “We’d never broken a $100 ticket here, but at $600,000 we had to.”

Again, Maliske explained, none of the other factors matter as much as the bottom line n what acts sell the most tickets.

“People can tell me what they want as much as they’d like to, but people speak with their dollars,” he said. “I know what people want because they’re willing to buy a ticket.”

Concert outlook

Rock acts will be a major source of bookings in the future, Maliske said, especially young rock groups such as Three Days Grace, Seether and Crossfade.

He said he will mostly be staying away from rap, unless someone merely wants to rent the civic center when bringing in a rap act.

Nielsen said he usually doesn’t do much rap but will avoid booking it in Rapid City for the time being. He said he will also be booking plenty of rock and roll.

“Rock and country will continue as normal,” he said. “Hip hop, we’ll just have to see what happens as we move forward.”

Both Nielsen and Maliske said they try to keep up with what fans in the area want to come out and see.

“The part I like to stress is that it’s like any business or any product. You find what product people want and once you know it, you go with that product until they don’t want it anymore,” Maliske said. “You’ll see that in the Top 40 as things move from rock to country to rap.”

Contact Ryan Woodard at 394-8412 or ryan.woodard@rapidcityjournal.com