There have been a lot of negative posts about the lack of ticket sales at some venues, but as someone who does research for a living, I think this album release and tour announcement/ticket sales has been fascinating.
So many artists have hated the ticketing industry for decades and are tired of diehard fans getting priced out of their shows due to bots and scalpers. However, despite trying a number of things to weed out bots, getting tickets to see even mildly popular artists is still insane in terms of price and process.
Obviously, getting around these pain points is a moving target, but the Captain JBS, may have found a temporary solution.
He only did a physical release of his album under a, somewhat well known, pseudonym. Casual fans mostly had no idea, but the album still did well in terms of sales, charts, etc.
For those who knew about the album, they immediately bought tour tickets. However, ifs sales are any indicator, that is a really small percentage of his fanbase.
Now, JBS has the opportunity to do an interesting experiment, because to fill the venues he’s booked he’s going to need to try to raise awareness of the tour. Here he can try one method at a time to try and isolate the causal mechanism that could explain lagging ticket sales (even if you think he wouldn’t sell out these venues, he’d certainly sell more tickets than this).
He could do a staggered rollout of a few things like, putting the album or a few songs on streaming, then launching advertising making JBS/Sturgill link clear, and then try anything else he wants.
This would allow to know whether ticket sales because of 1) lack of streaming presence/awareness, and/or 2) if people don’t make the JBS/Sturgill connection. Likely some combo of those two factors.
If one of those two things can be identified as the root cause, then until ticketing companies catch on, artists could physically release an album under a pseudonym, announce a tour, and let diehard fans buy tickets before changing course on marketing and/or streaming. That way diehards get their tickets and to enjoy the music early, while all fans eventually get access to the new music and tour tickets.
Maybe JBS is playing chess and wants to conduct a really cool experiment that rewards his most dedicated fans.