Slovenia Dumps Madonna

[Guest BrentVanZant]

Were tickets expensive there?

Also, as an artist, how successful is she in Slovenia. Some here have criticised her for playing there but we don't know how successful she is as an artist?

the tickets were too expensive to begin with for a show in a field (the Stožice Hippodrome is basically a field, don't get fooled by news reports that it's a "62,000 seater" or a proper "venue"), it's a freaking field and you cannot really set a rigid capacity to a field, can you?

moving along, the date did sell poorly but still in the vein of some other cities on this tour (for instance Udine and Zaragoza). interestingly enough, the cancellation was supposedly ordered from Budapest (LN Hungary's headquarters) and not from the local promoter Lupa Promotion. the local promoter had posters hung up on the very eve prior to the cancellation and the commercial on the telly was still in heavy rotation. afaik, the local promoter firmly believed the date was a go and was still advertising it and putting their money into promoting it. their biggest flaw, though, was the fact that they didn't manage to find a substantial sponsor that would be willing to invest at least 250,000 EUR or possibly even 500,000 into the show. they had several minor sponsors but they needed a big one and they failed in that department. to sell somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 tickets is simply not enough to cover all the expenses if you don't have a major financial injection to back you up. the Udine date had the whole community to back it up financially (the Friuli Venezia Giulia region's tourist association guaranteed financially that the date would go ahead no matter what). Lupa Promotion didn't have that and they still went ahead with the concert since it would have been worse for them to cancel it out of the blue like eventually happened than to go ahead with it and suffer minor losses (which could be recouped by LN's other act U2 that put up 2 sell-out gigs in Zagreb and that was also handled by Lupa Promotion). anyhoo, the final decision apparently came from LN's Budapest office and as someone mentioned it was the case of sacrificing one date to make others in the region sell a bit better. (many people who had tickets for Ljubljana immediately opted either for Munich, Budapest or Belgrade - all are in similar proximity to Slovenia).

to conclude, this years itinerary for Central Europe was logistically horrendous: a gazillion of dates in close proximity to each other. it would never sell-out, especially since this is a repetition of the tour many people in the region already saw last year. hopefully LN learned a lesson.

Edited August 23, 2009 by BrentVanZant