Touring Strategy Quotes

As far as the live shows go, we're not leapfrogging all the smaller venues. We would have bypassed these kind of shows and gone straight to the Arena shows, but we didn't want to.

When you make albums like I do, and it's based off fanfare and based off touring - I make these albums, and I get on the road. It's not really a radio-driven thing. I get on the road, and I see my fans, and I touch each and every last one of them.

You gotta do both. You've got to be on those big tours, and you've got to be in the clubs.

I only made x amount of albums in 20 years and to still be living comfortably. A lot of people and friends look at me and be like yo Ra how do you do it? You don't go on tour every year and you don't make an album every year, you chill with your family and watch TV. Everyone else is out on tour getting that money. But I managed to do my thing right with the help of my accountant and I'm still comfortable.

So we are pretty convinced we don't want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well.

I had a five-year plan to get to 500-seat venues and tour by ourselves and fill a room everywhere we go. I figured we could make a living off that. As long as you buy nothing stupid, you'll be OK.

I'm just going to tour; that's the best way for people to get to know me. Focusing on the international stuff and breaking in to the States and U.K.

I've always made sure that I tour with bands that people aren't expecting me to tour with.

My booking agent, of course, here and overseas, their tendency is to want to build on a certain kind of measurable success, and I was thinking yesterday, what I'd like to do is maybe start to compile a list of the best 200 to 500 capacity rooms around the world and just start going to them again and again and again.

If you don't tour, you cannot expect to sell a huge numbers of your albums either. It was both a business - and an economical decision and we wanted to play anyway. We just wanted to get out for the tour when it was safe enough for us.

Madonna would not have done a 360 deal with us just because of our touring capability. We had to prove to her and others that we have been working on and built a very good execution capacity at Artist Nation.

So we are not doing the traditional album, tour, album, tour, album, tour anymore. We're going to tour when we want to, regardless of whether we've got a record out.

It's not how many tickets can we sell, it's where do we want to play, not where should we play to make the most money. We don't really care about that.

The nature of touring is packaging acts together that have strong catalogues of music. It's about making sure that it's a winning combination. It's really about giving people value for their money.

Jay Z doesn't care if he plays in Paris or Denver, but we do. We make more money in Paris.

What Metallica always tries to do, as we go around and play a lot of the same cities, over and over again, year after year, is to give a different experience. We try to never play the same venues, or if we play indoors, we'll play outdoors, and all that type of stuff. It's always about just trying to do a different kind of experience.

I spent six figures of my own money to get a tour bus and do a fan tour for my second album. I surprised fans at their houses, and we'd eat food and play video games.