JP Saxe is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter who released the second part of his two-part album, “Make Yourself at Home,” in June. He’d scheduled an ambitious tour to take place in the Fall, headlining low-thousands-capacity venues like New York’s Brooklyn Steel and Seattle’s Showbox, but earlier this week, he posted a TikTok explaining that if he didn’t sell an additional 20,000 tickets for the tour in 48 hours, he’d have to cancel the entire trek. He said so with an honesty and self-awareness displayed by musicians in similar situations.
That honesty continues: On Friday morning, he announced that, like an increasing number of artists in recent months, he did not meet his goal. In the brutally honest editorial below, he contemplates the difficulties of being a touring musician and what artists experience when their expectations are met with an unexpected reality.
Due to unforeseen circumstances…
The circumstance: I didn’t sell enough tickets.
Last week, my team told me we were going to have to cancel my fall tour. Ticket sales weren’t where they needed to be. The suggestion was: take the L, try again next year.
The industry standard in this situation is to offer some ego-saving explanation — “wrong timing,” “new opportunities,” “a scheduling conflict,” “illness,” “global warming…”
What you’re not supposed to say is:
“Hey, I guess people aren’t really fucking with me right now.”
“I aimed too high — my bad.”
“All of you who did buy tickets? You’re more than enough for me emotionally, just… not pragmatically.”
But I said it anyway. I posted a video and told the truth: I was embarrassed. I’ve always prioritized connecting deeply over widely, but if we didn’t sell another 20,000 tickets in 48 hours, the tour would be canceled.
To my surprise, people responded — in a big way. The video hit a few million views. A little grassroots army of emotional-song-loving cuties showed up, trying to buy every tour-saving ticket they could.
Self-image is delicate on a good day, fragile on a bad one. As an artist, your sense of self is tangled up with your “brand,” and it becomes hard to separate how you’re actually doing from how you’re perceived to be doing.
And if you’re only as successful as you appear to be, then success starts to depend on your ability to shape perception. In scroll-world — where there’s no time for nuance — the flash becomes the fact. That’s why if a show is over 80 percent sold, you call it sold out. It’s not a lie, it’s marketing. We’ve all seen it work. You create the illusion of buzz, people get curious, the crowd grows — and suddenly the buzz is real.
That’s the game. If the ship is sinking, you announce you’ve decided to be a submarine.
Instead, I told everyone the ship was sinking.
And somehow… they jumped on board.
Oddly enough, it was more embarrassing before I shared it. Once it was out there, it started to feel weirdly empowering. The honesty cracked something open.
I didn’t expect to get messages from so many other artists calling me bold (or, absurdly, brave). I didn’t expect my team to get so many calls from industry folks commending me for telling the truth.
We say “honesty wins” a lot when talking about social media strategy. But I think that’s incomplete. It’s not just honesty. It’s honesty with a hook.
It’s “I’m embarrassed to tell you this…” followed by a jump cut and a vulnerable beat drop.
But maybe that’s part of the art form now. It’s not just about making something worth caring about — it’s about knowing how to make people care.
I’m scared I’m only ever as successful as I’m perceived to be. That to feel successful, I need to look successful — to my peers, my friends back home, my family, their families…
But how much of that is just… lying?
I hate lying. It gives me anxiety.
I also hate trying to “craft an identity.”
I’d rather just say too much, share too much, be too much — and hope that somewhere in the mess of it, something more honest takes shape than anything I could’ve constructed on purpose.
Applause for success is great. But there is something more interesting about being applauded for honesty in failure. It’s not as good for my ego — but maybe it’s better for my growth.
Even though a few thousand more people showed up in just a few days — which was emotional and the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me on the internet — it still wasn’t enough to save the tour, and I will be humbly refunding every ticket.
To borrow an allegory from my lifestyle in 2014…
Very few artists want to be sleeping in their car eating ramen, but every artist wants to say they used to sleep in their car eating ramen. So if I really believe (which I do) that I’m going to sell out arenas someday… then I also have to believe in how much better it’ll feel when I get there — knowing I can tell the story about that one time, in the fall of 2025, when despite the support of a few thousand beautiful strangers on the internet… I had to cancel my whole tour.
variety.com
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