Neil Freiman

Some have justified it by mentioning new music they're behind on or prioritizing work-life balance, but the Pussycat Dolls, to their credit, were the most blunt.

After taking an honest look at the North American run they wrote, we've made the difficult and heartbreaking decision to cancel all but one of the North America dates.

In other words, they weren't selling enough seats.

Fans and concert promoters have come up with a name for the sweeping trend of cancellations, Blue Dot Fever.

It's inspired by the seating chart graphic on Ticketmaster where a blue dot indicates an available seat.

And despite the cornucopia of excuses these stars have given for scaling back their tours, industry sources say that the real reason is that they haven't sold enough tickets to make them profitable.

Now, a blame game has begun to identify the cause of Blue Dot Fever.

Some blame the musicians for thinking they're Taylor Swift when they're not.

or Ticketmaster for running what a jury recently found to be a monopoly in the ticketing industry.

Either way, whatever started the fever is sending chills across music.

Right, like Post Malone and Meghan Trainor are playing these arenas, and people in the industry are saying, you guys are high on your own supply.

You cannot necessarily play a football stadium or an arena tour as Meghan Trainor, so it's time to look inward, and I think Taylor Swift kind of

really disrupted the market in 2023 and 2024 when she was charging these sky-high prices and people were paying.

And there's millions of people who would be willing to pay that, but they just couldn't get access to tickets.

So she kind of distorted everything and made people maybe feel, maybe made other musicians feel like they were at her level when they're not.

And I don't think we're going to see huge retrenchment in people going to concerts broadly.

I mean, at the top of the batting order, they're still going to pull in.

I'm thinking about

Olivia Rodrigo, who just released presale tickets for her upcoming tour a few days ago.

And I'm sure that was bedlam.