Shows of a Lost World

Shows of a Lost World was a concert tour by British rock band the Cure. The North American leg of the tour sold over 547,000 tickets and grossed $37.5 million over 35 shows, making it the highest-grossing tour of the band's career to date. The South American leg of the tour commenced in September 2023 and consists of three standalone concerts and four festival appearances.

Background

In March 2023, the Cure announced a 30-date tour across the United States and Canada. The tour was called Shows of a Lost World and all shows would have the Twilight Sad performing as a supporting act. On 5 April, the band's frontman Robert Smith announced that second concert dates had been added in San Diego, Montreal, and Atlanta and a new show had been added in Portland, bringing the scheduled number of concerts to 34. On 27 April, a second show in San Francisco was announced, bringing the tour to 35 dates.

On 21 June 2023, the band announced that it would be headlining four Primavera Sound festivals across South America and on 23 June it announced three standalone concerts with the Twilight Sad and Just Mustard performing as support acts.

Ticket sales

Tickets for the tour were sold through Ticketmaster. When registration for ticket sales opened on 10 March, the band announced that tickets would be non-transferrable and that the band would not be using dynamic pricing, a process where ticketsellers alter prices given high or low demand, nor selling platinum tickets in order to keep tickets affordable for fans and to reduce the ability of resellers to resell tickets. Ticketholders would only be able to resell the tickets for face value on a ticket exchange. These choices led to tickets for the tour selling for an average of $68.57. On 15 March, Robert Smith tweeted that dynamic pricing was a "greedy scam" that artists chose to participate in. When asked for comment by Rolling Stone, StubHub, the biggest ticket reselling platform in the US, criticised the restrictions on ticket transferability, StubHub claimed they hurt consumer choice and encouraged artists to keep tickets transferrable. On 31 March, Smith said that 7,000 tickets that had been listed for resale on secondary markets had been identified and cancelled.

Ticket sales opened on 15 March. Soon after ticket sales opened, some fans posted screenshots on social media showing that the additional fees added onto the ticket prices were high relative to the price of the ticket, sometimes exceeding the price of the ticket itself. On 16 March, Smith tweeted that he was sickened by how high the additional fees were and would be asking how they were justified. The next day, Smith tweeted that after negotiations, Ticketmaster had agreed to refund a portion of the ticket fees as a gesture of goodwill. Buyers who had purchased the lowest-priced tickets would receive $10 and all other buyers would receive $5. He also said that tickets purchased after that day would incur lower fees.

Set list

This set list is representative of the show on 10 May 2023, in New Orleans. It is not representative of all concerts for the duration of the tour.

Tour dates

Notes

References