Perloff Bowls A Strike

The results are in and Another Planet Entertainment’s Gregg Perloff is guesser of the year and winner of the $10,000 pool in the first (and maybe last) Bookers Bowl started at the 2006 Concert Industry Consortium in Las Vegas by I.M.P.’s Seth Hurwitz.

As CIC attendees may recall, Hurwitz selected eight upcoming summer tours and asked a panel of 10 concert industry veterans to guess what the average number of tickets sold for each would be. The only requirement was a willingness to part with $1,000, and the winner would collect the pot when the totals were compiled.

Pollstar provided Hurwitz with box office data from year-end totals and Hurwitz crunched the numbers.

"Oh wow, I actually won some money?" a stunned Perloff said of his victory. "I ought to book shows for a living."

Of the eight tours originally prognosticated, one – The Darkness – was canceled and instead of separate tours, Sheryl Crow and John Mayer joined forces for a co-bill so they were dropped from the original list of eight tours.

Perloff’s predictions came the closest to the actual average number of tickets sold per show for two of the remaining five tours considered: Ben Harper and Black Eyed Peas. The other three tours went to three different gamblers.

Predictions for the Bon Jovi tour were across the board but Jerry Mickelson of Jam Productions came closest to the actual count of 22,300.

Live Nation’s Danny Zelisko just missed Nine Inch Nails’ total, 7,300, by 300. Nine of the 10 panelists bet that newcomer James Blunt would draw anywhere from 5,000 tix to, well, 16,000. It took the lone record guy on the panel, Epic’s Harvey Leeds, to land close with the lowest bet of 3,000.

Hurwitz was noncommittal about the prospects for a future Bookers Bowl. "If there’s another one, maybe we could have something like the ‘Super Bowl Picking Chicken,’" he said. "After the egg I laid last year, maybe the chicken would be an improvement."

Perloff added, "I’ll take the victory, with all modesty. Just bring the cash."