T-Pain Calls Off 1UP DLC Tour, Admits Low Ticket Sales

T-Pain has announced his upcoming 1UP DLC Tour dates are canceled, with all tickets being fully refunded. He was very candid in his explanation of why the dates were nixed in an Instagram post on Oct. 22.

“Let me just start by saying that my team set up the tour in September and if you’ve ever set up a whole month-long tour before you’d know that’s not enough time to set up a full tour. Some corners got cut, production went missing and I wasn’t as hands on with the planning as I should have been.

“I’m going to take it upon myself to cancel the 1UP DLC Tour. It would have been a bad look for me and it wouldn’t have been entertaining for ya’ll. I’d rather just leave it for a later time.

“I was advised to lie about this and say that I needed some “alone time” or “me time” or needed time to spend with my family or some medical attention. ‘Just don’t make it look like we fucked up.’ We fucked up, I’m gonna keep it real with ya’ll. Most artists lie, whenever concerts or tours get canceled, it’s for low ticket sales. It ain’t really about whatever reason they say and I think that’s wrong. 

“The ticket sales were very low because we didn’t set it up right. We didn’t set up the way you buy tickets right, we was rolling off of momentum from the first tour and we figured everything would be a breeze. And it was not.” 

The tour was set to run in theaters from Nov. 1 through Nov. 23. The Rappa Ternt Sanga said in the end this will be more of a postponement, and he promised that he will plan the next tour better.

T-Pain’s most recently reported Boxoffice dates were with the RnB Fridays Live tour through Australia last year with Lil Jon, Usher, Ginuwine, Naughty By Nature, Salt-N-Pepa, Trey Songz and more. 

The artist’s candor is a welcome breath of fresh air, as tours and festivals are often reluctant to acknowledge cancellations due to ticket sales. C3 Presents was similarly straight with its fans in September when the company admitted that the Metarama Gaming + Music Festival was being canceled due to slow ticket sales. 

In 2016 after 23 festivals were canceled in the first three months of the year, Pollstar did a brief comparison of which events had been canceled before and after tickets went on sale, as some in the industry assume any event canceled after tickets go on sale is canceled because of the ticket sales.

T-Pain also had words for media outlets covering the tour’s cancellation but not its announcement. 

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Sure would’ve loved all this media coverage when I announced the tour. The media loves life’s lows. FREE PROMO FOR THE BAD SHIT!! EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT THE NEGATIVE PARTS!!!!!!!</p>&mdash; T-Pain (@TPAIN) <a href=”https://twitter.com/TPAIN/status/1187088801719406593?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>October 23, 2019</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>