JP Saxe Offers Radically Honest Explanation For Cancelling Tour: ‘I Didn’t Sell Enough Tickets’

JP Saxe was planning a fall headlining tour for rock clubs in the 1,000-2,000 capacity range to support the second half of his two-part album Make Yourself at Home. But after tickets went on sale, the Grammy-nominated singer announced on a brutally honest TikTok earlier this week that if he didn’t sell an additional 20,000 tickets for the run of shows he would have to cancel the entire thing.

“If we’re just not in a place yet to sell yet to sell out these two or three-thousand-cap venue that’s fine,” he said in the video. “It’s always been my goal to connect deeply not widely and I stand by that.” The clip was followed by another super honest one in which Saxe described his friends encouraging him to ask for help moving tickets, to which he said he initially respond, “no, that’s scary, I’m a man, I must do it all by myself.”

The 27-date North American tour slated to kick off Sept. 9 in Edmonton, AB at Midway Music Hall was booked to play venues including San Francisco’s Masonic, Nashville’s Cannery Hall, Detroit’s Saint Andrew’s Hall, Toronto’s Massey Hall and Brooklyn Steel in New York through an Oc. 15 gig at the Beachman in Orlando.

Then, on Wednesday (July 30) Saxe offered an update, saying that he’d sold “a few thousand extra tickets” since his initial plea, which he said he was grateful for and praised as a reminder that honesty and “being transparent in failure” can be more powerful than the “facade of success.”

“But what those few thousand tickets are not is enough to save this tour,” he lamented. “I’m really sorry. I’m so sorry,” he added, offering refunds for all the tickets purchased for the tour. And while he admitted to being “a little embarrassed,” Saxe said he is also feeling “a lot of ambition” to make sure he’s never in this position again and to make the most honest music he can going forward so he can fill those rooms in the future.

Saxe further explored the tour’s failure to launch in an essay for Variety on Friday (Aug. 1), in which he said the quiet part that most musicians (and their managers) don’t often say out loud about why they’re pulling dates after they’ve been announced.

“Due to unforeseen circumstances… The circumstance: I didn’t sell enough tickets,” he began. “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.” And while he wrote that he knows this kind of situation is often met with press releases about “wrong timing” or “a scheduling conflict,” the reality is something he knows you’re not supposed to admit: “‘I guess people aren’t really f–king with me right now.’”

He noted that the 20,000-tickets-or-bust video got a “few million views” and his grassroots army of “emotional song-loving cuties showed up” for him. But, alas, it wasn’t enough. “If you’re only as successful as you appear to be, then success starts to depend on your ability to shape perception,” he wrote about the difference between how an artist is actually connecting versus the perception of their success.

“In scroll-world — where there’s no time for nuance — the flash becomes the fact,” he said. “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.”

By sharing that his ship was sinking, Saxe said some people jumped on board to help and what was initially embarrassing to admit began to feel “weirdly empowering,” with the honesty cracking something open. He said that fissure was filled by messages from “many other” unnamed artists praising his boldness, as well as calls to his team from others in the industry commending his truth-telling.

His action comes more than a year after the Black Keys abruptly pulled the plug on their 31-date fall 2024 North American tour and split with their management and Jennifer Lopez cancelled her 2024 This Is Me… Live arena tour in order to, as a release said, take time off “to be with her children, family and close friends.”

“It’s not just about making something worth caring about — it’s about knowing how to make people care,” Saxe concluded. “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,” Saxe added, wondering how much of that brave face is just, well, lying.

“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,” he said about the RAV4-to-riches tales of other acts who’ve climbed from penurious obscurity to high-flying chart dominance. “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,” he wrote. “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.”