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Arcade Fire reportedly playing to half-empty arenas

The band released their latest album Everything Now this summer to a mixed reception

Clarisse Loughrey
Monday 06 November 2017 05:03 EST
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Arcade Fire is reportedly struggling to fill arenas on its North American tour.

The Globe and Mail has reported surprisingly low attendance figures for several of the bands shows: Billboard and Pollstar boxscore figures show just 4,263 fans showed up for the band's Quebec City show, 4,004 in Tampa, 5,614 in Austin, Tex, and 5,051 in Dallas.

This hasn't been the case for the entire tour, with LA and New York boasting larger crowds, and the band's even added a second show at Toronto's Air Canada Centre.

One of the more heavily attended shows was Vancouver, which saw frontman Win Butler address the disparity: "We've played cities three times as big with half as many people, so this is really a thing of beauty for us," he told the crowd of 15,000.

The band released their latest album Everything Now this summer, but faced a mixed reception. Did it affect their popularity? Possibly. Pollstar reported 5,739 attended the Ottawa show, with 9,798 attending a show in the same venue in 2014.

When contacted by The Globe and Mail, both the band and the tour's promoters Live Nation declined to comment.

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