EDM : Avicii's manager Ash Pournouri talks the "disaster" of U.S. arena tour

While he’s been on a fast ascent since his first releases, Avicii became a superstar in 2012. At 23-years-old, the Swede has co-headlined Stereosonic in Australia, ticked off Tomorrowland, Electric Daisy Carnival and Ultra Music Festival (with Madonna for company, too), staked his place in Ibiza and kept the Beatport blockbusters coming. When inthemix spoke to Tim Bergling ahead of Stereosonic, he was candid about the atypical reality he’s been living. “I do about 300-plus shows a year,” he told us. “I think I’ll end up at like 320 shows this year. It’s definitely a strange lifestyle. You know, I’m not going to push myself to the edge like this forever.”

At the recent Electronic Music Conference in Sydney, scheduled between the Stereosonic weekends, Avicii’s manager Ash Pournouri sat down for an in-depth discussion about taking Bergling from a bedroom producer to a top-billing act. “When you launch an artist that is young and kind of inexperienced, it’s hard for them to know their limits,” admitted Pournouri, who discovered Avicii’s productions when Bergling was still a teenager. “Especially as young as Tim was – he came straight out of school; doing the music stuff almost full time. For him, he didn’t know his limits – I was more concerned for his health than he was himself. I was always on him about, ‘Do you really want this tough schedule, I thought you might want this free period over here?’ and he was like, ‘No I can handle it, I can handle it”. So that is an important part of a manager’s job. It’s hard for an artist when they’re young to know their limits.”

As Bergling himself told inthemix, he’s already making plans to scale back his schedule. “Next year is going to be way more studio-oriented than this and last year,” he said in our interview. “We’re going to slow down a lot. January and February are pretty much completely free.”

At the Electronic Music Conference, Pournouri also spoke about the criticism that Avicii’s Le7els tour, which saw the DJ taking his 3D stage show around America earlier this year, was ‘too big too soon’. Several arenas on the circuit were reported to be far from sold out, with busy General Admission floors but empty and curtained-off seating sections. At the EDM Biz conference in June, Marc Geiger, head of music for WME Entertainment, coined the Le7els tour “an irrational decision fuelled by an irrational market. Avicii trying to be a rock star is a big mistake.”

“There’s a lot to that story,” Pournouri told the room at EMC 2012. “There’s a lot of elements that came together and made it a disaster, basically, for us. We weren’t really prepared for that scale of touring; we had a vision that we wanted to create this great production and create a different type of experience for EDM fans other than a DJ showing up and putting two stick in the players and do his set. We wanted to present an alternative to everything. Tim was still touring normal as well just with the simple set-up, we just wanted to add something to it.

“The routing was what killed us. The routing was done by my agents and the promoters that were involved, looking back on it; it was overly ambitious for no reason. So that’s basically what killed us. But on the other hand, we learnt a lot from it. I’ve never done anything like that before and I was the first one to say, ‘This is above my experience’. But I learnt a lot from that tour, not just about myself but about the scene and the market. In that sense, it was a good experience. It was a first and a big risk but I think moving on, we have learnt a lot from doing that tour.”



Credit : InTheMix