At first glance, it seemed HBO was just pulling out all the stops last minute to boost the final season of True Blood — the power of Beyonce.
The network announced on Thursday that right before the vampire drama airs each Sunday night, the channel will feature an episode of Beyonce: X10, a new series with footage from the pop star’s recently completed Mrs Carter Show world tour.
Each segment will clock in at about four minutes and air at 8.55pm beginning on June 29; songs included over the run include Drunk in Love, Ghost/Haunted, Get Me Bodied/Baby Boy/Diva and Girls. HBO notes that it was the highest-grossing female solo tour of 2013, with 132 concerts in 27 countries.
It’s also worth reminding everyone that Beyonce and HBO are in business, as her documentary Life is But a Dream aired on the network last year.
Then we looked a bit closer: The timing for the announcement is coincidentally right after Billboard published a story insisting that Beyonce and Jay Z’s upcoming co-headlining On the Run stadium tour is doing just fine, thank you very much.
Knocking down tabloid rumours that ticket sales are “dismal,” concert promoter Live Nation bragged that the tour has “sellout nights across North America”. Another source says the tour has sold $86 million (Dh305.8 million) in tickets.
This is all very strange. First, it’s unusual that Beyonce or her camp would even acknowledge a random tabloid report. Second, the sites claiming that the tour is in trouble are in no way reputable: Why would Live Nation care what they say? And if they did, why draw more attention to it?
Those reports must have hit a nerve for some reason, though, as the Billboard piece goes on to list why — even though tickets are selling very well! — On the Run might not be a sold-out tour. For example: People want to buy tickets closer to the date of the show, and some fans will wait to see reviews before deciding to go.
That only adds to the weirdness, as it seems just a bit too defensive. (Also, do people seriously wait until the last minute to drop several hundred dollars on stadium show tickets?) Even if the tour isn’t a sell-out or doing as well as expected, it’s clearly doing fine. The fact that Live Nation jumped so quickly to refute the reports makes it seem like everyone is just a little too sensitive about the fact that not everything associated with Beyonce and Jay Z can be perfect.
That sort of image control can be helpful, until it’s over the top and then it’s very much not. Because as a result, people will only wonder what really is the truth.
