Tickets for a concert go on sale a year or more in advance, which is a long time to commit to a Tuesday evening. The lead time is driven by scheduling constraints rather than by marketing.
Venue availability is the binding constraint
The main reason and the one that determines everything else.
Large venues are booked far ahead, and the calendar is competitive. Arenas host sport, conferences and other events, and the available dates are limited.
Which means a tour is routed around what is available rather than around what would be ideal, and securing dates requires committing early.
Once dates are held, deposits are paid and the schedule is fixed, which creates pressure to announce and start selling.
Routing is a logistical puzzle
The second constraint and it is more demanding than it appears.
A tour moves a substantial amount of equipment and a large crew between cities on a schedule that must allow time to travel, load in, rehearse, perform and load out.
Load-in for a large production can take a full day, which means a venue is occupied for longer than the show.
Which produces routing where geography, venue availability and travel time all constrain each other, and the solution takes months to construct.
Changing one date can require rebuilding a section of the route, which is why cancellations propagate.
The cash flow reason
The commercial factor.
Production costs are incurred long before any performance. Staging is designed and built, crew are contracted, rehearsals are held, trucks and buses are booked.
Ticket revenue arriving early funds that. A tour selling eighteen months ahead is financing its own production.
Which is why the on-sale is early even when demand would support a later one, and why the money is held by the promoter rather than the venue in most arrangements.
Why the on-sale itself is chaotic
The part everybody experiences.
Demand for a limited number of tickets arrives in a compressed window, which is a queuing problem with no comfortable solution.
A substantial share of inventory is allocated before general sale — presales for fan clubs, cardholders and platforms, holds for the artist, venue and promoter, and allocations to hospitality packages.
Which means the number available at general sale is frequently a fraction of the venue capacity, and the perception that everything sold in seconds is partly accurate for that reason.
Automated purchasing remains a problem despite technical measures and legislation in several jurisdictions.
What has changed recently
Several developments worth knowing.
Demand-responsive pricing, where prices move with demand during the on-sale, has been adopted widely and has produced substantial public objection, including from artists who said they had not understood what was being applied.
Personalised and transferable-only-at-face-value ticketing has spread, which reduces resale profiteering and creates difficulties for anybody whose plans change legitimately.
And regulatory attention has increased in several markets, with investigations into pricing transparency and market concentration.
Why dates get cancelled
Given the lead time, a proportion inevitably do.
Illness, which for a solo performer ends a date outright.
Poor sales, which is the reason least often stated and frequently the actual one. A tour that has not sold sufficiently may be rerouted or shortened, generally described as scheduling.
And production problems, which for elaborate shows are more common than audiences assume.
Refunds are generally straightforward for cancellations and considerably less so for postponements, where the ticket is usually valid for the new date and refunds may be limited.
The practical advice
Buy from the official seller, and be aware that unofficial resale sites frequently appear above official ones in search results.
Check whether the ticket is transferable before buying, if there is any chance you will not attend.
Note that the face value is rarely the price paid, with fees adding a substantial proportion, which is now required to be disclosed upfront in some jurisdictions and is not everywhere.
And for anything eighteen months out, consider whether the commitment is real, since a significant proportion of the resale market exists because people bought optimistically.
Smaller venues work differently
Worth stating because the whole picture above describes arena touring.
Club and theatre shows are typically announced two to four months ahead, priced simply, and sold without dynamic pricing or elaborate presale structures.
The economics are thinner and the experience for a buyer is considerably better.
Which is a reasonable argument for spending on smaller shows, where more of the money reaches the artist, the ticket costs what it says, and you can decide to go in a fortnight rather than committing eighteen months ahead to an evening you cannot picture.
What the artist actually receives
Worth stating since it is widely misunderstood.
A performer is generally paid a guaranteed fee plus a share of revenue above a threshold, negotiated with the promoter.
Production costs for an elaborate show come out of the artist's side in many arrangements, which means a visually ambitious tour can be substantially less profitable than a simpler one at the same ticket price.
Several well-known performers have said publicly that large tours made very little, which is counterintuitive and consistent with how the costs are allocated.
Merchandise is frequently where the margin actually is, subject to venue commissions that can be substantial.