After 20 Years, Emo Giant Something Corporate Is Back With a New Song, Tour — and a Bold Plan to Beat Ticket Scalpers
2024 is a good year to be a Something Corporate fan.
Known for full-throated pop-punk singalongs including “If You C Jordan,” “I Woke Up in a Car” and “Punk Rock Princess,” the band had a brief but successful initial run, releasing its debut LP “Leaving Through the Window” in 2002 and the follow-up “North” a year and a half later before going on hiatus in 2005.
Twenty years later, the band is busier than ever. The group just dropped its first new song — “Death Grip” — in two decades, and is launching a tour Thursday night at Brooklyn Steel that will cross the U.S., including festival dates and a cruise. As committed as the band is to getting songs ready for the shows, there has been as much work behind the scenes to confirm that fans got access to tickets before scalpers.
Lead singer and pianist Andrew McMahon tells Variety that getting the original lineup — including lead guitarist Josh Partington, bassist Kevin Page, drummer Brian Ireland and rhythm guitarist William Tell — back together felt natural after they had an unannounced reunion at his 40th birthday show in Anaheim in 2022.
“We had gotten together a couple of times over the years; for my benefit show, we did a 2010 reunion with most of the full lineup,” McMahon says. “This was the first time where everybody just had grins plastered across their faces — the band and the fans equally. We were all the same level of excited.”
McMahon, who has recorded and toured with projects including Jack’s Mannequin and Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness since Something Corporate’s hiatus, also said the milestone of hitting 40 allowed him to look differently at the music he recorded and toured in his early 20s.
“I started to see our history differently,” he says. “I started to appreciate my roots and where I came from, and not feel like I had to run from it to prove myself. This is a part of who I am and that opened the door to, ‘OK, let’s see if anybody out there wants a Something Corporate show.'”
From there, the band had a buzzy reunion set at the 2023 When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas, which led to more shows and the decision to launch the 2024 Out of Office Tour.
Along with the shows, the new song “Death Grip” shows a different side of the band, a sun-kissed anthem of self-reflection that eschews distorted guitars for lush pop production. Officially credited to Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness featuring Something Corporate, the song was born during a writing trip to Nashville. McMahon was so taken with the initial idea of the song that, knowing the Something Corporate tour was imminent, he asked his bandmates to come and collaborate on it.
“It was the first time we’ve all been in the studio recording together in several years,” he says. “And, man, it was just this magic moment. I had no expectations other than it just felt so natural. The writing, the recording of it and then bringing the guys into the process — I’m just kind of on this trip right now, just trying to let everything flow.”
As if the pressures of preparing for a tour and recording new music wasn’t enough to keep McMahon busy, he also was determined to make sure that tickets for the new shows went directly to fans and didn’t get posted for exorbitant fees on secondary markets. It’s a fight that superstars such as Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and Foo Fighters have taken on throughout their careers, but with the scalpers always finding new tips and tech to dodge the rules, it’s been difficult to crack down on them.
McMahon, along with Morgan Young and Ryan Carignan from C3 Management, was so dedicated to trying to make tickets go directly to fans that they mapped out a plan named the “Something Corporate Anti-Scalping Measures.” They are hoping to use this plan as an evolving blueprint for action, as well as share it with likeminded groups and industry professionals. (Click here to read the document in full.)
The plan aimed to deter scalpers of the Out of Office Tour via three main tactics: Enabling Face Value-only ticket exchanges, which was legal in every market except New York, Denver and Salt Lake City; having promoters do Over the Limit ticket sweeps to cancel and put a hold on potentially fraudulent orders; and work with their fan club to ensure that any fans that were shut out of getting tickets or had their order canceled in the process get another shot at accessing them at face value.
The group found that the process made a big difference in dodging the secondary market, even if it created a lot of work on their end, from initial messaging to fans to studying sheets of email addresses to try to spot any obviously fraudulent buyers.
McMahon first noticed the adverse impact of scalpers on his fans in 2012 when tickets to his then-final Jack’s Mannequin concert — which doubled as a cancer charity fundraiser — were being sold for hundreds of dollars over face value, with none of that money going to charity. McMahon ended up tweeting about the situation to StubHub, and he credits them for trying to resolve the incident. But the company has been on his radar ever since.
“The first Something Corporate show that we put on sale was a side show ahead of the When We Were Young Festival, and not having tested the market for Something Corporate, I was actually nervous about selling out the show period,” he says. “I wasn’t even thinking about the scalpers at that point. Sure enough, within minutes, we’re seeing tickets to a show that we’re charging 75 bucks for going online for $500. I decided with the team then and there that we were going to do everything within our power to try and thwart the secondary market and put fairly priced tickets in the hands of our fans.”
Young notes that it would be difficult for every touring act to take on such a project because of the scope of help they received from WME and C3, but they’re hopeful that the blueprint for action will help move the industry in the right direction.
“It requires diligence in advance because you can’t put a show on sale and fix it afterward,” Young says. “We’re continually educating ourselves, and you’ve got to stay one step ahead of scalpers. It’s definitely labor-intensive for the agents and promoters. Unless you have a tour that is going to do a certain volume, I don’t know that the promoters and ticketing companies really want to spend that much time, nor does an independent manager who’s also got to worry about getting a band on the road. We’re hoping to create a blueprint here.”
Carignan also noted that even with all of the messaging the band has available to fans, secondary market companies lobby Congress aggressively — and the team even hears some of that messaging in their direction.
“The message that they’re sending … we did get a couple of comments from fans who were angry, saying, ‘I should be able to buy the ticket for $300 if I want,'” he says. “‘Why are you standing in my way?’ That is the message they’re getting from the state laws and policies. Their messaging is affecting the consumer because people are starting to take that false notion and run with it.”
Beyond trying to spread their lessons and tactics to other acts, McMahon notes that serious change will come once larger conversations can be had in legislative bodies, and he’d be happy to be a voice on behalf of musicians and concertgoers.
In the meantime, McMahon breaks into a smile when considering starting the tour and revisiting Something Corporate material.
“Honestly, it’s a real full-circle moment,” he says. “I feel like I’m finally able to import this stuff into my present, as opposed to saying, ‘Here’s my Something Corporate career, here’s my Jack’s Mannequin career, here’s my Wilderness career.’ I’m just proud of all of it.”
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