Target Center boosters overstating its success

As Minneapolis city leaders urge more public money to renovate Target Center, they've been throwing around an astonishing claim: Target Center is the nation's No. 3 concert venue measured by ticket sales.

If that seems hard to believe, it's because it isn't true.

In recent years, Target Center has typically ranked 20th to 40th among similar-sized arenas in the U.S. So how did City Council Members John Quincy, Jacob Frey and others place it in the same league with New York City's Madison Square Garden? They inadvertently counted Garth Brooks twice.

Brooks played an 11-show sold-out run at Target Center as part of his comeback tour last year. Of the 500,000 concert tickets sold there, Brooks was responsible for 200,000.

Brooks asks the venues where he plays not to publicize his sales numbers, but somehow his Target Center ticket totals fell into the hands of Pollstar, a concert industry trade publication. That vaulted the Minneapolis venue from 19th place to sixth in the magazine's annual rankings.

Quincy, however, did not know Brooks was already counted in the Pollstar ranking, and he wanted to make sure Minneapolis got credit for all those tickets. So he added them in again, resulting in the erroneous third-place showing.

The Allstate Arena near Chicago and the Philips Arena in Atlanta also broke the Brooks embargo, and like Target Center saw their Pollstar rankings skyrocket. Arenas in Missouri, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina and Arkansas played by the rules, and that artificially depressed their totals.

Quincy says it doesn't really matter whether Target Center ranked third or sixth, his point was the arena had a great year.

"I would take number 28. If it generates more money, I don't care if other people are ahead of us," Quincy said Monday after the Ways & Means Committee he chairs voted to pour an extra $24.5 million into renovating Target Center.

The odds of Target Center having another year like 2014 any time soon are slim. Most years, the building hosts about 25 concerts. Last year, thanks largely to Brooks, it had 40.

General Manager Steve Mattson acknowledged finding a single artist capable of selling out the house — sometimes two shows a night — for more than a week straight is "an absolute rarity."

Even setting Brooks aside, Pollstar's rankings aren't a perfect measure of a venue's performance. They don't count tickets sold by the basketball and hockey teams that serve as the primary tenants for many of the arenas. And even with concerts, there are a significant number of ticket sales that go unreported.

The Xcel Energy Center doesn't send any numbers directly to Pollstar, so the magazine has to rely on reports from promoters, which are less consistent. Major 2014 shows including Miley Cyrus, Usher and Disney on Ice aren't included in the Xcel Center's total, which partially accounts for why it ranked 34th in the national rankings last year.

"It's not an exact science," Editor-In-Chief Gary Bongiovanni said of the annual rankings. "It's the best metric we have to compare one arena over another."