One of the more popular, baseless comment section arguments made around the reasoning for Phish’s thirteen-night run at Madison Square Garden is that ticket sales have suffered in recent years, so the band is retreating to a more familiar home base to line their pockets with guaranteed sell-outs. 

This, as you’d probably guess, is actually false. And it doesn’t take a deep dive into this free app called the internet to figure out that 2016 was actually one of Phish’s best sales years in some time, despite spending a large majority of it outside of the Northeast, their most loyal regional fanbase. 

A quick dive into Pollstar will tell you that Phish sold a total of 681,793 tickets over 42 shows (excluding Mexico in January) in 2016, their highest total sold since their 2009 comeback and the highest average tickets sold per show (with the third highest amount of shows played since 2009) since 2013. Phish dropped their average ticket price by just over $17 from 2015 and was able to pack an average of just under 31,000 people into each show. Yes, that number was inflated by bigger gigs at the likes of Wrigley Field, but for the most part the band’s touring slate was full of the usual suspects. 

In fact, the only years you could claim Phish’s ticket sales “slipped” is in 2015 where they barely averaged over 20,000 tickets sold (the average ticket price also jumped from $55.37 to $71.53 that year, too). 

All in all, it was a fruitful year for Phish, thus eliminating the ticket sales argument from the “why” of all of this. The search continues, alas.