Booking similar acts in a city on the same night

If you care enough about music to be on Inforoo, you've dealt with scheduling conflicts before at festivals and when deciding which show to catch in your town on a particular evening (especially if you have diverse musical tastes.)

I remember a June Friday night in Boston a few years ago where my choices were the Paul Simon farewell tour, John Prine, Ted Leo/Rx performing (imho) his best album "Hearts of Oak" in its entirety, and The Posies.

That's to be expected when you live in a big metropolitan area, especially when multiple shows on one night all interest you because you've got diverse musical tastes.

What you almost never see, though, are two acts that strongly appeal to the same audience playing one city on the same night.  You'd never see, say, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden playing two different arenas in one city on the same night, or Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar performing at different venues in the same city simultaneously.

It's Economics 101 -- each show will end up selling fewer tickets than they would have if the artists had played the city on different nights, due to the number of people who would have bought tickets for both shows.

When I checked my e-mail this morning, I was thrilled to see a subject line for a Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit presale at the Boch Center's Wang Theater in Boston.  When I opened the e-mail though, something about the date -- Saturday, September 18 -- sounded familiar.

Then I realized that that's the same night that Dawes is playing Boston, half a dozen blocks away at the Orpheum Theater.

That's about as big a conflict between current Americana acts as you can possibly imagine.

For what it's worth, that Dawes show was announced two months ago, so people who already got tickets for that show will probably opt for Dawes.  I waited to go to the box office and save money on the service fees, since there were a ton of balcony seats still available when I last checked a week or two ago.  Since I saw Dawes most recently in 2019, but haven't seen Isbell since 2017, I jumped on the Isbell presale this morning.

The Isbell show is being promoted by Outback Presents, not Live Nation, which is doing the Dawes show.  So, you can't chalk this up to one concert promoter being dumb enough to book Dawes and Jason Isbell shows in the same city on the same night.  But how does any booking agent or concert promoter not keep any eye upon the touring schedules of similar acts to avoid something like this happening?

Best case scenario, someone in Isbell's camp or Outback Presents realizes that they'll likely sell 500-1000 fewer tickets due to the scheduling conflict and see if they can move the show to another night.  FWIW, there's nothing else on the calendar at the Wang Theater in September and this is literally the only announced date for Isbell between 9/16 - 9/23, with those dates bookended by Philadelphia and NYC shows.  It shouldn't be too difficult to change the date if they're still in the process of adding dates in the northeast during that time.

With the exception of a single-genre festival where you can't avoid conflicts like these, have you ever heard of a "same night, same town, same audience" conflict like this before?