One for the Brooks

Thursday night in Atlanta, Garth Brooks performed the inagural concert in the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The new stadium was completely sold out, with over 80,000 fans in attendance to see the 6 time ACM Entertainer of the Year on his world tour. Between the infamous performer and the fact that Brooks was opening up Mercedes-Benz Stadium for concerts, there was understandably a lot of hype for this enormous event.

However, when the opener for Brooks began to play, Mercedes-Benz Stadium began receiving complaints that the sound was unclear and the acoustics were off, perhaps due to the metal stadium and closed metal roof. MBS responded to these complaints with a tweet saying, "Audio engineers are working through the sound issues with the artists. Garth Brooks will take the stage soon." When Brooks took the stage, the sound problem got even worse due to the fact that Brooks' band and vocals were louder than the opener's. Especially in the upper levels of the stadium, the sound quality was so poor that fans left only a few songs into Brooks' set, even after spending hundreds of dollars on tickets. Fans with floor seats were able to hear the songs more clearly, however they still reported a poor sound quality.

The only public statement that Mercedes-Benz Stadium made about the sound issues was the tweet before Brooks took the stage, but no mention of the sound during or after Brooks' set. After the concert, an email survey was sent to ticket holders to rate their concert experience. Many of these questions seemed to be leading fans to blame the sound problem on Brooks, although it was clearly a stadium problem. From most of the online reviews, fans seem to acknowledge the facts that it was not Brooks' fault for the poor sound, and that a world renowned performer would certainly have all of his equipment in check and working. Although there have been numerous national articles written about this concert in a negative light, Mercedes-Benz Stadium has not officially addressed the complaints and is not offering blanket refunds for tickets.

Especially with it being the first ever concert in the new stadium, Mercedes-Benz Stadium should make a public statement acknowledging the issues with the new stadium and offer some sort of refund or credit to attendees, no matter how small. At the very least, Mercedes-Benz should inform fans that they are working to fix the sound issues in the future, to ease future ticket holders' concerns about upcoming concerts, and reduce the risk of impacting ticket sales because of the negative publicity. Because it is a new stadium, optics for Mercedes-Benz Stadium are more important than ever, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium has done a very poor job of easing fans' minds and making fans feel like they are heard, something that could easily be done with social media in today's world.