MANKATO — With the Alltel Center’s honeymoon long over, its leaders have gleaned some hard lessons.

Among them: If a show isn’t a good fit, don’t host it. And if you have to pass on a concert to prevent it from eating into the ticket sales of another act, pass it up. Oh, and U2 isn’t coming, like ever.

Those lessons help explain why certain acts come and why there can be only so many concerts at the Alltel Center.

So the center’s executive director Burt Lyman and marketing manager Eric Jones sat down with a reporter to answer the questions (and complaints) they’ve been asked oh-so-many times.

‘A relationship business’

A simple example: Why aren’t there more concerts?

One answer to that question took shape over the first decade or so of the civic center’s life, when many shows did well and some shows didn’t. But, excepting concession proceeds, the civic centerdidn’t lose money when people didn’t fill the seats.

Lyman said the lesson was that the bad shows turned out to hurt more in the long run.

That’s because some promoters — investors who pay for the band and the venue and aim to earn a profit on ticket sales — soured on the Alltel Center.

“It’s a relationship business,” Jones said.

And if a promoter loses money, they might not come back. They also might spread the word to other promoters.

Jones said the Alltel Center has since wooed back some of those promoters.

Randy Levy, a Minneapolis promoter who has a good history here, agrees.

“If it doesn’t work, he (the promoter) then tells somebody else who tells somebody else and pretty soon you get on the ‘do not call’ list,” he said.

He also appreciates the Alltel Center’s honesty about which acts will and won’t perform well here.

“They’ll tell you straight up how your competition is and how you’ll do in the market,” he said.

That market, not surprisingly, is excellent for country and pretty good for classic rock.

It is not as well suited for performing artists and niche acts.

Artists like Lyle Lovett, Leo Kottke and the Indigo Girls have come here and haven’t sold enough tickets to make them worthwhile for promoters.

Unless performers have a broad base, there won’t be enough fans in the area who will pay to see them.

The lesson: Be honest with promoters and don’t “force-feed” a show into a market that won’t support it.

Mark Halverson, who DJs a blues program on KMSU, acknowledges that the genre hasn’t sold very well here to date. Ticket sales for Lovett and the Robert Cray Band didn’t do much to inspire his faith in the local blues scene.

But he thinks it can work, if the center is willing to cultivate the fans.

Legendary blues artist B.B. King, slated for an Oct. 30 performance, will be a good test, and Halverson hopes it starts a trend.

He said Duluth had a blues festival that drew between 40,000 and 50,000 people.

“And I’d like to think Mankato people are at least as sophisticated as people in Duluth-Superior,” he said.

A hockey footnote

There’s a corollary to the why-don’t-more-bands-come question.

The biggest season for concerts is in the winter and the best days for concerts are Friday and Saturday nights.

Now, what could the problem be?

Lyman is quick to emphasize that the Alltel Center is happy to host hockey, but the timing does incur opportunity costs.

Such a list of passed-up concerts would be “heartbreaking,” Jones said.

Keep ’em separated

The beginning of 2003 might seem like a country fan’s dream: Alan Jackson, Phil Vassar and Kenny Chesney, all in three months. Two other country musicians, Alison Krauss, and Rascal Flatts, would perform later that year.

But those acts are too similar and too close together.

There are no rules for spacing concerts, Levy said, but the analysis has to focus on the targeted audience.

Competition is the most intense, obviously, for the same band playing more than one date. The fan base of those shows is exactly the same, and that’s why some venues prevent bands from playing nearby for a certain period of time.

Within a genre, many fans must choose where to spend their money. If they can’t go to three country shows in three months, one or more of those acts will suffer.

The lesson also holds for conventions, as the center learned in early 2007 when the Southern Minnesota Home & Builder’s Show and a second builder’s show were scheduled a month apart.

“As a result, neither client was happy with their experience at the Center,” according to a marketing and advertising plan for the Alltel Center.

Sorry, U2 fans

It’s not that the Alltel Center doesn’t like you, it’s just that they don’t have $2 million lying around to pay the band. And they don’t think you’d pay the $333 ticket price that it would take to break even.

At the height of their fame, mega-acts like U2 and The Rolling Stones simply will not come to the Alltel Center, no matter how many pleading phone calls fans make on their behalf.

Occasionally, a quasi-mega-act — perhaps on a rise or fall in fame — finds its way to the Alltel Center.

Chesney, John Mellencamp and Tom Petty, while not necessarily on the rise or fall, are examples, and they generally cost a promoter about $200,000. Of those, only Chesney sold out, which was somewhat of a surprise to Lyman.

All of this isn’t necessarily bad news, it’s just the sort of reality that has to be acknowledged.

As Lyman summarized the market to the City Council during a recent meeting: “It is what it is.”