Joe Berchtold
President and Chief Financial Officer at Live Nation Entertainment
That's about a four part question. Let's start with some of the easier pieces. In terms of cancellation rates, our cancellation rates, we're seeing historical norms below last year. They historically run kind of 4% to 5% of shows, about 1.5% of fans, absolutely in line with historical trends. I think most of the reports that we've seen have been efforts to take one or two data points out of a very large number of tours and shows, and we're just not seeing anything unusual there. In terms of overall demand, continues to be extremely strong. We tried to highlight here a couple of casual fan metrics that we think are important where obviously, we've heard a lot of things from other companies over the past weeks or month or so.
One is, just when we put on promotions or summer concert week back in May or more recently our four pack promotion, those tend to be focused on the casual fan, and we've seen increased interest of fans and their purchase behavior, so that's positive signal. The other signal that we look at is, how do shows close in the last couple of weeks before the amps play off, are people buying more of those lawn tickets as they're making the last minute decision on whether or not to go to the show, that number is up 16% year-to-date. So again, seeing very strong casual demand there.
And finally, once they go to the show, what's their behavior, and again, we're seeing no issues that we continue to be on track for a couple of dollars' growth in our APF spend at our amphitheaters. So I think it's all consistent with our concerts being seen as very good value, two-thirds less than $100, a third of them less than $50. It's a much more memorable event than a lot of other experiences you can get at that price point. So we continue to feel very good about the strong level of consumer demand we're seeing.
In terms of the specific fan count numbers that we've seen over the quarter and over the first half of the year, I think it really is venue type driven. It's not so much geographic driven. It's very consistent with what we've been saying for the past year. This was not going to be a big stadium year. You're seeing that play out in terms of lower stadium shows, lower fan count, that impacts our international number. North America, where we've had very strong performance, particularly on the amphitheater side. As you see here, we said amphitheater attendance up 40% for the second quarter.
So it's really that amphitheaters are up very strongly year-to-date. Arenas, theaters and clubs, all up double-digits as well. So you're seeing in totality continued growth despite the -- not having the stadium shows this year. And just from a geographic standpoint, that happens to benefit the U.S. doesn't make any comment on any kind of macro longer-term trend. As we head into the back half of the year, again, no underlying issues on fan demand at all. We expect to see continued growth in the fan count over the course of the second half. I think most of that will come in Q4, Q3, you'll see the continued impact of the stadium show count. And I think we had -- if we just look at the summer season, Q2, Q3, probably about two-thirds of your amp growth in terms of shows and fans was in Q2 as we got started earlier in the year and the majority of arena shows as well. So -- but we expect still solid fan demand growth -- fan growth overall for the second half of the year, again, probably more in Q4 than Q3.
