The Walmart AMP's Next Season Went the Other Way

The Walmart AMP's next season went the opposite direction from what I said. In my roundup I said the amphitheater "continues to break records," and — in a stretch of audio that's genuinely hard to make out on playback — described something like a pattern of fewer concerts drawing bigger crowds. The 2024 season was in fact a record. Then 2025 fell off hard.

What actually happened at the AMP

2024 was the record year: 49 shows, 385,834 tickets sold, an attendance record set by Chappell Roan, and the highest-grossing show in the venue's history from Post Malone.

2025 went down on both measures. Thirty-nine shows — ten fewer — and revenue off 24.6%, from about $40 million to $30.15 million. Reporting attributed it to an industry-wide slowdown in touring rather than anything local.

I want to be careful here, because I can't fully reconstruct what I said on camera; that section of audio is muddy. But whatever the exact words, the shape of what I described — fewer shows, more people — doesn't match 2025. It was fewer shows and less money.

That doesn't undo the case I was making. The Walmart AMP is an 11,000-seat venue that Pollstar ranks somewhere in the mid-thirties worldwide among amphitheaters by tickets sold, in a metro of about 620,000 people. That's remarkable whether or not any single season set a record.

One thing to fix: I called it "the major amphitheater built by Walmart." Walmart holds the naming rights. The venue opened in 2014 and is owned and operated by the Walton Arts Center, a nonprofit. Different relationship, and it matters — it means programming decisions run through an arts nonprofit, not a retailer.

The Giving Machines: right instinct, wrong scale

I described a "Light of the World" donation vending machine in Bentonville. The program is Light the World Giving Machines, run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Bentonville hosted Arkansas's first one on the downtown square in December 2024.

I said "there's not many of these located in America, so it's very special that Bentonville has one." The program ran in 106 cities across 14 countries in 2024 and expanded to 126 cities across 21 countries in 2025. It's a global program, not a rarity. Being Arkansas's first is the genuinely notable part, and that's what I should have said.

The mechanics I described were right, and the detail I didn't have makes the model better than I made it sound: 100% of donations go to the charities, with the church covering all operating costs. In Bentonville the beneficiaries were the Northwest Arkansas Children's Shelter, the Northwest Arkansas Women's Shelter in Rogers, the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank in Lowell, Samaritan Community Center in Rogers, and Canopy NWA in Fayetteville, plus two international options.

I hoped out loud that they'd run "all year long." They don't — it's a December-only program. If you want to use it, that's the window.

And the temple I mentioned: the Bentonville Arkansas Temple was announced in 2019 and dedicated on September 17, 2023.

The 618 apartments, and the land-use claim underneath them

The approval is real. Bentonville's Planning Commission approved a 618-unit large-scale development near Southeast Walton Boulevard on December 3, 2024, as part of the broader Plan Bentonville rezoning and comprehensive-plan process. I couldn't confirm the developer or the current construction status, so I'm not going to name either.

The claim I want to revisit is the one underneath it. I said Bentonville "is very pro multi-, missing middle, apartment complexes" and that "it's very easy to get approved — you just got to do it right and they'll green light you," and that the city "will gladly approve a 100-unit apartment complex on a one-acre thing versus three houses in an acre."

The direction is right. Plan Bentonville is a real, deliberate shift toward a form-based code using a transect framework, which does favor denser and more flexible development patterns than conventional suburban zoning. That's not my imagination.

But "very easy to get approved" doesn't survive contact with the record. Two months before that 618-unit approval, on October 1, 2024, the same Planning Commission voted 0-6 to reject a rezoning request at 2406 SE 16th Street after neighborhood opposition. Unanimously. Bentonville's commission does say no, and neighbors do get heard.

And "a 100-unit apartment complex on a one-acre thing" isn't a real scenario. I couldn't find any Bentonville project at anything like that density, and it would require a tower on a postage stamp with nowhere to put a car. I used it as a figure of speech and it lands as a factual claim about what the city permits. It isn't one.

One number worth having: about 62% of Bentonville's existing housing stock is single-family detached, with roughly a quarter in larger multifamily buildings. I claimed new single-family construction inside the city is becoming scarce. I couldn't verify that against actual permit counts, so treat it as my impression from working the market rather than a documented trend. If you're relying on it to make a buying decision, ask the city for permit data.

The Fayetteville project: I think I merged two of them

I gave two different unit counts for what I presented as one development — "138 unit" early in the segment and "168 apartment complex" later — and two location descriptions that don't match each other: "near Central Barbecue, by all the trail systems," and separately "a weird corner as you turn up College Street near the library."

Those appear to be different projects. There's a 138-unit project southeast of South Street and Nelson Hackett Boulevard, which is the one with the parking controversy I described. There's a separate 168-unit townhome project called The Landing on Andrews on about 52 acres, in a different part of town. And Central BBQ anchors South Yard, a 128-unit mixed development on the Razorback Greenway. Three projects, three unit counts, and I appear to have blended at least two of them.

I can't cleanly untangle which one I was actually reading about, so I'd rather say that than pick one and sound confident. Same goes for my guess at who the units were for — I said "this isn't necessarily going to be truly student housing, I think it's going to be more expensive than that," and flagged it myself with "I'm guessing that's the idea." Since I can't pin down which project I meant, that guess stays a guess.

What I can tell you is how the parking fight ended, and it's more interesting than my guess. I speculated that "there's going to be some stipulations baked in to make sure that there's only one car per townhouse or one car per apartment." That's backwards from what happened. The objection was that the project qualified for reduced parking requirements by right, which neighbors argued would push cars onto narrow residential streets. Rather than cap cars per unit, that fight prompted council members to take on the city's residential parking requirements as a whole, and Fayetteville adopted a citywide overhaul on May 6, 2025.

So a neighborhood complaint about one project turned into a rewrite of the rules for every project. That's a much better answer to "will they figure it out" than the one I offered.

Theo Von, with the detail I skipped

Theo Von played Bud Walton Arena on the University of Arkansas campus on April 10, 2025, on his Return of the Rat tour.

Small precision point on the conclusion I drew. I said "the U of A has its brand, they're able to pull a lot of high-known people to come to the area." It was a commercially promoted tour date that rented a campus arena, not a university booking. Arena tours stop at campus arenas everywhere; that's routine, not a signal about the university's pull.

The signal that is real is the one I already had wrong in the other direction: this region books enough major touring talent that the AMP alone ran 39 shows in a down year. You don't need Theo Von to make that case.