Flux & Growth In 2018 So Far; Consolidation, Ticketing, Festivals And Ever-Changing Booking Agencies

The consolidation of smaller, regional promoters and buildings that picked up steam in 2017 with the acquisition of The Bowery Presents by AEG and the December launch of Mercury East by rival Live Nation went into overdrive in 2018.

January kicked off with Live Nation acquiring Midwest mainstay Frank Productions, which in recent years had acquired even smaller promoters itself. With this followed by Goldenvoice’s inking of a deal to operate Slim’s and Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, already the year had started with shots across various bows.

As 2018 chugs along, not only has Live Nation’s mergers and acquisitions staff kept busy, but AEG and others continue to fill out local and regional portfolios by either striking booking deals with existing rooms or building new ones.

Live Nation partnered in January with Denver’s Soda Jerk Presents to book and promote the city’s 1,100-capacity Summit Music Hall and 450-cap Marquis Theater, building a venue portfolio that also includes Red Rocks Amphitheatre (9,525), Fillmore Auditorium (3,700) and the new Seven Peaks Festival in Buena Vista, Colo.

AEG Presents Rocky Mountains also books Red Rocks, as it’s an open building, and its portfolio includes Fiddler’s Green (16,823 capacity), 1stBank Center (7,000), Ogden Theatre (1,600), Gothic Theatre (1,000) and Bluebird Theater (500) in the Denver market, as well as Union Event Center (3,500) in Salt Lake City. 

But, since the first of the year, AEG has announced the construction of the 3,950-capacity Mission Ballroom in Denver (to open next year) and a deal to present the Whistle Pig Vail summer concert series at the 2,500-cap Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater in Vail, Colo.

But Live Nation has made moves this year into markets that don’t see nearly as much action as Denver, San Francisco or New York. 

Just last month, Live Nation acquired a majority stake in Red Mountain Entertainment, which operates the 8,410-capacity Tuscaloosa Amphitheater in Alabama as well as The Wharf Amphitheater (10,250 capacity) in Orange Beach, Ala.; Brandon Amphitheater (8,500 capacity) in Brandon, Miss.; and Iron City, a 1,300-cap venue in Birmingham, Ala.

Live Nation also recently took a majority stake in Austin-based concert promoter and festival producer ScoreMore Shows, which produces the JMBLYA and Mala Luna festivals in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, and hundreds of hip-hop concerts per year. 

The partnership means ScoreMore Shows will likely share resources with fellow Austinites at C3 Presents, which presents Austin City Limits Music and Arts festival and multiple Lollapaloozas around the world.

Live Nation is also spearheading or part of numerous new venue developments, including the Lincoln Yards entertainment district in Chicago that could see five separate venues of differing sizes, as well as the $50 million-plus Met Philly redevelopment in Philadelphia and the just-announced Fillmore New Orleans.  That 2,000-capacity project joins the apparent trend of larger, indoor general-admission spaces, including the indoor/outdoor venue being built along the Ohio River by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. 

The thirst for growth continues, with Live Nation and AEG both publicly stating intentions to expand where appropriate. 

Primary ticketing inched ever closer in the first half of 2018 to the variable pricing model akin to airlines that concert industry types have discussed for more than a decade, and the major players appear to be tackling it in a few different ways. The first is inventory. Major tours appear unafraid of adding shows and increasing ticket allotments until demand has been met. As longtime Rolling Stones promoter John Meglen of Concerts West has told Pollstar multiple times, the easiest way to cut out scalpers is to increase inventory.  

Meanwhile, tickets have been priced to reflect true market demand, with wide ranges most noticeable at stadium shows where face value can now range from as low as the mid-$20s for a nosebleed seat to more than $300 for an up-close view of the spectacle. 

While tabloid rags and out-of-touch pundits may try to get clicks by proclaiming a tour is a stiff if not all tickets are grabbed up before showtime, surely promoters, agents and especially artists are reaping the benefits from disincentivizing scalpers and leaving mere scraps for them to try to unload at discount prices at the last minute. And, of course, mammoth stadium tours such as the Beyoncé/Jay-Z co-bill and Taylor Swift’s potentially record-breaking jaunt are still reporting largely sellouts of 40,000-50,000 tickets. 

Meanwhile, AEG is joining the secondary ticketing fray by starting its own secondary ticketing platform AXS Marketplace – in the UK for now, at least. The company is so confident in its initial rollout that it has already ended StubHub partnerships with The O2 London and SSE Wembley arenas, further blurring the lines between secondary and primary, as well as fixed pricing and variable.

While competitors such as Eventbrite, SeatGeek and even the smaller TickPick ramp up to provide alternatives to Ticketmaster and AXS, maturation comes not without growing pains. 

Ticketfly suffered a major, public hack of its website that kept it offline for almost a week starting May 31. Affected were dozens of venues and events like Chicago’s Riot Fest, which had to be moved to temporary new webpages while cybersecurity experts assessed the situation and Tickefly scrambled to get its platform back online but secure. 

Response to the situation from promoters and venue operators reached by Pollstar varied depending on circumstances.“Ticketfly shouldn’t be ridiculed for being affected by this because they actually responded fairly quickly,” said Alex Heid, chief research officer at SecurityScorecard. “Basically every company is going to be the victim of a data breach in one way or another – it’s just how you respond to it that’s going to be whether it’s big and embarrassing.”

The agency shakeups of late 2017 have been followed by more shifts at booking agencies in the first half of 2018, with a major acquisition by one of the big four agencies as well as major agents switching companies.

CAA announced in March that hip-hop agents Zach Iser and Caroline Yim, formerly of ICM Partners, had joined the agency. The pair, who worked together on many clients, brought major artists with them to CAA, including Future, SZA and Rae Sremmurd.

Photo by Misha Vladimirskiy / WireImage – Caroline Yim and Zach Iser
Eearz, Caroline Yim, Mike Will Made It and Zach Iser pose on the red carpet at the New Era All Star Event on Feb. 18, 2018 in Los Angeles.

The big news in April was United Talent Agency acquiring leading electronic dance music agency Circle Talent Agency, putting Circle Talent partners Steve Gordon and Kevin Gimble as co-heads of electronic music to work closely with UTA global head of music David Zedeck. Circle Talent was formed by Gimble in the ’90s, where at one point he was representing 75 drum and bass artists by himself. He brought in Gordon who was a promoter in Baltimore at the time and who is largely responsible for the first hard-ticket dubstep tours. Circle’s roster includes electronic artists such as Marshmello, Kaskade, Illenium, and Excision.

The sale of Circle Talent didn’t include the agency’s Live division run by Dan Rozenblum, JJ Cassiere and Matt Pike. The three veteran agents teamed to form Los Angeles-based 33 & West boutique talent agency in June, launching with 75 artists including Dance Gavin Dance, Insane Clown Posse, Dead Kennedys, and The Black Dahlia Murder. 

Billions Corporation saw the departure of major agents in the span of a couple months, with Adam Voith and Andrew Colvin joining WME in early May, and Ali Hedrick and Trey Many joining Paradigm Talent Agency a few weeks later. The news broke in early June that agent Steven Himmelfarb had departed Billions for The Feldman Agency.  

Combined, the agents represent major artists such as Mumford & Sons, Bon Iver, Jason Isbell, Sufjan Stevens, Fleet Foxes, Beirut, Wolf Parade and many others. Billions founder David “Boche” Viecelli told Pollstar he had no comment, although the agents in announcing their departure all thanked their former boss. 

Although Live Nation and AEG going head to head as the two global concert entities is nothing new, this spring saw the rivalry squarely in the public eye. 

An April 1 New York Times exposé titled “Live Nation Rules Music Ticketing, Some Say With Threats” alleged that the United States Department of Justice was “looking into serious accusations” into Live Nation’s business practices following allegations from AEG that it was punishing venues that didn’t use its in-house Ticketmaster system for ticketing – against the parameters of a DOJ consent decree that allowed for the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger in 2010. 

Ticketmaster President Jared Smith vigorously defended the company with a lengthy post on the Ticketmaster Insider blog, which essentially boiled down to two things: One, venues want Ticketmaster because of the quality of the service it provides and which it has invested heavily in; and two, vertical integration between Live Nation and Ticketmaster, or bundling, is not inherently bad – or illegal – which Smith said antitrust officials stated during the merger.

“The DOJ studied this issue very closely and determined that vertical integration between content suppliers (i.e. concert promoters) and ticketing companies was generally a good thing as long as it did not stifle competition,” Smith wrote. “In fact, the DOJ decided it actually wanted more vertically integrated competition, so it required the creation of a second company that could offer both content and ticketing.”

While there’s been no confirmation of any formal DOJ investigation, the vitriol adds fuel to the fire stoked when complaints surfaced that AEG was forcing tours that wanted to play its marquee The O2 arena in London to also play Staples Center in Los Angeles. The company said this was merely a response to Azoff/MSG Entertainment doing the same thing in forcing tours to hit both its Madison Square Garden in New York as well as the Forum in Inglewood, making this effectively a battle for L.A. (Irving Azoff is a co-founder of Pollstar’s parent company, Oak View Group.)

Both sides deny any wrongdoing, and the crux may come down to whether either is doing anything illegal – and, if so, whether it’s even enforceable. With the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2010, the Consent Decree from the DOJ left much wiggle room in its stipulations about competition, including a clause that says Live Nation can “bundle” its services for sound business reasons. 

Although maybe without 2017’s total catastrophe of a Pemberton or Fyre Festival cancellation, 2018 has seen a few major cancellations or suspensions of music festivals, most notably the long-running FYF festival in Los Angeles that announced in May it would not be taking place this summer. 

In late 2017 it was announced that co-founder Sean Carlson was let go by new co-producer Goldenvoice following allegations (and some admissions on Carlson’s part) of sexual misconduct. Goldenvoice quickly and admirably put together a strong lineup for a two-day event planned in July – it had been unclear the event would happen at all – but ultimately elected to pull the plug with the presumption of slow ticket sales. Fans complained of everything from ticket price to headliners (Janet Jackson, Florence + The Machine, Future), while industry peers wondered if the festival lost its audience, once known as being ultra-hip and ahead of the curve, and tried to go overly mainstream. 

The announcement that the 17-year-old Sasquatch! Music Festival, at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington, would not return in 2019 came June 28, along with the news that founder Adam Zacks was stepping down. According to reports submitted to Pollstar, Sasquatch!, co-produced by Live Nation, reported 36,015 tickets moved over three days in 2017, with 56,456 reported sold over four in 2016. This year’s Sasquatch! was a three-day event.

The June cancellation of another event, the second-year Lost Lake Festival in Phoenix produced by Superfly, gave wings to the theory that the North American market is oversaturated and self-correcting. 

However, new events keep sprouting up while other major festivals continue business as usual or continue to grow – demonstrating the evolving festival market where events at every level target a multitude of demographics, rather than the European-style, destination, all-you-can-eat festivals of yesteryear. 

Paradigm’s Tom Windish previously told Pollstar a key part of a festival’s success lies in its purpose and focus, citing Chicago’s Riot Fest as a prime example. 

“The identity, the brand, the cultural identity is really important. … And people will go to it regardless of who’s playing, because they love that brand,” Windish said. 

The higher-end “elevated” KAABOO brand is a prime example, expanding in its fourth year at its flagship Del Mar location near San Diego, adding a new KAABOO Cayman destination event and announcing KAABOO Texas at AT&T Stadium in collaboration with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, although details are scarce.

Talent buyer Roger LeBlanc told Pollstar it’s important for destination events to have a clear mission and demographic.

“We’re very particular about not booking the flavor du jour acts that are doing every festival across the country,” LeBlanc added. “The festivals that succeed have a reason and a purpose.”