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Live Nation Entertainment continued to profit from the red-hot live music market in the second quarter, beating earnings expectations with $5.6 billion in revenue — up 27.1% year over year and coming in a whopping $680 million over expectations. The company generated earnings per share of $1.02, which was $.40 higher than expected.
The financial results, which marked Live Nation’s strongest second quarter ever, also saw the company’s operating income rise 21% year over year to $386 million this quarter, while adjusted operating income was up 23% to $590 million and operating cash flow came in at $491 million, a 41% increase. The earnings report continues an upward trend at the company, indicating that 2023 will again set a revenue record for the concert promotion giant.
“We believe this is a time on a global basis when live will see incredible growth for years to come,” Live Nation chief executive Michael Rapino said on an earnings call after the company’s financial results were released Thursday (July 27).
The report noted that a record number of fans have attended Live Nation concerts this year, with 117 million tickets sold year-to-date for Live Nation shows — an increase of 20% year-over-year. Ticketmaster clients reported sales of 151 million fee-bearing tickets sold so far this year, with Ticketmaster on track to sell 300 million fee-bearing tickets in 2023. The company also reported a double-digit increase in sponsorship revenue and $4.3 billion in event-related deferred revenue, up 37% over last year, while double-digit attendance growth is expected next quarter.
In terms of venue size, stadiums saw the most growth, with attendance up 28% to 8.0 million fans, led by Europe and Asia Pacific. Arenas saw the second-highest growth rate, up 19% to 10.7 million fans, largely from Canada, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Finally, festivals grew 14% to 4.5 million fans, driven by global demand across all markets.
Capital expenditures at Live Nation totaled $158 million year-to-date, driven by investments in on-site venue enhancement and the expansion of the company’s venue portfolio. The 2023 capital expenditures forecast remains at $450 million, two-thirds of which is allocated for revenue-generating projects.
Despite the rosy earnings report, shares were slightly down Thursday after close to $96.93, marking a drop of less than 1%.
Below is a summary of 2023 Q2 results:
Total revenue: $5.6 billion, up 27% from 2022 Q2
Adjusted operating income: $168.1 million, up 37% from 2022 Q2
Concert revenue: $4.6 billion, up 29% from 2022 Q2
Ticketing revenue: $709.3 million, up 23% from 2022 Q2
Sponsorship and advertising: $302.9 million, up 15% from 2022 Q2
North American concerts: 8,111, up .67% from 2022 Q2
International concerts: 4,130, down 8% from 2022 Q2
North American fans: 18.5 million, up 6% from 2022 Q2
International fans: 18.6 million, up 13% from 2022 Q2
Fee-bearing tickets: 78.9 million, up 10% from 2022 Q2
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Live Nation is treating concertgoers to the ultimate summer promo: four tickets for $80. The Summer’s Live sale starts Wednesday (July 19) and will go until Aug. 1 or until tickets sell out. This year includes a stacked lineup of artists with upcoming tours and concerts.
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Yes, you read that right. You can really get four tickets to any qualifying concerts for only $80 total.
Some of the musicians you can get tickets for are the Jonas Brothers, Jelly Roll, 5 Seconds of Summer, Keith Urban, Maroon 5, Snoop Dog, Big Time Rush, Dominic Fike, Neon Trees, Chelsea Handler, Sam Hunt, Young the Giant, Counting Crows, Rod Stewart and many, many more. The promo isn’t live yet, but you can add it to your calendar here to ensure you get $80 concert tickets the second the deal starts. The last thing you want is to see the dreaded “sold out” message.
Want tickets earlier? Rakuten is offering members the ability to skip the line and purchase tickets during an exclusive presale on Tuesday (July 18). Click here to sign up and learn more or click the buy button below.
Rakuten Summer’s Live Presale
In order to get early access to the deal, you’ll need to sign up for Rakuten, then you’ll be able to take advantage of the four for $80 concert tickets deal.
Live Nation is home to events from concerts, tours and festivals to livestreams as well providing a one-stop destination to all things entertainment.
For more product recommendations, check out our roundups of the best travel deals, travel necessities and concert earplugs.
Ticketmaster owner Live Nation’s push for legislative ticketing reform earlier this year has actually slowed down progress on those issues, sources tell Billboard, stalling a long-in-the-works bill that addresses nearly identical concerns about the ticketing business.
Last year, even before Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour presale fiasco inspired a flurry of ticketing reform bills, the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) had been working on a wide-reaching piece of legislation in cooperation with Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) to “combat predatory and deceptive ticketing practices,” according to sources close to the issue. The bill included bans on deceptive practices and speculative listings, enforcement of existing anti-bot laws and new tools for countering ticketing fraud. Its most substantive change took aim at the secondary ticketing industry, granting artists and tour promoters sweeping power to reduce ticket scalping by allowing artists to set legally binding rules on how and where their tickets are resold, according to a November 2022 memo reviewed by Billboard. Besides NIVA, Universal Music Group, Wasserman Music, Dice and See Tickets were all among the broad coalition of music companies supporting the effort under the coalition name Fix the Tix.
But, for months, the bill has languished — even as attention around ticketing has grown considerably following a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January on competition within the ticketing industry. That’s because of increased lobbying by pro-scalper groups and a decision in February, by Ticketmaster owner Live Nation, to unveil the FAIR Ticketing Act, a five-point proposal with a list of legislative fixes — and the recommendations were very similar to the fixes NIVA had been quietly lobbying for.
With NIVA representing thousands of independent venues and Live Nation representing its huge corporate portfolio, the two entities often have opposing agendas, and some NIVA members theorized that Live Nation was attempting to sabotage their bill. Worried that supporting a similar proposal would look like politicians were rewarding Ticketmaster at a time when outrage at the company was growing, momentum around the NIVA bill waned. Klobuchar’s office, which had planned to announce a bi-partisan bill with Cornyn in the spring, delayed its announcement amid new concerns that the bill might strengthen Ticketmaster, sources close to both Live Nation and NIVA tell Billboard. They add that the FAIR Ticketing Act was neither a clone of the proposed NIVA bill nor a poison pill.
“Live Nation and Ticketmaster have been the target of the Senate since the two companies merged in 2010,” says one NIVA member speaking on the condition of anonymity. “There’s an appetite in D.C. to punish Ticketmaster, but the reality is that there’s no way to pass a law that would both punish Ticketmaster and bring about the types of reforms needed to clean up the ticketing business.”
Case in point: On April 28, Klobuchar’s office introduced legislation with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that would have banned ticketing companies like Ticketmaster from signing venue clients to long-term exclusive contracts. The proposal has faced opposition from some members of NIVA, who argued it would hurt small venues that relied on the payments from those contracts, and that fans would likely have to make up for the loss through higher ticket prices. A representative for Live Nation previously told Billboard the proposal wouldn’t “have a material impact on our business as we historically add clients in competitive marketplaces.”
As for similarities between the NIVA-backed bill and Live Nation’s proposal, “It’s not surprising that the two groups that spent the last six months thinking about legislative fixes [to] the same issue came up with similar solutions,” said one source close to Live Nation, noting that much of the friction between NIVA and Ticketmaster has subsided.
Ticketmaster officials appear to have gotten the message and have toned down the rhetoric around their political efforts. Many of the campaign efforts have been picked up by NIVA, which successfully lobbied for $15 billion in federal aid for venues negatively impacted by the coronavirus pandemic in 2021. Now, sources say, the Fix the Tix bill is expected to be proposed in the next couple of weeks.
Leading the charge at NIVA is the organization’s executive director, Stephen Parker. A longtime D.C. insider who worked with Sen. Tim Kaine when he was the governor of Virginia, Parker spent a decade at the bipartisan National Governors Association and has served on the board of the Country Music Association.
Parker confirmed to Billboard that neither Live Nation nor Ticketmaster has signed on as official supporters of the Fix the Tix coalition, while he and others are being extra cautious not to make their legislative package a referendum on Ticketmaster. Still, the Live Nation-owned company will play an outsized role in the Fix the Tix plan, as opponents are getting ready to paint the proposal as a major power shift to Ticketmaster and away from scalpers.
The Fix the Tix proposal would “make it illegal for resellers, professional ticket brokers, and ticket platforms to violate the artists’ and venues’ ticket terms and conditions, including restrictions that prohibit price gouging of fans through the resale of tickets above face value,” according to an early draft obtained by Billboard. That means artists, venues, or promoters could place ceilings on how much tickets are allowed to be marked up or restrict ticket resale until after all primary tickets have been sold. Since Ticketmaster and AEG are the only two companies on the market with technology that can track tickets after they’re sold to see if they are being resold and for how much, however, critics say this sort of law would create an even greater dependence on their services.
That’s far more power than Ticketmaster should have, says John Breyault, vp of public policy at the National Consumers League and a founding board member of the Fan Freedom Project, an advocacy group fighting restrictions on resale that receives funding from StubHub and Vivid Seats. “Ticketmaster does not want to eliminate resale; they want to control resale,” Breyault says. The current proposals by Ticketmaster and NIVA could bankrupt major secondary resale sites, especially if most tours decided to make their tickets non-transferable. Once Live Nation “got rid of its competitors,” Breyault says the company could convince the artist it works with to lighten up on ticket transferability and effectively “own the resale market.”
To a degree, Fix the Tix is a response to the dozens of pieces of pro-scalping legislation and lobbying that have been proposed at the state and federal levels over the past six months. This Fix the Tix bill would seek to overrule any state-level legislation that exists; there are currently over a dozen states with laws that outlaw restrictions on ticket transferability, meaning anyone can resell tickets at any price they want.Others, like Rep. Bill Pascrell’s (D-NJ) BOSS and SWIFT Act — which Breyault supports and the Fix the Tix coalition opposes — would permanently legalize scalping by making it illegal for ticketing companies to restrict ticket transferability.
Last year, the American Economic Liberties Project, which is funded by Pierre Omidyar — former chairman of eBay and owner of Ticketmaster rival StubHub — announced the “Break Up Ticketmaster,” campaign, aimed at pressuring the DOJ “to investigate and unwind the 2010 Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger,” according to the group’s website.
Opponents of scalping say the BOSS Act would make it impossible for artists to keep their tickets off secondary sites and would allow all scalping sites to sell any tickets they wanted without restriction. Proponents, however, believe that outcome is better for fans than allowing Live Nation and the artists it works with to make these decisions.
While the scalpers and the concert promoters are far apart on most issues, the rival bills do share consensus on a number of practices in ticketing that have long drawn the ire of fans. Those include speculative ticket listing, drip pricing and misleading marketing campaigns — all of which would be banned by both NIVA’s proposal and the BOSS and Swift Act.
Editor’s note: Billboard has updated this story to more accurately describe the work performed by the American Economic Liberties Project.
Doja Cat will embark on her first North American arena tour this fall with The Scarlet Tour, Live Nation announced Friday (June 23).
The 24-date tour will kick off on Halloween, Oct. 31, at San Francisco’s Chase Center and hit major U.S. cities before wrapping Dec. 13 at Chicago’s United Center. Special guests Ice Spice and Doechii will also join select dates.
The Scarlet Tour will utilize advance registration to make sure more tickets get into the hands of fans directly by filtering out bots and scalpers from the ticket purchase process. Fans can register now through Sunday, June 25, at 10 p.m. PT here. Once registration closes, they’ll be randomly selected to receive a code that gives them access to the pre-sales that start Wednesday, June 28. A limited number of tickets will be available during general on-sale that starts next Friday, June 30, at 10 a.m. local time at Ticketmaster.com while supplies last.
The “Attention” singer’s tour will also offer a variety of VIP packages and experiences for fans. Packages vary but may include premium tickets, a photo opportunity with one’s party in front of the stage, pre-show VIP Lounge access, specially designed VIP gift items and more. For more information, visit vipnation.com.
See The Scarlet Tour’s dates below.
Oct. 31 — San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center *Nov. 2 — Los Angeles, CA @ Crypto.com Arena *Nov. 3 — Las Vegas, NV @ T-Mobile Arena * Nov. 5 — San Diego, CA @ Viejas Arena * Nov. 6 — Anaheim, CA @ Honda Center *Nov. 8 — Phoenix, AZ @ Footprint Center *Nov. 10 — Denver, CO @ Ball Arena *Nov. 13 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center *Nov. 15 — Houston, TX @ Toyota Center *Nov. 16 — Dallas, TX @ American Airlines Center * Nov. 19 — Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena * Nov. 21 — Miami, FL @ Kaseya Center # Nov. 24 — Tampa, FL @ Amalie Arena * Nov. 26 — Charlotte, NC @ Spectrum Center #Nov. 27 — Washington, DC @ Capital One Arena #Nov. 29 — Brooklyn, NY @ Barclays Center # Nov. 30 — Newark, NJ @ Prudential Center #Dec. 2 — Boston, MA @ TD Garden # Dec. 4 — Columbus, OH @ Nationwide Arena # Dec. 7 — Minneapolis, MN @ Target Center #Dec. 8 — Omaha, NE @ CHI Health Center #Dec. 10 — Detroit, MI @ Little Caesars Arena # Dec. 11 — Toronto, ON @ Scotiabank Arena #Dec. 13 — Chicago, IL @ United Center #
* with Doechii# with Ice Spice
BMI’s recent rate court victory substantially increasing songwriters and publishers’ royalties for live events will be appealed, according to a notice filed by the North American Concert Promoters Association on Wednesday (June 21).
In May, Southern District of New York Judge Louis Stanton awarded the performance rights organization a 138% increase in rate to 0.5% of the event’s “revenue” with an expanded definition of the term to include tickets sold directly onto the secondary market, servicing fees received by the promoters and revenues from box suites and VIP packages. That 0.5% was up from what BMI said was a blended rate of 0.21%, based on 0.3% interim rate for venues that held less than 10,000 seats; and the interim 0.15% for venues that held more than 10,000 during the period of 2018-2022.
At that time, Stanton also set rates for the retroactive period of 2013-2017, with the previously used, less expansive “revenue” definition that only reflected earnings directly from the face value of primary market ticket sales. Those rates ranged from .08% of revenue for venues of up to 2,500 seats to 0.15% for venues with 10,000 or more seats.
On Tuesday, however, lawyers for the concert trade group filed a notice with the Southern District of intent to appeal that decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, according to the filing submitted by Weil, Gotshal & Manges, the law firm representing the concert promoters. The notice to appeal could mean that the group will appeal; or it could be a procedural move that keeps open the option to appeal. The concert trade group had 30 days to file the appeal notice from the last day in court— a few weeks back on a BMI motion regarding interest on whatever fees might be owed from the 2018-2022 term covered by the newly set rates for that period.
In a statement BMI said the concert industry has long fought against rate increases for songwriters.
“Given Live Nation, AEG and [the North American Concert Promoters Association’s] bizarre position throughout trial that concertgoers attend concerts for the experience of the staging, videos and light shows, as opposed to the actual songs and music being performed, their appeal was not a surprise to BMI,” BMI president and CEO Mike O’Neill said in a statement. “For decades, the live concert industry has fought to keep rates suppressed. And even now, when they are making more money than ever, in more ways than ever, they are determined to deny songwriters and composers the fair value of their work, despite the fact that without their contributions, a concert wouldn’t even be possible. BMI will continue to fight on behalf of our affiliates, the creators of the music that is the very backbone of the live concert industry, to prevent that outcome.”
The concert promoters did not. respond to a request for comment at time of publishing. In May, an AEG spokesperson said “AEG Presents and NACPA were defending performing artists, who bear the costs of BMI fees, in this litigation.” Concert promoters have long billed the performing artist for performance rights organizations’ royalty fees.
In a rare investor reproach for Live Nation, at the company’s annual meeting held earlier in June, a majority of its shareholders voted against ratifying chief executive Michael Rapino‘s $139-million pay package for 2022.
In an advisory say-on-pay referendum on June 9, more than 53% of votes cast rejected the 2022 compensation packages for promoter Live Nation’s named executives — Rapino, president and CFO Joe Berchtold, chief accounting officer Brian Capo, executive vp John Hopmans and general counsel Michael Rowles, according to a filing released on June 15. In contrast, 94% of the votes cast at its 2020 shareholder meeting were in favor of the say-on-pay proposal, according to Live Nation.
As the shareholder vote was advisory and non-binding, Live Nation’s board will have the ultimate say on any future actions around executive compensation.
Shareholder rebukes like this are rare, and it comes as the Ticketmaster owner is already under fire from fans and regulators over its role in the Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket debacle. As of May 31, only 1.5% of companies in the Russell 3000 index have failed Say on Pay votes so far this year, according to a report by Harvard Law School’s Forum on Corporate Governance.
In Live Nation’s proxy statement, the company said it believes its “compensation program is reasonable, competitive and strongly focused on pay for performance principles.” A company spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
“We believe that the fiscal year 2022 compensation paid to our named executive officers was appropriate and aligned with Live Nation’s fiscal year 2022 results,” the company stated in its proxy, citing the company’s 44% growth in revenue to $16.7 billion in 2022.
Influential shareholder advisory groups Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis recommended shareholders vote against Live Nation’s executive officers’ compensation, citing a “misalignment” between pay and performance in the structure of certain stock equity grants.
ISS actually estimates Rapino’s 2022 compensation higher than what Live Nation published in its proxy — at $156 million for the year. The group raised specific concerns over a “mega grant” Rapino received in July 2022 that it said was worth $120.5 million and a similar award CFO Berchtold received worth $52.6 million. ISS contends the grants were not adequately linked to achieving sustained higher stock prices. Total Live Nation shareholder returns were negative over a one-year period and underperformed the S&P 500 Index, ISS says.
“The current structure could reward these executives for short-term or merely temporary increases in stock price,” ISS researchers wrote, adding that the large one-time equity grants paid were “multiple times larger than the total CEO pay for the company’s peer group…lack clear disclosure regarding the rationale for the size of the awards and other details necessary to assess them.”
Glass Lewis also raised concerns over cash signing bonuses of about $6 million received by Rapino and Berchtold.
“The (bonuses) are not subject to any performance or recoupment provisions,” Glass Lewis researchers wrote. “Such pay levels on a one-time basis outpace total compensation levels afforded executives at some of the largest companies in the U.S. despite being subject to considerably weaker vesting and performance conditions.”
Additional reporting by Glenn Peoples.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and many liberal Democrats have two things in common, and perhaps only two: They hate the way concert and sports ticket sales work — specifically the company selling most of them, Ticketmaster — and they love Taylor Swift. Or, at least, they acknowledge that ingratiating themselves to Swift’s fan army as she sells out stadiums in their states is an efficient way to build up constituent support.
Over the past couple of months, Cruz, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Massachusetts Sen. John Velis (D-Hampden and Hampshire) and others have presented a variety of bills intended to reform the ticket-selling business, invoking Swift and fans’ displeasure with Ticketmaster’s Eras Tour on-sale fiasco in November, when more than 100,000 fans were kicked out of the online sale queue. Following a Senate subcommittee hearing focused on Ticketmaster in January, politicians clearly see positioning themselves against the ticketing giant and attaching themselves to Swift’s millions of passionate fans as a winning combination. They’re even naming their bills after her.
“There’s a growing awareness of the problem, and the Taylor Swift concert debacle played a part in focusing a lot of attention on the issue,” Cruz tells Billboard, adding that his 12-year-old daughter recently attended an Eras Tour show.
That debacle, Ticketmaster declared at the time, was due to unprecedented levels of illegal bots attacking the online sale. But that claim did little to satisfy fans and politicians, who during a January Senate hearing instead chose to focus on monopolistic behavior by Ticketmaster and its owner, promoter Live Nation, often referencing Swift lyrics between swipes at the company. Since then, the rhetoric has changed slightly. While politicians continue to scrutinize the concert giant — Klobuchar says the Department of Justice is investigating Live Nation and Ticketmaster for possible violations of their 2010 consent decree — senators and congresspeople at federal and state levels are proposing solutions to potentially more manageable issues.
In Massachusetts, Velis and his co-sponsor, Rep. Dan Carey (D-Easthampton), have introduced what they nicknamed the “Taylor Swift bill,” which aims to abolish hidden ticket fees and require sellers such as Ticketmaster and SeatGeek to disclose service charges and costs upfront. A similar law already exists in New York state, and Live Nation actually supports the issue — including it in the company’s own proposed legislation outline. “Taylor Swift obviously sells out every concert,” Velis says, “but she’s also got this support ecosystem that lends itself to, ‘If you want to do something about this, why not use something that’s absolutely going to get the public’s attention?’”
But at a time when opposing Ticketmaster is good politics, one source in touring suggested politicians do not want to be seen aligning with the corporate giant. That political strategy may even be holding back legislation on other subjects where there’s popular consensus. Other bills, like the one Klobuchar and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced in April, limit exclusive deals with venues and therefore more directly target Ticketmaster.
Velis said he and Carey plan to meet with Ticketmaster executives in the coming weeks to discuss their bill. “The more you can firm up a piece of legislation to get rid of unintended consequences, you’re better off,” Velis says. “That being said, as it relates to just telling a consumer, ‘This is what you’re going to spend if you want to go to this concert’ — I can’t think of anything remotely close to approaching how someone can convince me that’s not a good idea.”
To help wade through the many different pro-Swift, Ticketmaster-targeting bills out there, here’s a rundown of what they each intend to achieve — and what each legislator gets out of sponsoring them:
Unlocking Tickets Markets Act, in the U.S. Senate
Gloria Trevi will not renew her contract with Universal Music Latino after 15 years with the label, Billboard Español can exclusively report.
The Mexican superstar will now be an independent artist through her own company, Great Talent Records, Trevi’s publicist, Mayna Nevarez, confirmed. She has also signed a new distribution deal with Tango, and another one with ByteDance’s SoundOn for TikTok.
Furthermore, she has an agreement with Live Nation for an upcoming U.S. tour.
“This new stage is very exciting for me,” Trevi said in a statement to Billboard Español. “With our label, I will be able to have more investment, open new markets and work with dream collaborations. I love being the head of my own label now, Great Talent Records.”
On Friday (June 16), Trevi’s fans will be able to hear her first independent release, “Medusa,” a techno dance beat track produced by Dabruk, Manu Chalud and Alcover that will be available on all digital platforms.
During her years with Universal Music Latino, Trevi, known for classics like “Pelo suelto” and “Dr. Psiquiatra”, reached No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top Latin Albums chart with Gloria (2011), El Amor (2015), Inmortal (2016) and Versus (2017), the latter a joint album with Alejandra Guzmán.
Prior to Universal Music Latino, Trevi was previously with Sony BMG Mexico (1989-2004) and Univision (2005-2008).
The news of Trevi’s departure from Universal comes amid a wave of other major Latin music artists switching labels. On Wednesday (June 14), Billboard exclusively reported that Spaniard star Alejandro Sanz left Universal and joined Sony Music. And in April, Anitta and Warner Music Group announced their separation; the Brazilian star subsequently signed with Republic Records and will work closely with Universal Music Latino.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is hosting executives from Live Nation, Airbnb and other companies at the White House on Thursday to highlight his administration’s push to end so-called junk fees that surprise consumers. Biden prioritized the effort to combat surprise or undisclosed fees in his State of the Union address and has called […]
The concert travel business, once a reliably modest slice of the estimated global $25 billion concert industry, is being primed as a potential growth category as promoters of all sizes look for new revenue sources to offset rising costs.
As the pandemic has receded and the demand for live entertainment has blossomed, inflation and scarcity have driven up expenses across the board, and the resulting rise in ticket prices is unlikely to cool soon — a recent report from the American Bus Association cited a driver shortage as part of the reason for higher costs and concluded another 7,300 drivers would need to be added to the 28,000 tour bus drivers now working just to meet current demand.
With already tight margins squeezed further, concert promoters are looking for new revenue streams. “Many are seeing the economic impact their events create within their community and realize they’re not participating in that upside, despite taking on the bulk of the risk with their event,” explains Daren Libonati, co-founder of Las Vegas-based Fuse Technologies, which partners with concert promoters to source and sell accommodations and VIP upgrades for their events.
Libonati, a longtime Vegas event veteran who has served as an executive at both MGM and the University of Nevada Las Vegas, wants to help music event organizers unlock “travel per caps,” a twist on the phrase “per caps,” the concert business measurement of the spending on food and beverage per patron at an event. Tapping into travel spending could unlock major value. A March study commissioned by Live Nation found that its marquee Lollapalooza festival generated $270 million for Chicago last year, with fans spending $48.5 million on hotels and over $80 million on food and beverage.
Libonati is just one of a half dozen entrepreneurs who believe that event producers who draw fans from around the world to festivals and concerts should share in the hotel and hospitality revenue those fans generate. These entrepreneurs include Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, whose company announced a new travel and hospitality firm, Vibee, in April, which is producing a premium cruise based on Electric Daisy Carnival called EDSea and was behind a Resorts World hotel takeover during the flagship dance festival in May. They’re bringing new ideas to market just as two of the biggest players in concert travel have either gone bankrupt or pulled out of the music travel industry.
Pre-pandemic, three types of businesses were involved in concert travel: destination festivals, mostly in Mexico and the Caribbean; high-end packaging as an add-on for domestic events; and music-driven cruises.
Demand for music-driven cruises has been stronger than prior to the pandemic, but those packages are difficult for promoters to make substantial margins on because of the high fixed costs of chartering vessels and hiring crews, as well as the pressure to keep prices low against competing cruise lines.Hotels have lower fixed costs than cruises and come with different expectations: Customers are used to paying a premium for hotel inventory during periods of high demand. That was what helped drive the success of two of the biggest concert travel companies during much of the last two decades, CID Entertainment and Pollen.
CID focused on creating destination events like Luke Bryan’s long-running Crash My Playa at Riviera Cancun in Mexico, as well as travel packages similar to those it put together for the Grateful Dead’s 2015 Fare Thee Well concerts in San Francisco and Chicago. Pollen helped expand hospitality and VIP offerings for events like Bestival, a four-day event held in the south of England.
Pollen, founded in 2014, raised over $200 million from venture capital investors. But the pandemic stalled business, and a series of last-minute cancellations — including a January 2022 J Balvin event in Cancun — cost the company dearly. By October 2022 Pollen had collapsed, owing nearly $100 million in debt.CID Entertainment, launched by Dan Berkowitz in 2007 and purchased by a private equity group in 2016, was merged with a number of sports travel companies in 2020 and eventually sold to entertainment conglomerate Endeavor, where it operates as OnLocation and focuses mainly on big-ticket sporting events like the Super Bowl.
With CID Entertainment and Pollen out, companies like 100x, which Berkowitz launched earlier this year, and Fuse see a gap in the market they can fill. Fuse has been racing to expand its white-label software systems, which make it easy to tack partner hotels and add-on VIP events to a festival’s website for sale, divide revenue and handle credential management and verification through an integration with the ticketing company. The revenue lift from packaging and bundling these items with ticket purchases would then be split with promoters.
Live Nation has made the fastest inroads into the space with Vibee. It launched as both a facilitator of high-end destination events, like the Nov. 9-12 Chasing Sunsets festival in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, headlined by Tiësto with prices (tickets and hotel included) ranging from $999 to $3,259, and an entrant into the hospitality business for Live Nation’s traditional headline concerts, offering hotel packages paired with VIP upgrades for U2’s U2:UV Achtung Baby shows at the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas. Those packages have already yielded a $20 million boost to revenue from ticket sales for Live Nation and its partners at the Sphere and the Venetian hotel, Rapino explained during a recent investor earnings call.“Vibee is a product where we looked at OnLocation and CID and others that were doing it,” Rapino said. “The challenge these other companies have is the expensive part: the rights. We don’t have that problem.” He added, “These are our rights. We can do it in-house. We don’t have to outsource it and split any of that upside with anyone else but our own businesses.”
That leaves the rest of the sector competing for non-Live Nation events, which by some estimates equals 40% to 50% of the business and billions of dollars in potential revenue. Berkowitz has not yet revealed his plans or business strategy for 100x, while Libonati says that for now, Fuse plans to focus on creating add-on packages for existing events.
Can either firm make enough money to survive without also operating as an event promoter? It will take the right combination of scale and volume, but given the rebound in travel spending across the board — and engagement of dedicated fans — it seems possible.
Danny Robson, co-founder of management firm Leisurely, believes the answer is yes if the artist controls the event. Robson’s client Rüfüs Du Sol sold an impressive 8,000 tickets for the Australian EDM trio’s Sundream festival — a four-day event in San Jose Del Cabo, Mexico, where prices ranged from $700 to $2,000 per person — without a promoter or any outside help.
“The same changes in the business that make destination events lucrative for promoters,” Robson says, “also make these types of events profitable for artists interested in cutting out the middleman.”