State Champ Radio Oak View Group
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Tim Leiweke’s Oak View Group has created the entertainment industry’s first paid membership-based theater network, signing iconic venues like New York’s Radio City Music Hall, the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and Orange County’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts as its first clients. Led by executive director Noël Mirhadi, a longtime music agent in the performing arts and theater space, the new Theater Alliance is modeled after OVG’s Arena Alliance and Stadium Alliance and is being developed to utilize the collective strength of its members to scale up booking, routing and sponsorship sales.
The Theater Alliance will have 18 members in total representing 39 performance spaces including the Madison Square Garden-owned Beacon Theater and Chicago Theater, the ACL Live at the Moody Center in Austin, Texas; the Fox Theatre in Detroit, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, the Portland’5 Centers for the Arts and Stifel Theatre in St. Louis.
Each venue is independently run, Mirhadi explains, and “will work with OVG as an extension of their team with the two main pillars being programming and sponsorship opportunities.” That includes working with OVG’s Joe Giordano, vice president overseeing the Theater Alliance and Arena & Stadium Alliance, to identify and expand booking opportunities to more member venues, as well as offer sales and development resources not always available at arts organizations.
“Theaters serve as the heartbeat of their community. I understand and appreciate this sentiment having started as a musician and having gone on to dedicate my professional life and career to music and the arts,” Mirhadi said. “I’m thrilled to have joined Oak View Group as we create and launch our new Theater Alliance, which will support these critically important institutions and help them continue to thrive. ”
Having a presence in the theater world has long been a priority for Leiweke and Chris Granger, president of OVG 360, the company’s venue services division. Besides viewing theaters as an important development platform for the company’s many arena clients, Grangers says the formation of the Theater Alliance is a major opportunity to bring together the country’s leading art institutions.
“At OVG, we not only want to support venues, artists and our corporate partners, we also want to be good stewards of the communities that we’re in,”Granger tells Billboard. “We want achieve success through the arena and stadium alliances, and now the Theater Alliance, by bringing together like-minded venues to book together, sell together, buy together, think together and brand together.”
Granger says that facilities will pay a “mid-six figures” annual contribution for their membership in the theater alliance and that members must make a multi-year commitment to the invitation-only Theater Alliance when they commit to join.
“Our goal is to not just to help our members work in concert to improve their operations and overall guest experience, but, perhaps more importantly, to creatively elevate the arts and attract a new generation of theatergoers from within their communities, because we are all better when the arts thrive,” Granger added.
OVG will announce the inaugural members of the Theater Alliance, which also include the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, Boston’s Boch Center, the First Interstate Center in Spokane, Loew’s Jersey Theater, the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, the Paramount Theatre in Denver, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, during the Association for Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) conference opening session today.
“The demand for the Theater Alliance was certainly amplified coming out of the pandemic.” Giordano says. “Performing arts venues across the nation, which are traditionally costly to operate, all face similar challenges. The Alliance, under Noël’s outstanding leadership, is eager to continue building the network of top venues in first tier markets to help them meet and exceed their programming and budgetary goals, and bring opportunities to the table that they didn’t even know were possible.”
More information at OakViewGroup.com
This story is part of Billboard‘s The Year in Touring package — read more stories about the top acts, tours and venues of 2022 here.
Since opening in April, the Moody Center in Austin, has reshaped touring in central Texas, welcoming a bevy of star talent, including John Mayer, George Straight, Roger Waters, The Killers, and Boxscore record-breaker Harry Styles, to name a few. Over 36 shows, the building now tops Billboard’s year end Top Venues (10,0001-15,000 capacity) chart, grossing more than $62.7 million in the process according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. Averaging $1.7 million per show, the Oak View Group-owned arena took in more than $5 million more than its closest competitor, OVO Hydro in Glasgow, Scotland, which reported more than 110 concerts.
Moody Center general manager Jeff Nickler says the arena’s success is, first and foremost, due to the city of Austin. Dubbed the live music capitol of the world, Austin was without a proper arena prior to Moody Center and Nickler says the growing population had tons of pent-up demand for big name acts.
“A lot of major tours and artists were skipping the market due to the lack of a premiere venue. So, Oak View Group, Live Nation, [Live Nation-owned] C3 Presents, and [actor] Matthew McConaughey came into the market and we privately financed this building,” says Nickler. “We believed in the music in this market and that investment has paid off in a huge way.”
Moody Center does not have a professional sports team tenant (though the Texas Longhorns basketball programs play there after the arena took over the space from their former home, the 45-year-old Frank Erwin Center on University of Texas’ campus) and has been able to fill its calendar with major artists, many of whom regularly fill larger venues. According to Nickler, the arena’s draw is an amalgam of factors. First, venue partner Live Nation (who has had a record-setting year in revenue and could see its biggest year yet in 2023) has incentive to route their big tours through the new building like Post Malone, Florence + The Machine and Kendrick Lamar. But Moody Center remains an open building, meaning it books tours with any and all promoters including Live Nation competitor AEG.
“Then there is the Irving Azoff effect,” adds Nickler. Azoff is a co-owner of OVG and The Azoff Company manages acts including Styles, Eagles, and Lizzo – all of whom played the arena in 2022.
Styles conducted a six-night run at Moody Center in September and October selling 86,000 tickets and grossing $19.2 million. The multi-night stint was one of many from big artists who could easily fill larger capacity venues in competing markets including Dallas and Houston.
“We see this trend of continuing for artists to do multiple nights in the market,” says Nickler. George Strait and Willie Nelson, the Eagles, Styles and Mayer all did multiple night stints at the arena this year. There is an incentive for artists and promoters to play consecutive nights since it cuts down on bills from labor, marketing and more can cut a budget in half.
Another major advantage to playing Moody Center comes from its floor space. Unlike most arenas designed for sports, Moody Center can hold up to 3,000 fans on its floor compared to an industry average of 2,200, according to Nickler. An artist can significantly boost their grosses with the roughly 800 extra premium seats.
“Even though we have less seats, we can out punch our weight class because of the design of the building, the viability of the market and the ability to charge higher ticket prices,” says Nickler. “That’s a huge factor in why you see that giant number for those tour grosses.”
Global venue development company Oak View Group is expanding its DEI commitments with the new supplier diversity program. The initiative – which has launched a pilot program with Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Moody Center in Austin, UBS Arena in New York and Miami Beach Convention Center – will help facilitate the use of minority-owned suppliers at all 400 OVG affiliated venues in the coming year.
Starting in January, company wide OVG will work to identify and increase sourcing from suppliers that are at least 51% owned, operated and managed at least 51% by a non-white minority, a disabled person and/or a woman. OVG currently recognizes a wide range of diverse certifications that include minority businesses, women, veterans, LGBTQ+, disabled persons, and other local city certifications. The program aims to foster economic inclusivity by making OVG’s supply chain more diverse by encouraging the use of vendors that are historically overlooked.
OVG is seeking suppliers in several fields including food and beverage, security, technology, construction, marketing, public works and various forms of consulting. Suppliers can confirm their minority-owned status through over a dozen certification outlets including Minority Business Enterprise (MBE), Women Business Enterprise (WBE) and Small Business Administration 8(a).
Founded in 2015, OVG has grown to work with more 400 venues worldwide and financed over $5 billion in capital currently deployed for new development projects. The size of the growing company may seem counterintuitive to working with small businesses, but OVG’s vp of diversity, equity, inclusion Dr. Debonair Oates-Primus tells Billboard the company is rolling out toll kits to help facilitate engagement with smaller businesses around the world.
“So much of the training is mindset shift. We have to make this really intentional,” says Oates-Primus of the new requirement for OVG venues. “I have to educate [OVG staff] on the bias that diverse businesses face. We had to make some changes to our valuation process to our criteria to our expectations of diverse businesses due to things like not having as much access to capital and not having access to networking opportunities to grow at a pace that we might think they need to be in order to with a company like ours.”
The initiative will evaluate diverse businesses by their capacity and where they can succeed within the OVG chain, as well as key difference that make businesses standout such as cost savings, reduction in delivery or setup times, value-added services, product/services quality, and sustainability.
Interested suppliers can fill out a questionnaire on each venue’s site that will give the local OVG venue an idea of what each small business can provide, but Oates-Primus explains that entities that are too small to address needs with OVG could also be connected with other large companies. If a business is too small, “let’s pair them with a larger business,” says Oates-Primus. “Let’s do some mentoring and coaching. So much of supplier diversity is just we’re not going to use a one size fits all rule. We can’t. That’s how bias creeps into every structure.”
As the initiative continues to roll out to OVG venues, the company plans to create benchmarks to help it succeed. Oates-Primus is aware that some areas are less diverse and will make the recruitment more difficult for venue operators and plans to tailor the tool kit to specific regions based on data being collected by the pilot venues.
“I don’t want any of the venue operators or leaders to feel like this has been forced upon them,” Oates-Primus tells Billboard, explaining that additional resources will be allocated to train and help venues. “I am doing a tour of all our leadership meetings, vice president meetings to let the leaders know all the ins and outs of the program so they also become champions of this for their teams.”
The OVG supplier diversity form can be found here.
