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Dreamliner Luxury Coaches has acquired Hemphill Brothers Coach Company, combining the two private bus and coach tour operators into the largest provider of entertainer busses in the world.
Formed just three years ago, the Nashville-based Dreamliner now boasts a fleet of 190 high-end luxury coaches, servicing approximately 50% of North American arena and stadium touring market, CEO Jeremy Maul estimates. The high-end bus company specializes in leasing and servicing artist and headliner buses with a client list that includes Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Drake, Jonas Brothers, Chris Stapleton, Olivia Rodrigo, Zach Bryan and more.
Hemphill Brothers was launched in 1980 by Joey and Trent Hemphill, Tennessee-based brothers who toured in the family Gospel band and eventually bought out their father’s two-bus leasing company. In 1995, Hemphill Brothers opened their current 55,000 square foot office complex and shop facility on 15 acres of land near Nashville.
Dreamliner was founded in late 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic by businessman Rich Thomson, managing partner at Caprice Capital Partners and Jeremy Maul, Thomson saw the revival of the touring business as potential investment opportunity for his LA based private investment firm focused mainly on small cap companies with at least $2 million in EBITDA.
The bet on Dreamliner was fairly simple – while the pandemic had completely devastated the touring and concert business, the industry was expected to come back strong in mid-to-late 2021, as evidenced by ticket purchases during the pandemic and pent-up demand. Artists returning to the road would encounter a shortage of high-end luxury buses due to a pivot in the transportation industry away from concert touring.
The tour bus shortage, coupled with the explosion in demand, caused the leasing price for tour buses to nearly double overnight and created a backlog of demand for the industry, Maul explained.
Dreamliner’s first tour was the Jonas Brothers’ August 2021 tour. In June 2022, Dreamliner purchased Diamond Coach leasing from founder Kyle Ervin, growing the company’s fleet from 12 buses to 75 buses while establishing the company’s headquarters in Nashville.
Maul told Billboard that the Hemphill purchase took approximately one year to finalize. The combined business is expected to generate $100 million in business in 2024 from a fleet of 190 coaches, Maul said.
That puts Dreamliner ahead of Encore Luxury Coach, which briefly held the title of largest entertainment coach leasing company in North America following its acquisition of Nitetrain in September.
“As we further our goal of redefining the art of tour travel, we will leverage the strengths and experience at the heart of both Dreamliner and Hemphill to become the industry’s largest and most sought-after resource for high-end tour coaches,” Maul said in a recent press release.
Sixty miles outside Taking Back Sunday‘s gig at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., last July, the alt-rock band’s driver woke up and informed tour manager Andrew Sprague: “Bus can’t move.” The bus company’s fleet was too depleted to supply a backup, so Sprague spent a day securing transportation for 12 musicians and crew, some of whom hitched a ride on touring mate Third Eye Blind’s bus.
But 2023 is different, Sprague says: “Fingers crossed, everything’s moving a little bit better.”
Personnel shortages and supply-chain issues continue to plague the touring industry, but as 2023 shapes up to be a gigantic year, with stars like Taylor Swift, Drake, Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen and The Cure selling out shows, bands and managers are noticing an economic tension release from the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s been full-tilt since April of 2022,” says Brent Dannen, studio general manager for Rock Lititz, the 96-acre Pennsylvania campus where artists rehearse and prep for major tours. “Certain supply-chain issues are not like they were pre-pandemic — we’re not back to that yet. But they have improved since this time last year.”
Robert A. Roth, a rental representative for Christie Lites, the lighting company that works with stadium stars such as Bad Bunny and Karol G, is even more upbeat, although he acknowledges freight costs remain “elevated” above 2019 levels. “If somebody’s looking for a doom-and-gloom outlook, you need to look somewhere else,” he says. “Are things more expensive than they used to be? Yes. Demand is high. Challenges remain. [But] things are improving.”
One reason for concert-business optimism is that touring artists, crews and vendors have adapted to challenges like bus-driver shortages and being forced to procure hard-to-find parts from international factories.
Hemphill Brothers, the Nashville bus-rental company that specializes in concert tours and has worked for artists like Janet Jackson and Mötley Crüe, spent the past year and a half training 60 full-time drivers and stocking up on hard-to-find tires. And bands have learned to book buses farther in advance than usual, sometimes 14 months before a tour begins. “In ’21, we were doing a lot of things for smaller acts,” says Joey Hemphill, Hemphill Brothers’ co-owner, chairman and treasurer. “Now the monster tours are back.”
Finding qualified tour personnel remains a struggle. John Benjamin “JB” Brubaker, lead guitarist for August Burns Red, says a key lighting director recently departed the band’s tour for “some bigger accounts,” but they were able to find a replacement. Michele Abreim, who manages Pierce the Veil, adds that the metal band has given raises to all of its crew members since a tour last September, with high-demand guitar and drum techs being especially expensive. “Normally, our crew is with us a longer period of time before we give pay bumps,” she says.
Rhino Staging, which supplies thousands of staff and crew for live-entertainment events, has aggressively trained workers over the past two years. According to CEO Jeff Giek, it’s still challenging to find people for specialized concert-production work like stage rigging – but new employees are slowly filling the spots. He adds that Rhino has turned down more work over the last 18 months than it has in the last 30 years, but that tours have not had to scale back dates or production due to lack of personnel. “There’s some sex appeal to working in the music business. We’re better off than some of the other industries — I have friends who have cleaning businesses or are in the restaurant business, and they’re really struggling,” Giek says.
Bands are still frustrated that supply-chain issues, due to lingering pandemic shipping delays and factory shutdowns after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, still translate into parts shortages. August Burns Red’s lighting fixtures require cooling fans that have been on back-order for weeks: “It’s just dead equipment sitting in the back of the tour bus,” Brubaker says. Pierce the Veil ordered new guitar cases months ago, but they won’t be ready for the band’s tour, which begins later this month in Mexico. “We’ll sometimes start a tour without everything we need,” Abreim says.
Some economic, logistical and emotional issues remain insurmountable for touring acts — especially in Europe, which, Brubaker says, is “extremely expensive” given high oil and gas prices. “It’s definitely still an issue,” adds Bob McLynn, who manages Miley Cyrus, Green Day, Fall Out Boy and others. “Costs are very high. It’s more difficult than it’s ever been. We had an act do a sold-out theater tour [in] Europe, came back, $60,000 loss on the tour. It’s brutal.”
Lorde, one of McLynn’s clients, wrote last fall of “truly mind-boggling” freight costs, crew shortages, overbooked trucks and other factors that created an “almost unprecedented level of difficulty.” Still, Lorde’s own international tour, which began last April, has achieved what McLynn calls her “greatest success ever, as far as ticket sales.” For 2023, many artists playing top venues say they’re seeing similarly high numbers, including rapper Key Glock, who has sold between 48,000 and 60,000 tickets for a tour of mid-size theaters that started in early March.
“It’s almost 100% back to normal,” says Kyle Carter, Key Glock’s agent. “You’re seeing a lot more of these bigger shows go out — the Beyonces, the Drakes. They’re able to do the shows they want to do. It’s easier to find buses. It’s easier to find equipment we need.”
Live shows are back in full force — Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, two years after the pandemic relegated it to hockey games in front of empty seats , is currently in a run of 12 shows in a 23-day period, including country concerts headlined by Keith Urban, Jason Aldean, Reba McEntire and Wynonna Judd on successive Friday nights.
But the live-show reboot has come with its challenges. The volume of acts has caused logistical problems, including a shortage of available tour buses and operators to drive them. The loss of some venues during the shutdown — particularly at the club level — has increased competition among touring acts for bookings in the remaining outlets, creating routing issues. And artists in smaller venues often encounter spotty attendance, thanks to the glut of concert options for a fan base that isn’t entirely back: 20% of American adults remain uncomfortable with the prospect of attending mass public events, according to a May survey by CivicScience.
It’s in that context that independent singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters — whose body of smart, emotional work includes hits with Martina McBride‘s “Independence Day” and Faith Hill‘s “The Secret of Life” — has announced that her current concert tour will be her last. She remains open to performing the occasional one-off concert, much like George Strait has since he quit doing full-fledged tours in 2015. The feedback from fellow artists has been mixed.
“A couple of them said, ‘Oh, no, you can’t stop,’ you know, as if ‘the show must go on’ is actually a rule,” Peters says. “I thought that was an interesting reaction. But then I’ve also gotten — and I won’t mention their names because this is something everybody needs to make public for themselves — but I’ve also gotten quite a few ‘I’m right behind you, girl.’ I’ve gotten a few of those.”
To observers who see only the glamorous, onstage part of touring, the idea of walking away might seem shocking. But the road is never easy — it’s a business in which employees navigate a different working environment on a daily basis, and the lifestyle itself is physically taxing. The costs of putting on a concert in an era of 8% inflation have increased across the board, and many of those expenses are significantly higher. Bus drivers, when they can be located, are sometimes getting double the daily rate they charged before the pandemic. And security costs, compounded by the volume of mass shootings in the 21st century, have risen as much as six times in the last five to eight years.
Those costs are borne by promoters and the acts themselves, who already pay their bands and crews, share commissions with business associates, rent transportation and cover volatile fuel costs. Outside of the top-tier acts, artists are facing a financial squeeze.
“They can’t go out and charge $125, $150 a ticket, so they either have to cut their operating costs [or] go out with less crew, or that cost gets passed on to the promoter. And the only way for the promoter to recoup is to keep their costs down, which is very difficult to do,” says Action Entertainment Collaborative partner Nick Meinema (Trace Adkins, High Valley) . “But the audience is not willing, or in some cases not able, to afford a higher ticket price. That becomes a conundrum.”
There are ways to combat the problem. Some of Meinema’s artists are cutting fuel costs by refusing to tour west of the Rocky Mountains unless they receive a superb contract. Others are declining Canadian offers, choosing to avoid customs issues on top of the fuel costs, or they are asking to book 10-day runs that cover two weekends and the days in between instead of traveling only on the weekend before driving back home. Additionally, some artists are booking fewer dates and discovering in the process that they create higher demand — and higher grosses — by becoming a little more scarce.
“Country music artists overplay at every level,” Meinema says.
During 2023, Reliant Talent artist David Nail will be doing more soft-ticket shows — fairs and festivals — where the income is more reliable.
Transportation has not been. Nail had an issue this past summer when Nashville coach companies ran out of buses. Two days before a Thursday getaway, his team finally located a vehicle in Indiana: Someone had to travel to pick it up and drive it back to Nashville, adding gas charges in the process. And it was only the morning of their departure that they were able to fly a retired driver who still had his license from Texas to man the wheel.
“A lot of that has to do, obviously, with everybody touring, but a lot of huge tours have 15 to 20 buses,” Nail says. “I can remember thinking, ‘Man, I might have to call Luke Bryan and just see if maybe he could double up on the buses and maybe throw me a bone.’”
In the face of that shortage, Meinema has a client who plans to tour strictly in the spring and fall in 2023, taking a summer vacation from the road for the first time in 26 years after a lackluster 2022 experience.
“The shows were great, the money was great, the merch was great, the travel — it was too much, not the level that that artist was accustomed to having,” he says. “It just didn’t feel worth it.”
While much of the fan base is acting as if the pandemic is over, the coronavirus remains an unpredictable issue. Nail has picked up some good money by subbing last minute for other artists whose teams suffered COVID-19 infections. But the artists who have to back out of the shows still have to pay their bands and crews. And the thought of losing dates to the virus is haunting.
“It’s impossible to not feel a little different, whether it’s the meet-and-greets or whatever,” says Nail.
Peters has thought at times during a performance — particularly when the reboot began — that working without a mask made her vulnerable in smaller, indoor venues.
“I was very appreciative of the audience members that masked up early on,” she says. “But just to think, ‘Boy, how much air am I sucking in here tonight?’ I mean, I can’t wear a mask because I have to sing. For somebody with asthma, it was surreal and a bit terrifying.”
By contrast, Peters is comfortable with her decision to back out of touring, ready to discover how her work/life balance will change when her schedule is a little more predictable. She’ll miss the shows, but that’s the smallest portion of the day.
“There’s a whole list of other things that I really won’t miss,” she says. “[Particularly] airlines — I mean, it’s a long list.”
Nail, on the other hand, is committed to slugging it out, even if touring remains unpredictable for the near future.
“I don’t have that plan B,” he says. “This has to work, one way or another.”
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For the record… We’re hiring!” reads the lawn sign in front of Nashville’s United Record Pressing, the largest vinyl pressing plant in the United States. With an expansion underway that will bring in 48 new presses — upping the manufacturer’s count to nearly 100 and more than doubling its total output from approximately 40,000 to over 100,000 units of vinyl per day — the need to staff up is crucial. And URP isn’t the only Tennessee plant on the prowl.
As the vinyl boom continues — the format generated $570 million in revenue through June 2022 (up 22% year over year), according to the Mid-Year 2022 RIAA Music Revenue Report — pressing plants around the world are not only striving to keep up with demand but planning how to get ahead of it. Tennessee is aiming to take the lead, increasing its number of plants from two to five in 2022 and planting a flag as the U.S. vinyl hub. The state offers advantages in distribution, in taxes and, most notably, in culture.
“All music resonates from Tennessee,” says Brandon Seavers, CEO of Memphis Record Pressing (MRP), which was founded in 2014 and is undergoing its own $30 million expansion. “We really take pride in our musical heritage.”
“We’ve got wine country in California,” adds Drake Coker, CEO of Nashville Record Pressing, one of three new manufacturers that have come online in the past year in Music City. “Tennessee is going to be vinyl country.”
The growth in Tennessee’s vinyl production capacity is substantial. MRP — owned by Czech Republic-based GZ Media, the world’s largest vinyl record manufacturer — is adding 33,000 square feet to house 36 new presses to be up and running by early 2023; NRP, also owned by GZ Media, opened in June. Physical Music Products, a smaller plant with three presses currently online (and five more expected by early 2023) that was founded by Nashville-based mastering engineer Piper Payne, opened in March, and The Vinyl Lab, a music venue and boutique two-press plant, has been operational since April 2021.
“Nashville is exploding right now,” says URP CEO Mark Michaels. He cites everything from “attractive” economics and state tax rates to the presence of tech giants like Amazon and Oracle as drivers for the city’s growth.
And, as Coker points out, an estimated 75% of the U.S. population lives within a 24-hour drive of Nashville, making it what he calls “a distribution heaven.” (Nashville and Memphis are centrally located to two of the country’s major distributors in Franklin, Ind., and La Vergne, Tenn.)
It’s not just proximity to distributors that makes Nashville and Memphis ideal cities to house a pressing plant. The Vinyl Lab founder Scott Lemasters believes it’s about proximity to everything. “The components that you need to make a record: the mastering houses and studios, the people who cut the lacquers. There’s even a plating facility in town. Everything is within a 10-minute radius,” he says. “Half our jobs are just running around town.”
But not everything can be done locally, and surely not everything can be sourced locally. So how did so many plants within one state manage to break ground on expansions or entirely new facilities all at once — and during a global supply-chain shortage?
Michaels believes URP, which was founded in 1949, had a bit of luck on its side. After the plant relocated to its current, larger facility in 2017, Michaels never thought it would need to further expand. “And then, as we saw 2020 and the growth of vinyl, it created an incredible acceleration and demand,” he says. “All of our customers were just crying for capacity.” By the top of 2021, URP decided to grow its operations yet again — fortuitous timing, with Michaels noting that supply-chain challenges got much worse soon after.
It’s something Seavers can attest to as well. At the start of 2021, MRP booked three-and-a-half months of work in five weeks. “It was more than a flood,” he says. “It strained every system that we had.” With the financial support of GZ Media, MRP added another 36 presses to its facility for a total of 52, which will eventually boost its vinyl units per day from 36,000 to 130,000. “Having GZ behind it all really has been key,” says Seavers.
The hustle to get GZ-backed sister plant NRP operational is further proof of how essential that kind of backing can be for a plant at any stage and of any size. For decades, GZ has been building a family of plants across North America, including Precision Record Pressing in Ontario. It was that plant’s president, Shawn Johnson, who approached Coker about relocating to Nashville to head up the newest sibling. Coker arrived in fall 2021, secured a space for NRP by December (because of Nashville’s current growth, he says commercial real estate was hard to come by) and started construction and operations in March. He compares the process to a plane leaving the runway as it’s still being built.
Capital and technological support from GZ have allowed that plane to take off, fueled by already existing customer relationships. “Every record that we can make in the next four years is already presold,” Coker says. “Who gets to start a company and not worry about sales?”
The Vinyl Lab — a multifunctional space that includes a pressing plant and a venue that will open in October — has enjoyed a similar safety net from the start. Scott first conceived the idea for The Vinyl Lab in 2015 and, after a series of setbacks, leased its space in January 2020. The following December, the Grand Ole Opry called. The Opry had continued holding shows in an empty hall during the pandemic, recording each one and eventually choosing 12 performances to release as an album — which it wanted on vinyl. “They called us, and we were like, ‘Our machine is not even in its final resting spot yet,’ ” he recalls with a laugh, noting he secured the company’s first Phoenix Alpha press in 2019. “We were fully transparent with [the Opry]. That order was due on June 3, and we delivered it on June 2.”
Lemasters, who operates The Vinyl Lab alongside Clint Elliott and Heather Gray, says their orders have mostly been word-of-mouth (in addition to ads they posted in bathroom stalls). He praises both the city and the vinyl community as a whole for the eagerness to help one another, recalling the time Jack White and Ben Blackwell of Third Man Records referred Dualtone Records to The Vinyl Lab, which led to a steady flow of work early on.
“That’s what’s great about the industry right now, is that we are still in a very collaborative phase,” says Seavers. “We would never be where we are if we hadn’t had that.”
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