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As tens of thousands of fans arrived at Toronto’s Rogers Stadium on Aug. 24, their bucket hats — worn in homage to the night’s headliner, Oasis — protected them from the sun that hung above in the azure sky. The atmosphere at this, the band’s first North American show of its zeitgeist-shaking reunion tour, was convivial, communal, basically euphoric.
But inside the venue, Arthur Fogel sat in front of a weather radar and watched as a storm approached. The meteorologists gathered around him offered guidance: “It’s moving at this speed. It has lightning in it. If it gets this close to the stadium, everyone inside has to go.”
“So you’re sitting there and you’re stressing,” Fogel says. “Like, ‘Aw, f–k. They’re saying it’s going to come right over the top of the place.’ ”
Navigating dilemmas — at times as uncontrollable as the weather — has been part of Fogel’s repertoire for roughly four decades, as he has helped guide some of the biggest musical superstars in history through major, and majorly lucrative, world tours.
Arthur Fogel will be recognized as Touring Executive of the Year at Billboard‘s Live Music Summit, held Nov. 3 in Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, click here.
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On a September afternoon in his sprawling corner office at the Live Nation headquarters in Beverly Hills, his success is tangible. There’s a yet-to-be-hung plaque celebrating Beyoncé’s six sold-out shows at the United Kingdom’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, a June run that earned $61.6 million and sold 275,000 tickets, according to Billboard Boxscore. There are plaques for similarly massive achievements by Coldplay, U2, Madonna. An image of David Bowie commanding a stage during his 1990 Sound+Vision Tour hangs over the room’s sitting area, where Fogel sinks into the couch in his office attire of black cargo pants and a black hoodie.
As Live Nation’s chairman of global music/president of global touring, Fogel has helped these and other greats tour the world in a global market he has seen quadruple in size during his decades in the business. This year, Oasis, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé worked with Fogel to put on, respectively, the aforementioned reunion tour, the opera-themed Mayhem Ball and the country-centric Cowboy Carter spectacular — runs that collectively tallied 160 shows in 19 countries. Coldplay just performed 10 shows at Wembley Stadium, the longest consecutive run ever by an act at the venue, while 1.6 million people gathered on the beach in Rio de Janeiro to see Madonna play a free show in May 2024, a site Lady Gaga drew 2.5 million fans to a year later.
Successfully executing such epic concert endeavors has earned Fogel the trust of icons, a place in the Canadian Music History Hall of Fame and even his own documentary, 2013’s Who the F**k Is Arthur Fogel?, in which his client and friend Bono helps answer the titular question by explaining that artists like Fogel because “he’s calm.” It’s the kind of even temper that, for example, might help one navigate something like a freak thunderstorm hurtling toward a stadium full of rock fans.
“Even though inside I might be tied in knots, I think part of how you lead is to stay calm,” Fogel says. “Being calm is part of what people look to you for in tough situations.”
Today in his office, Fogel is soft-spoken but talkative, and one gets a sense of the steady presence that has helped him develop professional relationships that also transcend business, a goal since his early days in the Toronto rock scene. “The live business is very transactional, but in those early years as a musician and then working with artists as a tour manager, I knew I was looking for a different sort of relationship,” he says.
He instead sought “the anti-transactional. It was like, ‘How do I develop long-term relationships where I’m providing a service and an understanding, and I’m able to converse with artists about different aspects of their career, and certainly about touring, on a global basis?’ That became my fixation because it was, and to some degree still is, the great differentiator in my career — that global perspective.”
Arthur Fogel
Joel Barhamand
To go global, however, one must still start local. Born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, Fogel relocated to Toronto as a young adult and began playing drums in various bands before realizing, he says with a chuckle, “that if I wanted to get to a certain place in life, it wasn’t going to be as a musician.” He became the night manager of Toronto club The Edge, then started tour-managing a band that played there, Martha and the Muffins. Fogel was then hired at Concert Productions International by Michael Cohl, the touring impresario and eventual chairman of Live Nation. He was named president of the concert division of Cohl’s Toronto-based company in 1986.
“Michael Cohl had the same view on global business,” says Fogel, who worked with Cohl to book The Rolling Stones’ 1989 Steel Wheels tour, a gargantuan 115-show, 19-country run “that really helped develop my understanding and expertise of putting together a major tour on a broad basis.” Bowie’s 1990 Sound+Vision Tour followed as Fogel settled into a long tenure at CPI. As the live sector consolidated in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Fogel and Cohl’s subsequent company, The Next Adventure, was acquired by SFX, where Fogel stayed as it merged with Clear Channel Entertainment and that company eventually spun off its concerts division as Live Nation in 2005. Fogel, who started working with U2 in 1997, Madonna in 2001 and Sting in 2004, became Live Nation’s president of global touring in 2005. Beyoncé became a client in 2012; she and the rest of these icons — apart from Bowie, who stopped touring in 2004 and died in 2016 — remain Fogel’s clients to this day.
“Arthur has always been a visionary, and we value his expertise in touring,” U2’s The Edge says. “Over many years working with him, we have come to depend on his great counsel. Our tours would not have been the same without him. Beyond that, he’s a fantastic person and he has become a dear friend as well.”
When Fogel started out, he says there were roughly 20 countries artists could tour. Now “there’s probably 70 or 80. Over the last 20 years, globalization has expanded pretty much everywhere, except maybe the heart of Africa.” This quadrupling of the market is “probably the most significant shift in the last 20 years… Artists are able to touch their fans everywhere in the world and generate an income everywhere in the world.” The success of Bad Bunny, he adds, demonstrates how touring has not only opened geographically, but genrewise. “I find that particularly gratifying,” Fogel says.
Certainly, the kind of shows he tends to put on — Beyoncé flying through the air on a mechanical horse, Gaga in a chessboard dance-off with her past self, U2 playing under the cosmic glow of Las Vegas’ Sphere when it performed the venue’s opening residency in 2023 — help foster this global fascination. While putting a band onstage with a few lights “can and certainly does” work, Fogel says, “I like big; I like wow; I like the spectacle.”
He has had no shortage of wow this year. Gaga’s tour behind her new album, MAYHEM, started in April at Coachella, where Fogel was in the audience for the show’s stunning debut. (While he “sort of had a sense of what was coming together, you never really know until you see and hear it, and it was awesome.”) Fogel and Gaga, who’ve worked together since the early days of her career, debated putting the Mayhem Ball in arenas versus stadiums, ultimately deciding that its 87 dates would primarily be held in arenas.
“The last tour, for [2020’s] Chromatica, was in stadiums, and my feeling was that she should go back into arenas for multiple nights everywhere to reconnect with her fans in a different way,” Fogel says. “This show is unbelievable in arenas; it’s so powerful and so well done. She’s an amazing talent, really is.”
“Arthur has been by my side through some of the most defining moments of my touring career,” Gaga says. “His vision, dedication and heart for the live experience have inspired me endlessly. I wouldn’t be the artist I am today without his partnership.”
Arthur Fogel
Joel Barhamand
Meanwhile, Oasis and its team “were quite convinced that stadiums were the way to go” for the band’s first tour in 16 years, Fogel says. “I don’t think there was ever any doubt, certainly in the U.K., about their strength and their ability to sell out stadiums… My gut said it was going to work, but I think everybody was a bit surprised at how big it was.” He notes that the most significant challenge in bringing the reunion to market was simply keeping it a secret for six months before it was announced.
“You’d wake up every day going, ‘Oh, f–k. Did somebody spill the beans?’ Because it was very important to them that it not enter the rumor mill in a serious way.”
Fogel and Beyoncé, meanwhile, decided on a residency structure for Cowboy Carter, where she played multiple nights in nine cities across the United States and Europe. Fogel says he and his clients make such decisions based on how much time a given artist wants to tour and how much of the world they want to reach. “Doing multiple shows in less cities is a model that’s more prevalent now than ever,” he says, “but the flip side is that if you don’t go wide and touch your fans, eventually they kind of move on. You have to find that balance… I don’t think the residency model serves the long-term strategy very well.”
While these particular superstars can reliably play stadiums whenever they want, Fogel says a major development in the business is how stadium dates have opened to artists in earlier stages of their career. In previous eras, “playing stadiums was very rarefied air,” he says. “In the last few years, the volume of stadium shows has continued to increase dramatically, and I don’t see it really slowing down.”
He attributes this development to the sense of community people feel when they’re part of such a major event and to acts being “bigger than ever. The noise about artists and their music [and the culture around it] is so overpowering and motivating to people to want to be a part of it. It’s pretty extraordinary.”
As 2025 draws to a close, Fogel reports that from where he’s sitting — which is, in this moment, still the couch, although he later relocates to his standing desk — “the business is in a great place.”
Still, when your clients are simultaneously putting on several of the world’s biggest tours, things can, and do, get thorny. “There was a period during the summer where Beyoncé was rolling, Oasis started, Gaga was out there, Sting was out there,” Fogel says. “There was a lot of bouncing around, and it was a tough year just physically and mentally with travel. But the flip side is that that’s a one-percenter problem, so you can’t get too dramatic about it.”
This is the even keel that artists love about Fogel, who ultimately watched the Toronto thunderstorm veer south of the stadium, taking the lightning with it and leaving some 39,000 fans joyfully singing “Don’t Look Back in Anger” in a downpour.
“Stuff like that happens. I can give you a million stories where it’s like, ‘What the f–k? How is that happening?’ But it’s part of the game, part of what we do.”
Fogel’s trick is not just staying calm during challenges, but sometimes even enjoying them. “The rain,” he says, “actually added to the vibe of the show.”
This story appears in the Oct. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.
When veteran concert promoter Louis Messina weighs adding an act to Messina Touring Group’s impressive stable of superstar artists, his eyes aren’t focused on the stage. Instead, he’s intently surveying the concert audience. “I watch eyes and lips: eyes, if they’re really focusing on the artists, and lips, if they’re singing along and if they’re smiling,” he says. “When I see that happening, that’s when I know I need to be involved. It’s rare that you see artists that can do that and [aren’t] just going through the motions. You know they bring this unique connection.”
Messina knows that feeling well; he remembers first experiencing it at just 7 years old, when his father took him to see Elvis Presley in his hometown of New Orleans. “I’ve never forgotten that energy in that room,” Messina says. “It was a feeling that I’ve never had before, and I’ve carried it until today. When artists and an audience connect with each other, it’s magical.”
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Seventy years later, Messina and his enviable roster have created plenty of magic together, too. The Messina Touring Group origin story began in 2001 with acts including his longtime client George Strait — and since then, each of the artists Messina exclusively promotes has been within one or two degrees of separation from the country legend (with the sole exception of The Lumineers). Taylor Swift, Kenny Chesney, Blake Shelton, Eric Church and Old Dominion all once opened for Strait; then Ed Sheeran and Shawn Mendes both opened for Swift.
Simply put, Messina says, without Strait “there wouldn’t be a Messina Touring Group.” But Messina’s own story started way earlier. His promoting career got off to a dubious start in New Orleans in 1972 when he sold out a Curtis Mayfield/B.B. King show — only to have the artists get stuck in Atlanta, unable to get to the gig. “I had 8,000 people trying to break the doors down to get their money back. The New Orleans riot squad had to come out,” he recalls. He learned a valuable lesson: “After I got over my depression, I had to go back into the ring. I got knocked down, but I didn’t get knocked out.”
After a tumultuous run in New Orleans, in 1975, Messina and his mentor and fellow promoter, Allen Becker, formed PACE Concerts in Houston. They introduced several new concepts into the live-event business, including touring multi-artist festivals such as the George Strait Country Festival and OzzFest, and were the first promoters to own outdoor sheds, starting with Nashville’s Starwood Amphitheater. Messina and Becker quickly realized they could reap the rewards of, as the late Becker used to say, the revenue from “popcorn, peanuts and parking” — and, in turn, greatly mitigate the financial risk of promoting concerts.
In 1997, Robert F.X. Sillerman bought PACE for $130 million as his SFX Entertainment consolidated the promotion business. In 2001, Messina launched Messina Touring Group, and in 2003, he partnered with AEG. His noncompete clause allowed him only to promote country acts, and he started with a passel that included Strait and Chesney, both of whom he still promotes. “Nobody else was paying attention to country acts back then,” Messina says. “What I did was take a little rock’n’roll mentality and brought it to Nashville; meaning I’m not going to do the same old same old.” He also gave each act its own dedicated team that they consistently work with from tour to tour.
On the fall day that Billboard speaks with the voluble Messina, now 77 and a father of six, he is at his desk in Austin. (Messina Touring Group’s 35 employees — 70% of whom are women — are spread between its Austin and Nashville offices.) “This is the time of the year where I’m busiest because I’m prepping for next year and the year after,” he says.
Still, he’s able to take a moment to look back. Last year was his company’s most successful yet, he says, with 2024 coming in second. Swift doesn’t report her concert totals to Billboard, but Billboard estimates her 2023 shows for The Eras Tour grossed $906.1 million (the tour will end Dec. 8). In 2024, Chesney completed his highest-grossing outing yet, according to Billboard Boxscore, with $159.5 million for the Sun Goes Down Tour, which ended in August. And Strait remains big business: His June 15 concert at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field set the all-time attendance record for a ticketed concert in the United States with 110,905 ticket-buying fans. “Everything’s clicking and so, you know, we’re happy,” Messina says.
But for Billboard’s 2024 Touring Executive of the Year, an artist’s potential career arc can’t be reduced to the success of any one tour.
“Louie isn’t a tour promoter. He’s an artist promoter… He’s a champion of not just the current tour he’s involved in with you, but your whole career,” says Church, who has worked with Messina for 12 years. “Louie always said to me, ‘You think your dreams are big, but you’ll never out-dream me.’ ”
Louis Messina
Jasmine Archie
Your father was a boxing promoter. Though you’ve said he didn’t influence you because your passion was music, what did you learn from him about taking risks?
I hate to say this because my dad’s passed away. He was a good man, but what I learned from him was what not to do. He was not a good businessperson. He did take me to see Elvis and exposed me to the excitement of what live music does. That’s what I’ve learned from my dad.
PACE pioneered the concept of touring artist festivals — multi-act events that would travel the country — but such stadium festivals are virtually gone now. Did local and regional festivals kill the touring artist festival?
I just ran out of talent. And the whole ego about “I’m not going to play in front of this guy… I need 110% billing… I need this. I need that” — it just wasn’t worth it. Then we started building amphitheaters and we made more money doing an amphitheater show than we did [promoting] stadium shows.
Two years into starting Messina Touring Group, you partnered with AEG. How does that relationship work?
I operate totally independent of AEG. Hell, a lot of times I’m competing with AEG over tours. They have their model, Live Nation has their model, and I have my model. My model is about careers, not tours. I always say I’m not in the rent-a-band business. I want to know what that artist’s vision is five and 10 years from now.
Legendary booking agent Wayne Forte unintentionally provided you with a light-bulb moment that changed your approach when you started Messina Touring Group. What did he say?
I was booking amphitheaters, and I referred to artists as inventory, and Wayne goes, “I’m sorry, Louis, did you just call artists inventory?” Literally, it stopped me in my tracks. I went, “I sure did.” At that moment, it totally reset my mind and where I was going in this business. I [wouldn’t] say I’d lost the passion, but I was a promoter that was just trying to sell popcorn and peanuts and parking. And I’m going, “This is not why I got in the business.” I got into the business because I love the passion of it. I changed my whole mentality at that point.
Most of your clients came from being opening acts for artists you were already promoting. Do you advise your acts on their openers?
With Kenny and George, I’m totally involved. Taylor always picks her opening acts. I’m involved with some and with others, I follow their lead. I believe there’s no such thing as overkill. Give the people their money’s worth. I’ve got George and Chris Stapleton and Little Big Town playing stadiums together and Zac Brown Band playing with Kenny. It’s magical.
The newest star in your orbit is Megan Moroney, who recently opened for Kenny Chesney even though you hadn’t seen her perform beforehand. Will she become your next client?
I’d love to work with her. I think she’s amazing. [Chesney’s manager] Clint [Higham] and I were talking about Kenny’s support and we brought up Megan Moroney. Kenny goes, “She’s only got one hit.” I go, “This album is so deep. Kenny, I’m telling you, this is going to work.” I’d never seen her perform, I just listened to her music and her songwriting. We put her on, and oh, my gosh, I’ve never seen Kenny so excited about an artist. He called me and he goes, “Louis, you were right. I was wrong.” But it didn’t take long for Kenny to recognize because Megan is such a natural star.
The production on Swift’s The Eras Tour is unlike anything that fans have seen. Has it changed what can be done onstage?
What Taylor has done is to me the best show I’ve ever seen. She amazes me night after night. She’s one of a kind. She’s always been like that. I’ve known her since she just turned 17… I always tell people, “You think you’re working? Go sit around Taylor for 15 minutes.” I remember when she was the first of three acts with Strait. She was the first one in the production office every day after visiting radio [stations], handwriting notes to people around the country. Ed’s the same way, Eric’s the same way, in their own way. None of the artists I work for is dialing anything in. They’re working their ass off.
The Ticketmaster site crashed when the Eras tickets went on sale, upsetting fans and leading to an antitrust suit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster. In hindsight, what could you have done differently?
When you have 15 million people trying to buy a million tickets, nothing could handle that. When we started adding shows, what [Swift’s management company] 13 and everybody decided to do was to stagger on-sales where instead of putting five shows up at once, we would put one show up at a time. Everybody’s blamed Ticketmaster, but I use this analogy: Imagine getting into a subway car in New York City. It holds 40 people, but 1,000 people are trying to get in that subway car. It just doesn’t work. They can’t get in. That’s what happened.
What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in negotiating artists’ fees over the last 10 years?
The biggest thing is [other promoters] playing with house money. These touring deals that some of my friends and competitors make, it’s ridiculous. The sales pitch [is] “What’s it going to take financially?” I don’t believe in that because if you’re tied to a check that somebody wrote to you, that means you have to play so many shows, your ticket price has to be this. You lose control of your own destiny. My trying to compete with a checkbook, that’s the hardest part I have because my sales pitch is “Let’s talk about the future. Let’s talk about your dreams.” Do what you’re supposed to do and the money will be there. If you chase the money, you’ll never get there.
Ed Sheeran has talked about trying to keep ticket prices low. Is there something other acts can learn from him?
No. This is one thing that’s wrong with artists that [want to price tickets too low]. Ed goes, “Louis, I want to go to bed at night knowing that this is the ticket price I wanted my fans to pay.” I go, “Ed, you’re beautiful for saying that, but here’s the problem: People are going to go to the secondary market and spend $700 on a ticket that you want to sell for $99… and you’re only going to get $99 of it.” I remember a long, long time ago working with George and his tickets were really reasonable and I did a printout of StubHub or whatever and said, “This is how much your tickets are being sold for right now.” And his eyes got big, and it was like a “Holy crap” moment for him. He had no idea.
Which acts are on your wish list?
I love Bruce Springsteen. I adore [Springsteen’s manager] Jon Landau and [tour manager] George Travis. They are all like family to me even though I don’t promote Bruce anymore these days because [Springsteen’s longtime agent] Barry Bell said I was too cheap, that I wouldn’t do the Bruce Springsteen deal. I don’t work at a discount price. My other fantasy [act] is Beyoncé. I adore her. Sometimes it’s cheaper to just buy a ticket than to get involved with the artists you love.
You spend a tremendous amount of time on the road. What’s your best travel tip?
My best travel tip I gave myself is I stopped drinking. This Christmas will be two years. I figured me and Jack Daniel’s had a good run together.
Any thoughts about retiring?
Seeing an artist go from an opening act to a stadium act and knowing that I had a little bit to do with it and walking into that sold-out stadium and seeing that energy… Wow! Why would I want to give that up? I’m the luckiest human being in the world.
Messina will receive Billboard’s inaugural Touring Titan honor at its Live Music Summit & Awards on Nov. 14.
This story appears in the Oct. 26, 2024, issue of Billboard.
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