Touring

In early 2021, Wasserman Music’s Tom Schoeder met with a rising electronic producer at the artist’s London studio. There was buzz around the producer, who had pivoted to making his own music after working the boards for artists like Ed Sheeran, but he wasn’t famous yet, and Schroeder was cautious.
“There was an assumption from the industry and other agents that this was going to be a runaway success,” Schroeder recalls. “I said to [some of these people], ‘You’re thinking the wrong way. No one really cares what producers do, you’ve got to work out what your story is.’”

Luckily, the nascent artist – the now globally-famous Fred again.. – had already figured out the narrative. In the studio, he showed Schroeder short videos of mundane scenes on his phone – the cleaning crew at a stadium, friends with their children – that he had scored with his music, giving the visuals a poignancy they wouldn’t have had on their own. The videos, he explained, would be the basis for the intimate feel and life-as-seen-through-a-phone-screen look of his shows. He also laid out his plan for using social media to engage with fans in a casual, conversational way and then leverage this connection to create momentum around live events.

Trending on Billboard

“It was like, ‘Wow, this guy isn’t just an incredible musical genius, he’s thinking way beyond that,” says Schroeder, the executive vp/managing executive of Wasserman Music U.K., who signed Fred again.. in August 2021. “You could see the ambition. The confidence was something like I’d never seen before.”

In the three years since, this plan – leveraging an ongoing discourse with fans into excitement around new music and mold-breaking live shows – has led to one of the most innovative and successful touring strategies in electronic music and the broader live music ecosystem. Amid his rise, Fred again.. has played increasingly large festival sets – including headlining slots at Coachella 2023, Glastonbury 2023 and Bonnaroo 2024 – along with historically long residencies at key venues and increasingly big and culturally resonant “pop up” shows that Fred himself announces just days before they happen.

His last pop up – a June 14 show at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum – was announced with just four days notice. It went on to sell 65,100 tickets and gross $6.4 million, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore. The Rolling Stones are the only act with a bigger reported gross at the venue.

“He’s completely changed the game, and the scale only comes later. It’s almost secondary,” says Schroeder of these pop-up performances. “Now he’s changed the game with stadiums, but he changed the game from the start.”

Pent-Up Demand

It was a kind of kismet that Fred again..’s music – emotive, hooky and extremely current sounding electronic productions – gained traction during the pandemic, when live shows were impossible. When audiences could finally see Fred in concert, the pent-up energy created demand. Fred’s first U.S. performances were a pair of buzzy, sold-out shows at 500-capacity Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles in December 2021. That same week in L.A., he played his first U.S. pop-up at a Mid-City Chinese restaurant.

“It was 75 people in a restaurant, but everyone in Los Angeles was talking about it the next day,” says Wasserman senior vp Evan Hancock, who along with Schroeder and senior vp Ben Shprits make up the Fred again.. team at Wasserman. “We just tried to do that again and again.”

The interest around these early shows culminated in a pair of packed, sweaty sets at Coachella 2022, where the earnest sentimentality of the music and relatable iPhone bric-a-brac visuals whipped up big feelings for a crowd that was gathering for the first time since the pandemic. Things leveled up again in July 2022, when Fred’s euphoric set for online streaming platform Boiler Room went viral.

At this point, many artists would announce a major tour. That wasn’t Fred’s plan. “Do I think he’s ever going to put up a predictable tour nine months in advance?” says Schroeder. “No. I can’t see it. Why would he? What he wants to do is things that have never been done before.”

The team leaned into their pre-existing model, playing festival sets in Europe and the U.S. along with sold-out, multi-night runs at venues including Los Angeles’ Hollywood Forever Cemetery in September 2022 and three nights at New York City’s Terminal 5 that October. In early 2023, Fred, alongside friends and fellow producers and performers Skrillex and Four Tet (both also Wasserman clients) created an electronic scene frenzy when they played three pop-up shows in London and a few in New York ahead of a February 15 announcement that they’d be playing a headlining set at Madison Square Garden three days later. That show sold out in two minutes.

“Everyone in London, everyone in Sydney, everyone in Tokyo knew what had happened in New York,” says Schroeder. “We realized we could create these iconic moments and if we executed them at 10 out of 10, we didn’t have to replicate them, because they resonated everywhere.”

“Creating Moments In The Now”

The team agrees that the most crucial element of these pop-ups is less their size and more their immediacy. To wit, on Oct. 27, 2022, Fred announced he was riding a bike through London’s Hyde Park while playing his new album on portable speakers and that fans were welcome to ride with him. Hundreds of people turned up.

“What Fred’s doing is creating moments in the now,” says Schroeder. “He’s not having this ten-month delay [between putting shows on sale and playing them] where people can split up with their girlfriend or change their musical taste. He is living in the moment at a time when society is living in the moment much more than it used to, because the world is more uncertain than it was pre-pandemic. The world has moved to, ‘What are we doing next week?’, not ‘What are we doing next year?’, and Fred’s the best example of it.”

On June 1, Fred again.. and Skrillex sold 25,000 tickets for a show at the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza that was announced four days before it happened and was the first music event to take place at the government run space in years. At one point during the day they went on sale, 65,000 people were in the digital queue trying to buy them. When Fred landed in Australia this past February, 125,000 people attempted to buy tickets for his pop-up at the Sydney Opera House, which holds 2,250. Another seven pop-ups around the country created a sort of national hysteria akin to Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket lottery. “I mean obviouslyyyy we didnt come all this way for one show….” Fred wrote on Instagram when announcing the events, which all sold out in minutes.

The team and most any fan who’s been part of it will attest that the last-minute aspect is part of the thrill. “There’s an excitement in making yourself available, changing your plans for Friday, hunting a ticket down, refreshing Fred’s socials to see what the clues are,” says Schroeder. “What we have with Fred is what I call active engagement, where fans are trying to find from out from Fred what’s about to happen, versus him presenting what’s about to happen.”

But the shows are planned well in advance. Another Planet Entertainment, the team’s partner on the June 1 San Francisco event, applied for the permit in February after Fred’s team reached out about doing an outdoor event in the city. Another Planet‘s president of concerts & festivals Allen Scott says that while producing the show was “definitely a workout” – given that the stage had to be built late at night so as not to not disrupt business at City Hall – the fact that tickets would sell out immediately “was the most known variable in the equation” based on Fred’s touring history and the “pent up demand” for the artist in the Bay Area. He says Mayor London Breed even had a watch party for the show on her balcony at city hall.

Meanwhile, while fans were only given four days notice for the L.A. Coliseum show (though Fred teased it by having “Los Angeles, June 14” printed in the liner notes of the vinyl for his Tiny Desk Concert, released a week prior to the event), it was on the calendar a year out. With these tentpole events in place to work around, the team was able to arrange unannounced Fred sets at EDC Las Vegas in May and Glastonbury in June.

All of this hype also helps feed the model’s residency element. In the fall of 2023, Fred played five shows at London’s Alexandra Palace, three at Forrest Hills Stadium in New York and nine at Los Angeles’ Shrine Expo Hall – the most consecutive shows a single artist has ever performed at the latter two venues.

“I think we originally proposed five or six Shrines,” says Hancock, “and Fred came back and said eight, then 20 minutes later came back and said nine.” Fred announced the shows on his Instagram, and all of them sold out within days. (The final Shrine show was announced the day of.) The Forrest Hils run grossed $2.9 million and sold 42,300 tickets, while the Shrine shows grossed $2.2 million and sold 45,000 tickets, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore.

Still, says Hancock. “I’m not going to say that in the weeks and months leading up I wasn’t like, “What the f— are we doing?”

“Absolutely Huge Risk”

After all, Fred’s rapid growth appears to violate one of the key rules of agenting – when it comes to developing new talent, don’t skip steps. Most agents agree it’s not wise to go from night clubs to stadiums; long-term careers are built with the help of audiences who invest in artists. While hype tends to fade quickly, building a long-term fan base is a slow burn, and most of live music’s largest players are used to moving at a slower pace.

“I’ve been an agent a long time, and we’re used to doing things in a particular way, and the infrastructure around us is used to doing things in a particular way,” says Schroeder, “and at the front of it you’ve had Fred going, ‘I don’t care that that’s how it’s done. I want to do it differently.’”

A crucial element has thus been finding partners who are willing to take, says Schroeder, the “absolutely huge risk” inherent in announcing very big shows at the very last minute and many shows at the same venue all at once with no traditional marketing – “because your marketing means absolutely nothing, because it’s all him,” Schroeder adds. “And you’re going to have to cut a really tough deal, because he’s the hottest act in the world.”

The Wasserman teams also credits the “hive mind” of the entire Fred again.. team, which they say works more collaboratively than many artists they’ve seen. This all-hands-on deck mentality has involved Fred himself speaking with the mayor of Perth, the head of the NYPD and the San Francisco mayor’s office to help coax certain permissions for shows, like taking over control of the lights on San Francisco City Hall for the show. “He’s so confident in his vision for what he wants to do that he’s positive that if he can explain what he wants to do, ultimately they will let him,” says Shprits. “And ultimately that’s what happens.”

“Fred is changing how people see touring and how agents and promoters approach touring, and he’s unsettling a system that’s been in place for 50 or 60 years and turning it on its head,” Schroeder continues. “It’s a complete game changer that the industry isn’t talking about, because they can’t talk about it, because it’s so challenging to them and the status quo.”

Growing Influence – and Future Plans

But conversations on how other artists can replicate the model are currently happening, Schroeder says, “in every single planning meeting that you ever have about every artist.” It’s not a model most artists can pull off, although one can see the appeal, given that it cultivates incredible hype while also offering a solution to the longtime dilemma of artists, and particularly electronic artists, burning out with nonstop touring. “Fred wants a life,” says Schroeder. “He’s never going to do 250 shows a year, so it’s about making very, very special moments… This isn’t a model that’s appropriate for many artists, but it has completely shifted the game.”

But despite the success, the team still sees huge room for growth. Thus far Fred hasn’t played in Asia, has only done a handful of shows in South America, has done just two short runs through Europe and has focused his U.S. touring largely on the coasts. The latter is about to change; on Monday (August 5), he announced the Places We’ve Never Been Tour, which will follow the Sept. 6 release of his fourth studio album, ten days, and take him to stadiums and amphitheaters in the Midwest, northwest and southern U.S. and into Canada this September and October. (The run includes two-night stints in Denver, Seattle, East Troy, Wisconsin and Toronto.) On Instagram, Fred noted that additional dates will be added to this run – and given his track record, it also seems likely that pop-up shows will be incorporated into this and future runs as the touring footprints continues expanding.  

“I think Fred is enormously underplayed,” says Schroeder. “Are we going to be able to go to all these countries we haven’t been to? A million percent, and I can’t wait to do it.”