Touring
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One of the country’s busiest nightclub markets is getting an addition, with a new club called Substance set to open in Las Vegas on July 12.
The venue will be booked by Las Vegas-based entertainment promotion/production company Rvltn Events, which is partnering with dance behemoth Insomniac Events and the Latin-focused Altura for artist bookings.
The space opens July 12 with a set from house duo Walker & Royce. The summer calendar also includes dance producers Kshmr, Boombox Cartel and Crankdat, with additional artist announcements forthcoming. Saturday nights at the club will focus on Latin music, with the venue also set to feature genres including regional Mexican, rock, R&B, reggae and more.
A single-story, 18,000-square foot venue on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, Substance is located inside the Neonopolis entertainment complex. The space will have an industrial aesthetic, a large-scale LED installation and graffiti and other art by visual artist Gear Duran.
Rvltn is operated by partners Marcel Correa and Joe Borusiewicz, who are also the owners of Substance. The Rvltn Events family also includes Altura Presents, the house and techno-focused Elation and the New Year’s Eve event Jackpot.
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“Growing up in Las Vegas, we’ve always loved our great city and its incredible potential to become a thriving local music scene,” Correa and Borusiewicz said in a joint statement. “We’ve attended countless shows, festivals and events here, and our passion has always been about serving our fellow locals.
“As promoters, working with various venues throughout the city has given us deep insight into what works and what doesn’t — from guest experience and operations to overall strategy. No one enjoys paying $30 for parking or navigating a casino just to attend an event. People dislike strict dress codes, long lines for drinks and bathrooms, poor sound quality and gouging fees. At Substance, our goal is to create an entertainment destination that addresses these issues, incorporating everything we’d want as event producers and local music fans. We can’t wait to unveil our most exciting venture to date.”
Steve Sayer recently celebrated his 10th anniversary at The O2, the AEG Europe-owned and operated London arena that consistently ranks among the world’s top-grossing concert venues. In 2023, the 21,000-capacity building grossed $220 million from 188 shows, placing it second only to Madison Square Garden (MSG), which grossed $223 million, on Billboard’s Top Venues chart (15,001-plus capacity). In terms of total attendance, The O2 is a global leader, welcoming a record 2.4 million people through its doors last year (600,000 more than MSG), according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, justifying its claim to the title of “world’s most popular music venue.”
This year looks to be just as busy, with The O2 recently hosting sellout shows by Bring Me the Horizon, Take That, Depeche Mode and The 1975 as well as the three-day Country 2 Country (C2C) festival and 2024 Brit Awards. Upcoming bookings include J Balvin, Doja Cat, Justin Timberlake, Janet Jackson, four shows by Liam Gallagher and six shows by The Killers.
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“We’re grossing huge sums for the artists, selling an incredible number of tickets and we continue to invest and innovate to make sure the fans are having an amazing time,” says Sayer, who joined The O2 in 2014 as commercial director before being promoted to VP/GM of the arena four years later.
In addition to overseeing the day-to-day management of the venue, which first opened in 2007, Sayer is responsible for operations at the wider O2 complex, which also contains a second 2,800-capacity venue, a 210,000 square-foot designer shopping outlet, a 19-screen cinema and more than 30 bars and restaurants. “We’re certainly not resting on our laurels,” says Sayer. “We want to continue to be the front runner.”
Here, Sayer discusses dynamic ticketing, the rapidly-increasing costs of putting on shows, his opposition to a proposed Sphere venue in London and more.
Steve Sayer
Courtesy Photo
This year marks your 10th anniversary at The O2. What have been some of the biggest highlights and challenges in that time?
There have been so many highlights and quite a few challenges. It sounds cliched now, but a global pandemic and the shutting down of the live industry for 18 months was an incredible challenge for everybody. We’ve got nearly 200 [staff] that I’m responsible for and I guess what I’m most proud of is leading the team through that period, minimizing a very small number of redundancies and probably coming out stronger at the other end than we’ve ever been.
How has the pandemic changed the live and arena business?
Ticket-buying behavior has definitely changed in terms of late buying. There’s also been a definite shift in the number of shows that are getting booked within weeks and months of the show playing out. Pre-pandemic we would have really good visibility 12 to 18 months [ahead] in terms of what’s in the diary. We still have that to a large degree, but 20% of our shows are now short lead and that’s been a real shift.
What do you regard as some of the biggest issues facing the live music business?
One of them is sustainability. We’re acutely aware of our responsibilities and we collaborate with all our stakeholders right across the industry and we’re pushing hard on that. It would be remiss of me not to mention general cost inflation, which is impacting every part of the live ecosystem. Our energy costs are significantly higher than they were four years ago, and they are only going one way. Wage inflation has gone through the roof: double-digit growth in the last couple of years. The cost of putting on shows and running venues is significantly higher than it has ever been and that is a challenge to try and manage and mitigate that. Another challenge is the [health of] the broader live music ecosystem. While The O2 is having incredible success, we know the U.K. grassroots sector is having a tougher time. We’re cognizant of the importance of a vibrant live ecosystem that fuels sustained success for all of us.
Last month, a Parliamentary committee called for a new voluntary tax to be added to arena and stadium tickets sold in the United Kingdom to support struggling grassroots music venues. Is that something The O2 supports?
It’s something we’ve been talking within the industry about. One thing that we have got to understand as far as a levy [is concerned] is just what is legally permissible when you start thinking about competition rules and unilaterally adding levies to the price of a ticket. But it is certainly something that we’re actively exploring and it’s something that we’re talking about within our own business.
Unlike in the United States, the U.K. live music market has so far been generally resistant to the introduction of dynamic ticketing, whereby prices are set according to demand. Can you see that changing?
My sense is that you are going to see more dynamic pricing in the U.K. It will be an interesting challenge. It’s well understood in Europe that in travel and hotels, you pay a different price based on demand. We haven’t had that in the [U.K.] entertainment or the live sector or even really in sport, but obviously, it is commonplace in the U.S. and North America. My sense is that on certain shows and certain artists, it will start to come in. It’s just a question of over what time period and to what extent. Are we talking about a relatively small number of ringfenced tickets? Or are we talking about the entire manifest? That’s the big question.
AEG strongly opposed proposals by MSG to build a Sphere concert arena in East London, not far from where The O2 is based. Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSGE), which is owned by James Dolan, withdrew those plans in January following opposition from London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Was that a big win for The O2?
The thing with the Sphere that we’ve always been quite open about is — it’s not about competition. Competition is healthy. We are constantly looking at what other venues, festivals and other industries are doing and what we can learn. There was a lot of local opposition to the Sphere [in London]. Local residents didn’t want the light pollution. Las Vegas is a very different city and a completely different environment to East London. All along we said, “We don’t oppose competition in the live music industry.” But that was the wrong scheme in the wrong location in our view and that was what the [London] Mayor also concluded.
Are there lessons to be learned from the high-profile teething problems at the Oak View Group-owned Co-op Live Arena in Manchester, the U.K.’s biggest concert venue, which finally opened last month after a series of costly delays and cancellations? And what impact do you think the arrival of a major new U.K. arena will have on the wider business?
Building and opening any venue of scale presents various challenges and only underpins the importance of meticulous planning, thorough preparation and engagement with key stakeholders throughout the process, right up to opening day. There’s lots that we can always learn from new venues but we’re not resting on our laurels. We’re going to continue to invest in The O2. This year we’re upgrading our Wi-Fi. We’re starting a two-year program to renovate all our backstage. We’re continuing to look at what we can do on the sustainability front, so back-of-house we’re operating as efficiently as we can be. It’s a good time to be in the industry because while there are challenges, undoubtedly the market forecasts are strong.
Live music experts are anticipating the antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Live Nation to take years to resolve, given the wide scope of the claims against the concert giant and the various stakeholders in the live music ecosystem.
“It is going to take a couple of years, at least,” Lee Hepner, senior counsel of anti-monopoly group the American Economic Liberties Project, said at the NIVA 2024 conference in New Orleans on Tuesday (June 4). The conference is put on by the National Independent Venue Association, which formed in 2020 to secure federal funding from the government during the pandemic. The upside, for Hepner and other speakers on the panel called Ticket Tyranny: The Unseen Grip of Market Dominance, is the “massive potential in restructuring the industry.”
Ant Taylor, founder and CEO of ticketing competitor Lyte, agreed on Tuesday saying, “Given how big the scope [of the DOJ lawsuit] is, it is going to be challenging to see it through… What excites me about this moment is the opportunity we have as an ecosystem to look — not just at Live Nation — but to look at the way we do business together and the conditions in which Live Nation has thrived.”
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Specifically, Taylor added, “What’s the business model of ticketing and why, for 40 years, has there been so little innovation around it?”
Ticketmaster has been a dominate force in the ticketing business for decades — its 2010 merger with Live Nation only strengthened its position in the U.S. market. The DOJ lawsuit claims that Live Nation-Ticketmaster has “unlawfully maintained monopolies in several concert promotions and primary ticketing markets and engaged in other exclusionary conduct affecting live concert venues, including arenas and amphitheaters.” A major concern for the DOJ and the group of 30 states that jointly filed the suit on May 23 is Live Nation’s “flywheel model,” which the DOJ describes as a “self-reinforcing business model that captures fees and revenue from concert fans and sponsorship, uses that revenue to lock up artists to exclusive promotion deals, and then uses its powerful cache of live content to sign venues into long term exclusive ticketing deals, thereby starting the cycle all over again.”
Unlike the consent decree that Live Nation has been under since the merger, which was designed to prevent the company from abusing its position, Kevin Erickson, director of Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization Future of Music Coalition, told the audience that he believes the DOJ lawsuit is focusing on the correct parties impacted by the alleged monopoly: the artists, venues and fans.
“Even with the best intentions, a consent decree is inadequate to address the potential for harm,” Erickson said. “It shifts the enforcement burden onto the people who have the least amount of power. It forces artists and artist representatives and venue folks to monitor for violations of antitrust law.”
Hepner explained that Future of Music Coalition has been collecting such complaints against Live Nation for years and encouraged those in the room to reach out on how to connect with the DOJ with additional complaints as the lawsuit works its way through the justice system.
If the DOJ’s lawsuit is successful and Live Nation is forced to divest Ticketmaster, the panelists expressed hope that without the promoter’s financial backing, competition in ticketing will flourish, allow for innovation and end exclusive ticketing contracts often used by Ticketmaster and other major ticketers.
Panelist Gary Witt, president and CEO of Pabst Theater Group, stressed the importance of eliminating Ticketmaster’s dominance due to growing customer dissatisfaction. “It is not about your experience when the customer comes through the door. It is not about the artist’s experience when they come backstage. It’s about the initial experience of buying a ticket,” Witt said to the audience.
The primary ticketing market has become “a closed market and allows for zero innovation,” Witt said, adding, “We have an industry to save here.”
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Ice Spice is hitting the road this summer in support of her debut album. On the heels of revealing Y2K‘s release date, The Bronx native announced the Y2K! World Tour.
On Wednesday (June 5), Ice unwrapped the details on her first global outing, which kicks off in Denmark on July 4. She’ll remain in Europe for a handful of shows and festival dates in Poland, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, the U.K. and more.
The “Deli” rapper then returns stateside where she’ll begin the North American leg on July 30 in Washington, D.C., with fellow New York City resident and Slizzy CEO Cash Cobain set to perform as her opening act.
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The amphitheater headlining trek will continue with dates in NYC, Boston, Detroit, Toronto, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston and Atlanta, and wraps up in Miami Beach on Aug. 31.
Pre-sale tickets are currently on sale for Citi cardmembers, while the general public will have their chance starting on Friday (June 7) at 10 a.m. local time. There are also various VIP packages available, and some come with perks that include a meet-and-greet photo op with Ice Spice.
The 24-year-old made it official when she announced this morning that her highly anticipated debut album, Y2K, will be arriving on July 26. “HIIIII >.< Y2K ☆ THE ALBUM WILL BE DROPPING JULY 26TH !!!! pre-save the link in my bio now ;**,” she wrote to social media. In a salute to her NYC roots, Ice Spice also shared the graffiti-filled cover art for the project, which finds the rapper standing outside a subway station next to a fire hydrant, with Y2K spray painted in hot pink on a trash can. Ice Spice unleashed her first EP Like..? in January 2023, which received a deluxe last summer, and ended up peaking at No. 15 on the Billboard 200. Find all of the Y2K! World Tour dates below.
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Singer-songwriter Benson Boone has signed with WME for global representation in all areas. Boone gained popularity with the release of his viral hit “Beautiful Things” in January. The track has been an international hit, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 for seven weeks and leading the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart for eight […]
Artists at country singer-songwriter Ashley McBryde’s level of popularity can sell $16,000 to $20,000 worth of T-shirts and hoodies when they play 1,500-capacity venues. Layne Weber, director of merchandising and fan engagement for McBryde’s management company, Q Prime, says some venues took a 20% to 25% cut of her merchandise sales during her spring tour — which is standard in the industry but, he says, exorbitant for services rendered at many clubs. “I went to a show the other night and the merch table was next to the bar,” Weber says. “The merch seller was having to compete with the bartender who’s trying to sell the drinks. That was a venue taking 20% of the sales.”
Weber’s complaints, which many artists and their representatives share, are at the center of a long-running live-industry debate over merch percentages. For decades, artists, venues and promoters have haggled behind the scenes over percentages as part of every show contract, but they contend the stakes are now much higher. “Ever since we’ve come back from COVID, the merch numbers have gone through the roof for all genres of music,” says Crom Tidwell, owner of Crom Tidwell Merchandising in Nashville. And with so much money at stake, artists want a larger percentage of their own profits.
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“Bands are getting ripped off,” says Barry Drinkwater, executive chairman of Global Merchandising Services, which handles merch for top metal acts such as Iron Maiden and Guns N’ Roses. He adds that the venue’s cut particularly hurts small acts, which tour on slimmer margins and often operate their own merch tables. “They need the money that gets them food, gets them to the next show,” he says. “Then the promoter wants to charge them 20% of the gross.”
Live Nation has expressed sympathy for this point of view. Last fall, trumpeting an endorsement from Willie Nelson, the world’s biggest concert promoter unveiled its On the Road Again program, which eliminates merch-selling fees for artists at its clubs and provides a per diem of $1,500 in gas and travel cash for artists, among other benefits. Earlier this year, Live Nation president/CEO Michael Rapino told Billboard that the program had “already helped support 3,000 developing artists,” and a statement that Live Nation issued on May 22 said, “We’re incredibly proud of how On the Road Again is supporting thousands of artists and their crews, with 100% merch profits, $1,500 cash nightly for gas and travel costs and more. Developing artists are the future of live music, and we’re proud to keep this program rolling strong.”
Complaints over merch fees are not limited to clubs, however. At arenas, stadiums and other large venues, in-house concessions staff take over merch sales, and the 20% to 25% cut goes largely to these services. And at least one venue takes an even bigger chunk. Drinkwater says New York’s Madison Square Garden (MSG) charges artists 30% of their merch sales, plus credit card fees. He also notes that percentages can be higher in the United Kingdom. (A representative for the Garden declined to comment.)
Whether artists are handling their own merch tables or relying on in-house staffers, managers say they’re often unsatisfied with the services they get, given the cost.
“I don’t feel they’re worth 25% of the revenue,” says Rick Sales, who manages Slayer, Ghost, Mastodon and others. “It’s not good value for the money spent.”
Venue reps counter that long before fans step into their buildings, they negotiate deals with artists, including merch percentages. Not surprisingly, those with leverage receive favorable terms. “Every live performance is a negotiation,” a concert-business source says. “The band doesn’t like the merch percentage, find somewhere else to play.” Venue consultant Brock Jones, the former GM of Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, adds: “At the end of the day, venues have got to make money, too — electricity isn’t free, all that space isn’t free. Venues have to recoup those expenses. An 80/20 merch deal is absolutely fair when the venue is selling.”
Tidwell agrees that it’s a different story at arenas, which often are required to staff union employees at fixed salaries. “You’ve got to have a crew to facilitate the sales,” he says. “Somebody has to pay for the help.” But he also contends that artists complaining about high venue percentages in small venues have a point: “What are you doing for your 20%? You’re just providing a lobby and a table.”
Some small venues, still reeling from the pandemic, have expressed concern that Live Nation’s On the Road Again program might pressure them into following suit and giving up a crucial revenue source. “Temporary measures may appear to help artists in the short run but actually can squeeze out independent venues, which provide the lifeblood of many artists on thin margins,” the National Independent Venue Association said in a statement in September.
Arenas and stadiums are where the big merch money is. On her The Eras Tour last year, Taylor Swift made a reported $200 million on T-shirts and other goods sold at shows. In its 2023 financial report, Live Nation claimed “double-digit growth” in merch and concessions at the arenas it owns or operates, such as the Moody Center in Austin. Notably, the On the Road Again program does not apply to large venues. Drinkwater says the standard 20% to 25% cut applies and, like MSG, sometimes venues pass on credit card fees (usually 5%) to the artist. “We try with our artists to beat this down,” he says. “Sometimes we get a reduction if we can do big sales.”
As music consumers increasingly demand sustainable options from businesses across the industry, AEG has struck a partnership that will bring a full-time reusable cup program to Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena and Peacock Theater, the company announced Tuesday (June 4). In collaboration with reusable serveware company r.World, which produces reusable items for large-scale gatherings, the venues […]