Touring
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Live Nation will pay its 5,000 employees and service crew working at its club venues a minimum of $20 per hour, company officials announced earlier today.
“Shows wouldn’t happen without the unsung heroes who work in the background to help support artists and fans,” Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino explained, announcing that the wage hike was an extension of Live Nation’s On the Road Again program, first rolled out in September with the endorsement of touring legend Willie Nelson.
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“In addition to developing artists, clubs also help industry professionals learn the ropes, and many of our promoters and venue managers worked their way up from smaller venues,” Rapino continued. “The live music industry is on track for years of growth and offers a great career path, and by increasing minimum wages we’re helping staff get an even stronger start as they begin their journey in live.”
The $20 per hour base pay is significantly higher than federal minimum wage, which currently sits at $7.50 an hour and serves as the defacto minimum wage in 30 states. Washington has the highest minimum wage in the U.S., starting at $15.74 per hour, followed by California at $15.50, Connecticut and Massachusetts at $15 and New York at $14.20.
“Moving forward, base pay for hourly club staff will start at $20/hour, while supervisor roles will start at $25/hour with opportunity for advancement in the company,” a press release announcing the wage rate explains. The increases will impact more than 5,000 crew members who serve as box office attendants, production crew, artist hospitality, guest services, ushers, parking attendants, cleaning crews, sustainability coordinators, and more.”
“Live Nation prides itself on providing advancement opportunities and developing leaders from within,” according to a release announcing the new minimum wage. “And at venues participating in the On The Road Again, nearly half of all crew members were elevated from part-time into full-time roles over the past two years.”
Company officials added that two other initiatives announced by Live Nation — a commitment that all headline and support acts playing Live Nation clubs would receive $1,500 in travel bonuses on top of nightly compensation and zero fees on band merch sold at participating LN venues, would be extended through 2024.
The September announcement did draw criticism from the National Independent Venue Association, which criticized the program saying “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.”
One NIVA member however, Thomas Cussins with Ineffable Music Group, which oversees 10 venues across California, said he welcomed the change, noting his company eliminated merch fees at the beginning of the year, noting it is an overall healthier ecosystem and you will actually do better in business because you are doing something that makes the process easier.”
P!nk played 10 shows, split between two separate tours, in October. In all, those dates grossed $51.2 million and sold 271,000 tickets, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. That’s enough to rule Billboard’s monthly Top Tours chart, marking her third month at No. 1 since the charts launched in February 2019.
P!nk began the month in San Diego, playing an Oct. 3 show at Snapdragon Stadium. After three more stadium shows on the Summer Carnival tour, she transitioned to the arena-focused Trustfall Tour, playing dates in California, Denver, and Kansas City. She’s the first artist to lead the Top Tours list via multiple tours. It’s rare enough for an artist to play two tours within a year of one another, but it does happen, per recent treks by Bad Bunny and Post Malone, among others. Both tours’ setlist, personnel and staging are relatively similar, though the Trustfall Tour puts an extra accent on its namesake album.
The October Summer Carnival shows earned $30.9 million and sold 190,000 tickets, while the six Trustfall shows brought in $20.2 million and 81,100 tickets. That means that on average, P!nk’s stadium dates averaged more than twice as much revenue as her arena concerts, at $7.7 million and $3.4 million, respectively.
The transition from stadiums to arenas, particularly in North America, makes sense as the weather shifts and outdoor concerts become less viable. Still, with active stadium tours in Oceania and South America, P!nk’s monthly gold medal in (primarily) arenas is significant.
In fact, P!nk is the first artist to crown the Top Tours chart while touring arenas in 2023 – though she did so with the help of four stadium performances. Trans-Siberian Orchestra staged the last arena win in December of last year. Before that, Bad Bunny was tops in February and March of 2022, before ruling the chart in stadiums later that year.
P!nk was No. 2 in August, when she and Beyoncé became the first women to ever rank Nos. 1-2 together. She previously topped the chart in March and July of 2019, while barreling toward the end of the Beautiful Trauma World Tour. That trek grossed $397.3 million and sold 3.1 million tickets, standing tall as the third highest-grossing tour by a woman in the Boxscore archives, behind Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour ($579.8 million in 2023) and Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet Tour ($407.7 million in 2008-09).
P!nk is one of just three woman-identifying acts to lead the Top Tours chart. She follows Beyoncé, who ran the ranking in four of the previous five months. Plus, the Spice Girls were No. 1 in June 2019. Both in terms of unique artists, and in total months, women have been No. 1 for less than 20% of the time since the monthly chart premiered.
Including the Summer Carnival Tour from earlier this year, and current through the Nov. 14 Trustfall show in Miami, P!nk has grossed $309.4 million and sold just over 2 million tickets in 2023.
Eight of P!nk’s October dates appear on the Top Boxscores chart, at No. 7 with $9 million from Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium on Oct. 7, and at No. 10 with $8.1 million from the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. on Oct. 5. Unsurprisingly, the stadium shows come up first, even above double-header arena engagements in San Francisco and Kansas City.
Top Boxscores is led by RBD. The Latin pop group grossed $19.5 million over four nights at Los Angeles’ BMO Stadium (Oct. 18-20, 22). Without any other reported shows in October, it’s enough to make the venue No. 1 on Top Stadiums.
Those dates power RBD’s No. 2 finish on Top Tours with $39.4 million overall, scoring a second consecutive month in the runner-up position. Through Nov. 19, the Soy Rebelde Tour has grossed $182.6 million and sold 1.1 million. It’ll likely cross $200 million before the end of the year, becoming the second tour by a Latin act to ever do so. Bad Bunny’s World’s Hottest Tour grossed $314.1 million last year.
Last month, RBD joined Beyoncé, Coldplay, Drake and Morgan Wallen in the top five, making the most genre-diverse top five ever. October’s ranking isn’t quite as spread-out – SZA and The Weeknd double up for R&B, and Luis Miguel adds more Latin star-power – but it does block rock, the most traditionally steady genre on the touring circuit, from the upper echelon altogether.
Paul McCartney, the Eagles, John Mayer and Depeche Mode follow at Nos. 6-9, giving rock its due in the top 10. Still, October marks only the third month since the charts’ 2019 beginning without a rock act in the top five. Previously, KISS was held off at No. 6 in April 2019, and Elton John in the same spot in October ’19.
The Top Tours chart is spiked with four co-headline billings. Enrique Iglesias, Pitbull & Ricky Martin kicked off The Trilogy Tour on Oct. 14, earning $20.9 million from the first eight shows. Iglesias had previously toured with Pitbull and Martin, though these are the first concerts for the trio as a group. Elsewhere, Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks grossed $10.5 million from one date at Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium, at No. 3 on Top Boxscores.
The other two co-headline pairs are blink-and-you’ll-miss-it team-ups. Ben Gibbard pulls double duty as the lead of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, each celebrating a 20th anniversary of landmark 2003 albums. Their collaborative – or split-personality – tour brought in $11.5 million in October, finishing with a total of $22.1 million since its September kick-off.
Finally, Ms. Lauryn Hill & The Fugees are No. 30 with $7.8 million and 61,500 tickets from five shows, showcasing Hill’s run of ‘90s R&B and hip-hop, alongside Wyclef Jean and Pras. While we noted that P!nk and Beyoncé achieved a first-time top-two finish for women only a couple months ago, Hill is part of an even-more-sparse Boxscore history: She is just the second female rap artist to ever appear on the chart, following Cardi B via her co-headline appearance with Bruno Mars on the inaugural February 2019 list.
Jason Aldean has extended his headlining Highway Desperado Tour into 2024, adding 24 cities to the trek, beginning May 18 at WinStar World Casino and Resort in Thackerville, Okla. The tour will also make stops in Philadelphia, Savannah and more, before wrapping with a show in Aldean’s original hometown of Macon, Ga., at the Macon […]
Live Nation officials are at an impasse with a powerful Senate subcommittee over demands that the concert promoter hand over confidential emails, contracts and memos detailing sensitive information about artist compensation.
Attorneys for Live Nation say they have already turned over more than 10,000 documents to investigators working for Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, or PSI, which Blumenthal chairs. Live Nation in-house counsel Dan Wall wrote on Live Nation’s corporate blog on Tuesday (Nov. 21) that the company is willing to hand over more sensitive documents if the PSI agrees to confidentiality protections to ensure the information is kept out of the public domain.
So far, Blumenthal has refused to agree to any restrictions requested by Live Nation and issued a subpoena for the confidential documents on Nov. 16. Live Nation officials plan to challenge the subpoena in court and are preparing for a lengthy legal battle to protect the confidentiality of its artist contracts if the two sides can’t reach an agreement.
“It is only in a subpoena enforcement action [before a federal judge] that Live Nation can assert its rights to protect the confidentiality of this information,” Wall wrote in the blog post.
Live Nation’s insistence on “confidentiality protections” is fairly routine, most legal experts agree, especially when it comes to court proceedings or investigations by government agencies. It’s also common practice for congressional investigators to agree to confidentiality rules while collecting evidence for congressional inquiries, but there’s no legal recourse if a member of Congress or staff discloses confidential information to the public.
News on Monday (Nov. 20) that Live Nation was being investigated by the powerful Department of Homeland Security and PSI surprised many music industry insiders. Created by President Harry Truman in 1941 to investigate wasteful defense spending after World War II, the PSI’s focus for much of its existence has been on matters of national security, including Korean War atrocities, the American Mafia’s influence on major labor unions and the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
Under Blumenthal’s leadership, the PSI has shifted its focus to consumer-oriented investigations, like the proposed merger of the PGA and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf league, equity within Medicare Advantage and sexual abuse in federal women’s prisons.
Blumenthal has also long been a critic of Live Nation and its 2010 merger with Ticketmaster, calling for the two companies to be split apart during a high-profile Senate hearing in January. According to a Nov. 16 letter from Blumenthal to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, the PSI officially began investigating Live Nation in March, in part for what Blumenthal calls “failure to combat artificially inflated demand fueled by bots in multiple, high-profile incidents, which resulted in consumers being charged exorbitant ticket prices.”
That description is the only public hint of what PSI is focusing on in its Live Nation investigation and doesn’t seem particularly damning of the concert promotion company. While bots, often operated by scalpers, do inflate demand for tickets — especially during high-profile onsales — and can lead to exorbitant ticket prices, it’s almost always Ticketmaster’s competitors in the secondary market who stand the most to gain.
Before Live Nation hands over any documents that contain “highly sensitive client information about artists, venues and others with whom we deal,” Wall wrote in the blog post, the company wants “binding confidentiality protections to prevent its misuse.”
Live Nation’s request might prove more difficult than the company’s leadership realizes, says Andrew Olmem, attorney and partner at Mayer Brown, which specializes in defending clients targeted by major investigations and congressional inquiries.
“Any documents provided to Congress are always vulnerable to public disclosure,” Olmem explains, noting that Congressional members and their staffers enjoy broad protections against criminal and civil liability under the U.S. Constitution’s speech and debate clause.
It is common for attorneys of clients targeted by Congressional inquiries to negotiate terms of documents’ use with investigators requesting the information, Olmem says. Many investigators, he adds, care deeply about reputational trust, knowing that violating confidentiality agreements with targets could make future targets less willing to voluntarily cooperate with document requests and significantly slow down investigations.
“But even if you secure such an agreement, members of Congress and their staffs can’t be liable for releasing confidential documents as part of their official legislative duties, such as submitting (the documents) into the congressional record or reading them on the House or Senate floors for the purpose of informing a legislative debate,” Olmem continues. “There are many circumstances in which members and their staff are incentivized to leak and do leak information for political purposes without consequences.”
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has rejected Madison Square Garden’s long-standing proposal to build a Sphere arena in London, less than two months after the company debuted its first Sphere project to critical acclaim in Las Vegas.
News of the rejection came by way of a letter from Khan to Anthony Hollingsworth, director of the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), which oversees London’s Olympic Park properties. On Nov. 6, Hollingsworth had written to Khan to inform him that “the local planning authority is minded to grant planning permission” for the Sphere project. In the letter dated Monday (Nov. 20), Khan explained to Hollingworth that after considering a 111-page report commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA) advising the mayor to reject the plan, he was now ordering the LLDC to “refuse planning permission” for the venue.
A statement from Madison Square Garden Entertainment officials said they were “disappointed in London’s decision” but added, “There are many forward-thinking cities that are eager to bring this technology to their communities. We will concentrate on those.”
A proposal for the venue was submitted in 2018, and Sphere London initially survived key votes by the city’s local planning authority. But with his letter, Khan has seemingly doomed the project.
The mayor said his main reason for rejecting the proposal was the impact he believed the venue would have on the surrounding area, writing that Sphere would “cause significant light intrusion resulting in significant harm to the outlook of neighbouring properties.”
He also said the size of the venue — 300 feet high and 400 feet wide — “would result in a bulky, unduly dominant” facility” that failed “to respect the character and appearance of this part of the town centre and the site’s wider setting.” Lastly, he criticized the venue’s high “energy intensive use,” which he says “does not achieve a high sustainability standard, and does not constitute good and sustainable design.”
“GLA officers have concluded that to grant permission would be contrary to the Development Plan,” adds Khan in the letter, citing a document that lays out the spatial development strategy in London for the next 20 to 25 years. “[It] would prejudice the implementation of the policies within the Development Plan relating to residential amenity, good design, and the conservation and enhancement of London’s heritage.”
The Sphere project had previously faced pushback from some local residents as well as AEG, which operates London’s O2 Arena, located just four miles from the proposed site of the venue. In January, after the London Legacy Development Corporation’s Planning Decisions Committee greenlit MSG Entertainment to initiate work on the project, AEG called on Khan to reject the project in a statement that read in part: “The advertising façade is at a wholly unprecedented scale for London and totally out of keeping with the surrounding area. The design was conceived for the heart of Las Vegas and has been transposed onto this east London site: it’s the wrong design, in the wrong location.”
Each year dozens of primary ticketing systems hit the market, and rarely do any last long enough to generate significant attention or revenue to survive. Lyte is the likely exception.
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That’s because founder and CEO Ant Taylor has a proven track record of innovating the ticketing space, starting with its Lyte ticket exchange allowing fans to sell tickets to one another, directly driving the price of tickets down on the secondary market. In his new bid, Taylor is launching the Lyte Returnable Ticket, which allows buyers to return their tickets for a refund, funded by Lyte, along with tools for fair market pricing and simplified ticket buying tools integrated into the platform.
“Event creators equipped with data intelligence and pricing solutions don’t just increase their revenue potential—they also pave the way for more fans to have richer, more transparent ticketing experiences,” says Taylor. “With the Lyte Returnable Ticket, we’re putting fans first by providing a world-class experience, and generating more demand for creators.”
Lyte is the first platform to upend the industry standard policy of no refunds and no cancellations for ticket purchases. Fans gain early access, dedicated support lines, and exclusive tickets unavailable to other ticket holders.
Lyte’s current ticketing partners includes Australia’s music and arts festival Lost Paradise, Madrid’s MadCool Festival, the Association for Volleyball Professionals Pro Tour, and event powerhouse ReedPop, owner of PAX and numerous Comic Con events.
Lyte’s demand-first ticketing platform is powered by SmartPricing and SmartFulfillment, a powerful ecommerce engine with a history of outpricing scalpers and giving event creators total control of the sales experience for fans. Lyte’s SmartPricing feature dynamically prices tickets at fair market rates.
SmartFulfillment introduces an intelligence to who gets tickets by empowering event creators to decide which fans are fulfilled first. Fulfillment logic can prioritize group orders, repeat buyers, local fans and more, giving true priority treatment to event creators’ best customers beyond stressful, finite early access windows. Lyte’s platform also includes a Subscribe and Request buying interface, enabling fans to request tickets months in advance to avoid painful on-sales. The new experience helps creators sell out earlier, with 95.7% of requested tickets converting to tickets sold.
A small percentage of Taylor Swift fans made huge profits reselling their Eras Tour tickets on sites like StubHub as professional scalpers mostly had to watch from the sidelines, according to data reviewed by Billboard.
The unusual dynamic underscores the challenges major tours face in combating scalpers — and the unintended consequences of efforts to keep tickets off the secondary market.
Swift’s touring team sought to keep tickets for the Eras Tour off the secondary market, according to Ticketmaster officials, and met with Ticketmaster executives to discuss how to best prevent mass ticket scalping. One option was that Ticketmaster could use its Safetix service to digitally lock tickets in place and prevent fans from transferring their tickets, effectively blocking all ticket buyers from reselling their tickets on sites like StubHub. But the downside was that, while many fans liked the idea of blocking scalpers, they didn’t like having their own tickets made non-transferable and found such restrictions inconvenient.
Ultimately, the tour decided to use Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan platform to screen out scalpers from the initial ticket sale, asking buyers to register in advance. Fans identified as legitimate fans were sent a code allowing them to buy tickets during the presale, which opened on Nov. 15, 2022, and subsequently crashed as millions of fans, scalpers and bots flooded the site.
Ticketmaster officials would later say the website meltdown was the result of a massive denial of service attack that disrupted the presale but didn’t defeat the security measures put in place to screen out scalpers from fans. As proof of its success, Ticketmaster announced that less than 5% of the approximately 5 million tickets sold for the tour ended up being listed on secondary markets.
It’s an impressive feat compared with other major tours in 2023 that took fewer steps to keep tickets off the secondary market and on average saw 20–30% of available tickets sold through StubHub.
While secondary tickets for tours like Beyonce’s and Coldplay’s were initially listed at major markups several times the face value, as more tickets moved through the secondary market prices dropped over time.
Swift’s Eras Tour saw the opposite effect. Eras tickets on StubHub were marked up 10 times face value, and then never dropped. The huge spike in price allowed resale sites, which collect a percentage of sales from both sellers and buyers, to make up the revenue it would have generated had they sold a higher volume of tickets, according to a StubHub rep.
Selling the tickets was easy, but getting them into the hands of fans proved difficult. StubHub noticed that orders for Eras tickets were experiencing an unusually high volume of delays and complaints from buyers. When company officials investigated the issue, they discovered that 83% of the Eras Tour tickets sold on its site were coming from new accounts with no record of past sales. The vast majority of those tickets are believed to have come from Swift fans, and they were making big bucks. A ticket with a face value under $150 could fetch $1,700, while tickets close to the stage were going for as high as $10,000.
While the outcome of the story is surprising, the fact that 83% of the available inventory of Eras Tour tickets on StubHub was sold by fans and not ticket brokers is a testament to how efficiently Swift and Ticketmaster were screening out professional scalpers, reducing their access to inventory to less than 1% of available tickets. While Swift would probably prefer that none of her tickets be flipped on the secondary market, at least she can take solace knowing that her fans, not professional scalpers, reaped most of the financial rewards.
Tate McRae wrapped the sold-out Are We Flying Tour in October, but she’s busier than ever. After launching her next cycle with “Greedy,” she will be performing this weekend (Nov. 18) on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, en route to the release of the album Think Later in December. Next year, McRae takes the new album on tour on the biggest stages of her career.
The Are We Flying Tour grossed $2.2 million and sold 60,000 tickets between Sept. 5 and Oct. 15, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. Expect those numbers to triple (and then some) next year, as McRae levels up from clubs and small theaters to boutique amphitheaters, and in one major case, an arena.
At its most extreme, McRae’s level-up expands her audience almost five times over. After selling out Dallas’ House of Blues at 1,674 tickets on Oct. 15, she’s scheduled to play the 8,000-capacity Toyota Music Factory in July. After playing House of Blues in Boston to a crowd of 2,705 fans on Sept. 16, she’ll play two nights at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway, to a potential combined crowd of more than 10,000. Similar jumps follow in Minneapolis, Nashville and San Francisco.
Of the 16 North American markets that line up with shows from her recent tour, McRae is playing a venue at least twice the size in 12. The only market with a dip in capacity is Los Angeles: She sold out two nights at the Hollywood Palladium (7,671 tickets on Oct. 4-5) and is scheduled to play the Greek Theatre (6,162 capacity) on July 11.
While McRae could move 10,000 tickets in Boston and at the Walmart Arkansas Music Pavilion in Rogers, Ark., two markets could break 15,000. In Toronto, she’ll play the Budweiser Stage, a 16,000-capacity amphitheater that has recently hosted sold-out concerts by Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, Janet Jackson and more. Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, it’s the only home-country show on the tour.
And after clearing two nights at The Rooftop at Pier 17 (7,494 tickets on Sept. 19-20), McRae is scheduled to close out the North American leg at New York’s Madison Square Garden, which has hosted A-list pop stars from Harry Styles to Madonna. Assuming she doesn’t play in-the-round, she could sell as many as 15,000 tickets.
With every show on McRae’s 2023 tour sold out, the upgrade in 2024 is warranted. There’s also her forthcoming album, already sporting the biggest single of her career. “Greedy” is No. 11 on the Nov. 18-dated Billboard Hot 100, bringing her closer to a top 10 hit than ever before. Previously, “You Broke Me First” slow-burned its way to No. 17. She has five other Hot 100 entries to her name, including collaborations with Khalid, Troye Sivan and Tiesto.
And while McRae can anticipate tripling her North American audience, and potentially expand her grosses further with accelerated demand, The Think Later World Tour will be her first major trip outside North America. The trek begins with 25 shows in Europe and ends with nine in Australia and New Zealand.
Without any Boxscore history on either continent, projections are tricky. But McRae’s international chart history bodes well for her live prospects. While “You Broke Me First” clawed its way to the top 20 of the Hot 100 in March of 2021, it got there five months sooner on the global stage, reaching No. 17 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. list in October 2020, and then peaking at No. 15 in November. Further, “Greedy” has spent its first eight weeks on the Global Excl. U.S. chart in the top 10, returning to its so-far high of No. 3 this week. On Billboard’s Hits of the World chart, “Greedy” already hit No. 1 in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, and the Netherlands. It’s a top 10 hit in 16 more territories.
Live Nation will promote the Think Later World Tour, with Presley Regier as support in North America, and charlieonafriday in Europe and Australia.
McRae, who is the latest Billboard cover star, is set to perform for the 2023 Billboard Music Awards, which streams Sunday (Nov. 19) at 8 p.m. ET via BBMAs.watch and the Billboard and the BBMAs’ social channels.
“I Remember Everything” hitmaker Zach Bryan is set to help launch the second year of the Bud Light Backyard Tour, headlining The Bud Light Backyard Tour Presents Zach Bryan during Super Bowl LVIII weekend, on Friday, Feb. 9, 2024, at the 3,000-capacity The Chelsea at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. The show will take place two days prior to Super Bowl LVIII at the city’s Allegiant Stadium.
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Leon Bridges, known for songs including “Coming Home” and “July,” will open the show.
Bryan, who grew up in a military family and served in the U.S. Navy for eight years, noted the event’s integration with the nonprofit Folds of Honor, which aids families of fallen and disabled service members and first responders.
”I’ve been drinking Bud Light since I was old enough to drink, and partnering with them now after all the songs I’ve written while swigging them is full circle for me,” Bryan said in statement. “When Bud Light asked if I would be involved, I didn’t hesitate after I learned the immense amount of support going into Folds of Honor, fallen service members, first responders’ families and loved ones. It is a privilege and honor to provide help in any way to veterans and all the people who make this country as great as it can possibly be.”
Since releasing his breakthrough top 10 Billboard Hot 100 song “Something in the Orange,” Bryan has skyrocketed into a stadium-headlining artist. This year, he earned his first Hot 100 No. 1 with the Kacey Musgraves duet “I Remember Everything” (which also spent seven weeks atop the Hot Country Songs chart), while his self-titled album vaulted to the top of the all-genre Billboard 200 albums chart.
“Anheuser-Busch and our brands have brought unparalleled experiences to football fans and to country music lovers for decades. We could not be more excited to partner with Zach Bryan and to showcase his all-star talent during Super Bowl LVIII weekend,” said Brendan Whitworth, CEO, Anheuser-Busch. “All of us at Anheuser-Busch are thrilled to work alongside Zach to bring positive experiences to country music fans and to local communities nationwide.“
“Bud Light has always been at the center of great music moments, we couldn’t be more excited to return to our country music roots by teaming up with Zach Bryan, who is one of the most compelling artists in country music right now,” said Todd Allen, VP of Marketing for Bud Light. “Bryan is known for connecting with and bringing fans together, and we can’t wait to put on a great show for fans ahead of the Super Bowl.”
Tickets to The Bud Light Backyard Tour Presents Zach Bryan will be on sale beginning Thursday (Nov. 16) at 3 p.m. ET, with tickets selling for $20. Future dates on the tour have yet to be announced, and the tour is separate from Bryan’s own Quittin’ Time Tour, which launches in March.
The 2024 Bud Light Backyard Tour builds upon previous events including Bud Light Super Bowl Music Fest, Bud Light Dive Bar Tour and the Bud Light Seltzer Sessions. Earlier this year, artists including Midland and OneRepublic were announced as part of the Bud Light Backyard Tour summer concert series. The slate of country and country-adjacent shows follow the recent controversy and backlash that ensued against Bud Light and its parent company Anheuser-Busch, after the company teamed with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who posted a video on social media featuring a customized can of Bud Light that Mulvaney received from the company.
Artists including Kid Rock and Travis Tritt spoke out against the brand, while Bryan offered his thoughts on the controversy and spoke out against Tritt, saying via X (formerly Twitter), “I just think insulting transgender people is completely wrong because we live in a country where can all just be who we want to be,” and later adding in comments that he has “family transitioning” and “blood to defend here.”
Last spring, executives at Onex, AEG’s private equity partner in facility management company ASM Global, notified AEG leadership of their plans to trigger a clause in their agreement that allowed Onex to sell its 35% stake in ASM. Under the terms of the deal, AEG could either buy out Onex or match competing offers.
AEG officials instead elected to get out too, and over about half a year worked with Onex to identify a buyer for all ASM Global. On Nov. 3, Onex and AEG jointly announced that Legends Hospitality was buying ASM, the country’s leading venue management company.
Onex CEO Bobby Le Blanc told investors on a Nov. 10 earnings call that the decision to sell its ASM ownership stake for $2.3 billion was prompted by the company’s rebound in value, quickly recovering in the post-pandemic period after seeing its value dramatically drop when concerts shut down from 2020-2021 due to COVID-19.
The final sale price would double what ASM Global was worth in 2019 when AEG and Onex merged their SMG facility management holdings to create the world’s largest facility manager, Le Blanc confirmed.
Still, AEG’s decision to sell surprised many in the touring industry who had followed the company’s growth in that space.
For one, the sale made AEG a much smaller company, reducing its global footprint from 350 facilities under management to just nine — all of which AEG either owns or partially owns. And unlike Onex, as the world’s second largest concert promoter, AEG was able to enjoy significant synergies from owning ASM that other companies could not. AEG could more easily book its touring shows at ASM-managed facilities, expand its AXS ticketing platform to ASM-managed venues and sell sponsorships through its global partnerships division.
AEG and Onex merged their facilities holdings 14 months after Onex acquired SMG, AEG’s longtime facilities rival. In so doing, ASM Global became the world’s largest venue management company, with little to no competition for potentially large lucrative government contracts. Facility management has long been a predictable contracts business, in which city and county governments would pay SMG or AEG a fee to manage publicly owned venues and split any profits the private companies helped generate.
Merging the industry’s two largest competitors into ASM Global gave Onex and AEG unprecedented scale in the capital-intensive space and access to lucrative contracts. But the honeymoon didn’t last long. Oak View Group, which was founded in 2015 by former AEG CEO Tim Leiweke — who made his own failed bid to buy SMG — began growing as a serious competitor, and peeled away a number of big-name management clients away including PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, the BOK Center in Tulsa and the sprawling McCormick Place convention center in Chicago. While the concert business’ post-pandemic boom has brought impressive profits, a source in facility management says that increased competition and inflation have been eating up ASM’s margins. Additionally, rising interest rates have made it difficult for firms like ASM to offer up capital investments in return for long-term management contracts, and much of the business’ growth was coming from new international venue projects, which were more costly to service.
Most recently, the bulk of AEG’s growth has been in its tour promotion business globally and through its theaters and clubs division. Since the end of the pandemic, both AEG and Live Nation have been looking to expand their network of smaller venues that they manage exclusively.
The company’s sweet spot is “locations with capacities of 1,500 to 5,000,” Rick Mueller, president of AEG Present North America, told Billboard last month. While most arena management deals do not include exclusive booking agreements because no single promoter can provide arenas enough content on their own to sustain a large facility, exclusively programming a club or theater can be much more profitable due to the leverage the contract holder has over other promoters wanting to book the venue, requiring promoters to cut them in on show deals. Now, AEG likely has more than an extra billion dollars to invest in this strategy, should it choose to do so.