Touring
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Of all Jimmy Buffett‘s accomplishments, from classic hits such as “Margaritaville” and “Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes” to building a billion-dollar travel-and-lifestyle empire, one of the biggest was an unprecedented, decades-long amphitheater deal in which he received a whopping 105% of the gross ticket receipts. This anti-mathematical trick stunned the concert business.
“Early in our careers, we would all whisper about Buffett’s rumored deal. Could he possibly be getting not just the lion’s share of the show profits, but all of the box-office gross? Or in some cases more than the box-office gross? What?” asks Fielding Logan, a Q Prime manager who represents country star Eric Church. “Like a mythical white whale, we’ve been chasing that deal ever since.”
How did Buffett, who died Friday at 76, pull off this legendary deal, which several concert-industry sources confirm was in place through his very last amphitheater tours?
In the late 1990s, when SFX Entertainment bought out promoters around the country, the new concert-business giant offered touring stars huge payments to anchor its summer-amphitheater lineup — and avoid losing them to rival companies. Back then, artists were asking — and receiving — 90% of the net ticket sales after expenses, leaving 10% to the promoter.
Buffett took this trend to a new level on his annual summer runs, which drew more than 3.9 million fans and grossed $215.4 million over 196 shows in the 2000s, according to Billboard Boxscore. “Here’s the thing about Jimmy: 90-10 wasn’t good enough for him. He started demanding 105%! All of the gate plus 5% of the gross,” Barry Fey, the late Denver promoter who competed with SFX at the end of his career, wrote in his 2011 book Backstage Past.
Promoters agreed, knowing they could take a cut of ancillary revenues, like parking, food and ticket service charges and — especially with Buffett’s hard-partying Parrotheads — alcohol. “It worked out for me and the other promoters because of beer sales,” Fey wrote.
In 2000, Clear Channel Communications bought SFX, then spun off the concert-promotion business into a new company known as Live Nation — which maintained his deal, sources say. So, for example, in 2005, when Buffett’s show at Arrowhead Pond (now the Honda Center) in Anaheim, Calif., made $1.13 million at the box office, according to Billboard Boxscore, Buffett would have taken home roughly $1.136 million.
Buffett, who toured through spring 2023, set a financial precedent that younger stars, such as country singer Kenny Chesney, were able to replicate, according to sources. “Jimmy was a key artist in establishing and solidifying the amphitheater model,” says Brock Holt, a longtime Nashville promoter who is now a touring consultant, “and opened the doors for a higher financial return for artists.”
“He was the only one who had the leverage to do it. He toured perennially and did the same amount of business each time. The Parrotheads came out. It was a yearly ritual,” says Randy Phillips, former CEO of promoter AEG Live, and now a consultant for Silver Lake, an investment group whose portfolio includes Madison Square Garden Sports and Endeavor. “He was the anchor to Live Nation’s schedule so it was really critical. He used that to negotiate.”
Buffett’s longtime touring reps, including Live Nation, attorney Joel Katz and agent Howard Rose, did not respond to requests for comment.
Tucked into the side of Southern California’s new SoFi Stadium is a Palm Springs-inspired hideaway dreamt up by actor David Arquette and nightlife company The h.wood Group. The field level suite – called Bootsy Bellows at SoFi Stadium – is a truncated version of the West Hollywood bar by the same name (Arquette’s mother’s name) and more stylish than most sporting spaces. Decked out in velvet furniture, breezeblocks and gold-trimming, the suite is an elevated experience for NFL fans watching home teams LA Rams and Chargers, but the operators are stepping up their game for major concerts.
“No one’s really experienced something like that with the decor and everything, so it’s been very special,” The h.wood Group co-founder John Terzian tells Billboard about the reception to the suite. “If you can make people feel warm in a stadium setting, feel like they’re kind of in a living room, you’ve done a pretty good job.”
This summer alone, SoFi Stadium has hosted Twice, Morgan Wallen and Metallica, in addition to six nights of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour that just wrapped up a star-studded three nights. The h.wood Group has taken the growing demand for stadium concerts and not only expanded their presence at SoFi, but also made improvements over the past three years.
Timothy Norris
“The first season, you could only order like a burger, chicken tenders and fries – standard stadium food. People were paying $10,000 for a table to come to a game, they don’t really just want to eat chicken tenders,” explains The h.wood Group co-founder Brian Toll. Going forward the stadium agreed to allow Bootsy Bellows to take advanced orders to deliver additional offerings like sushi platters and Tomahawk steaks.
The h.wood Group also expanded their seating options for concerts. Instead of being limited to their large suite, Bootsy Bellows has been able to take over more space along the sidelines. For concerts, Terzian says, they can run an entire sideline of suites and, depending on the show, add seats on the field for Bootsy Bellows designed pods. “We’ve extended [the space] so that you have this incredible experience where you have your own little section with a couch and a high top [tables] essentially on the field itself,” he says. “That was a massive thing that we did from last year to this year. It’s all about viewing experiences and things that we keep improving.”
Wonho Lee
The ultimate appeal of the Bootsy suites, according to Terzian, is the level of accommodation. In a stadium that can hold up to 100,000 fans, The h.wood Group tries to simplify an overwhelming experience with an exclusive entrance, dedicated staff to get patrons to the suite and private bathrooms, as well as in suite bars and servers. The difference “has been our attention to handling any sort of talent that comes in,” says Terzian. “The whole idea is when you’re in there, you have your own bar, there’s a DJ going, there aren’t people asking for pictures. You have fun whether it’s with family or friends. It’s supposed to be a safe space.”
Organizers behind the Electric Zoo festival on Randalls Island in New York canceled the Friday (Sept. 1) opening day because Department of Parks & Recreation officials would not issue the permits needed to stage the city’s largest EDM festival, promoters behind the event have confirmed with Billboard.
On Friday, when event organizers with Brooklyn venue company and concert promoter Avant Gardner canceled the festival’s first day, they blamed “global supply chain disruptions” in a statement, saying, “These unexpected delays have prevented us from completing the construction of the main stage in time for Day 1.” Organizers did not provide further specifics. A rep for the festival told Billboard on Tuesday (Sept. 5) that the application for the permits had been made well in advance, adding that the permit issue was resolved when the festival finally opened on Saturday.
Touring industry sources, however, say it was due to organizers’ failure to pay vendors from last year’s festival that led to a shortage of experienced concert professionals willing to work at this year’s event. Specifically, the main festival stage caused the most issues early Friday during an inspection of the site hours before the event was scheduled to open. City officials demanded the festival staff fix several safety and security issues before the festival could open. It took organizers more than 24 hours to fix the issues, leading to the festival opening two hours late on Saturday.
The problems did not stop there, though. Making matters worse, many fans did not receive their festival wristbands and tickets in the mail as promised, forcing attendees to queue up for hours to retrieve their tickets. And then on Sunday, organizers were forced to shut down access to the festival after the site reached maximum capacity. Some fans who reached the festival site after the gates were closed decided to jump fences or run through security checkpoints as a group, joining other ticket-holding fans in mad dashes past security staff. Hoping to deter fans from boarding ferries to Randalls Island, festival organizers announced on X (formerly Twitter) that the event had reached maximum capacity for “unknown reasons” and promised “everyone denied entry today will be issued a refund.”
The problems experienced at Electric Zoo mirror ongoing issues at the Avante Gardner venue. Created by owner and creative director Jürgen “Billy” Bildstein in 2017, Avante Gardner is known as a favorite for fans and acts because of its size and flexible space. To state regulators however, the 6,000-capacity venue has been the subject of ongoing legal disputes and investigations by agencies like the New York State Liquor Authority over overcrowding and drug use since 2016, according to court records. On Aug. 22, liquor authority chair and commissioner Lily Fan testified that Avant Gardner “couldn’t care less what people do in their establishment so long as they made money.”
The price tag for this year’s chaotic festival — including refund costs to fans who didn’t make it in, as well as paying Friday night performers The Chainsmokers, Excision and Kx5 their full fees — could total $25 million, according to former insiders at SFX Entertainment, which owned the festival from 2013 to 2022.
Electric Zoo was originally launched in 2009 by founders Mike Bindra and Laura De Palma and grew to be the East Coast’s biggest electronic festival, always taking place over Labor Day weekend. In June 2022, Bildstein led the purchase of Electric Zoo from LiveStyle, a holding company created in the aftermath of SFX Entertainment’s bankruptcy in 2015. Bildstein agreed to pay $15 million for the festival property, Billboard reported at the time, paying about half the money in cash and while agreeing to a convertible debt note to cover the unpaid portion of the purchase.
Avant Gardner staged the 2022 festival and racked up debt with a number of talent agencies and vendors, sources tell Billboard, leading to delays building out the festival site in 2023 that were partially to blame for the permit delays.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams suggested the city will launch an investigation into Electric Zoo’s organizers for going beyond the festival’s approved capacity. The New York Police Department estimated event organizers oversold the festival’s 42,500-person capacity limit by 7,000 tickets on Sunday.
“It’s unfortunate that the organizers wanted to turn our city into a zoo, and we were not going to allow that to happen,” Adams said during an NYPD briefing on Tuesday. “And we will be dealing with them in the next few days based on their behavior and actions.”
From Diana Ross & Kendrick Lamar surprises to an A-list fan section, here are the most electrifying moments from Bey’s 9/4 B’Day show.
When Reneé Rapp’s manager and talent agent began routing the singer-actress’ debut 2023 tour, they opted to break a key rule in the touring business – always play the smaller venues before playing the larger venues.
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It’s a rule WME agent Ben Totis normally agreed with, and yet, Totis and Rapp’s manager Adam Mersel also believed Rapp had developed a special connection with fans as one of four stars on Mindy Kaling’s hit HBO series The Sex Lives of College Girls playing Leighton, an au-pair raised queer sorority princess attending a fictional liberal arts college in Vermont. The popular show created a huge audience for Rapp, especially with Gen Z adult females, and served as a perfect segue for Rapp’s pursuit of a music career. In July, Rapp confirmed she was leaving the show as it entered its third season.
“Original music and pop music has always been her passion,” Mersel said. “Now’s she getting back into the studio, making music and really taking a swing at it.”
While her popularity and name recognition are certainly a major advantage in live touring, the adage in the industry has long been that all artists — even high-profile new artists like Olivia Rodrigo in 2021 and in 2018 — should build their touring business slowly and deliberately, making sure the artist is ready and the early audiences are invested.
“One of the age-old rules of this business is don’t skip steps,” booking agent veteran Tom Windish with Wasserman Music told Billboard last month. Windish, who counts Eilish, Lorde and Alt-J as clients explains “if you sold 500 tickets the last time, maybe you’ll try to sell 1,000 this time. You’re not just bumping up to 2,000 because you have this data that’s indicating there might be more [demand].”
Rapp is not following that strategy. The North Carolina native put tickets on sale for the LA Greek Theatre (5,900 capacity) on Sept. 30 and the Anthem in Washington DC (6,000 capacity) on Oct. 27 two months before she had even released her debut record Snow Angel on Aug. 18 on Interscope.
As Totis and Mersel had hoped, both shows quickly sold out. She quickly sold out the famed Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the Mission Ballroom in Denver and the Roadrunner in Boston (despite penning a breakup song on her new album called “I Hate Boston”). In total, Rapp has sold out 22 of the 30 North America dates on her tour, which begins Sept. 15 at the Bayou Music Center in Houston.
Mersel and Totis said there were plenty of reasons to think Rapp could be the exception to the “no skipping steps” rule. While the 23-year-old was new to the record and touring business, she had been involved in musical theater from an early age – and won best actress at the 2018 National High School Musical Theatre Awards (the Jimmy Awards).
“She grew up singing in North Carolina and that is always what she wanted to do with her life,” Mersel explains. “Musical theater sort of was by accident. She was running around really trying to hustle and make it, especially through high school.”
In December, Rapp released her EP and booked some teaser shows including the Troubador in LA and Le Poisson Rouge in New York “just to get her out there in front of her fans and get her on stage for the first time,” Totis explained.
“They were all just supposed to be small shows, but in New York we had 10,000 people sign up for waitlist because the tickets went so quickly,” Totis said, leading her team to add two more New York shows that same month.
Rapp is planning a four-show “take over” in New York starting Nov. 3 – playing two Terminal Five dates along with Brooklyn’s Avante Gardner and Kings Theater. After New York she heads to Europe where she has sold out five of 15 booked shows in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium before closing out her tour with back-to-back sold out shows March 1 at the famed Hammersmith Apollo in London and a March 4 show at 3Olympia in Dublin.
As for Snow Angel, it debuted at an impressive No. 10 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, the biggest U.S. sales debut for a debut female pop album in 2023
“The music’s great and she’s extremely talented. I don’t think anyone is concerned about her being comfortable on stage knowing where she came from,” Totis said.
The first day of the Electric Zoo Festival on New York’s Randall’s Island was abruptly canceled hours before it was set to start, organizers announced Friday (Sept. 1) on X (formerly Twitter).
In the statement, organizers cited “global supply chain issues” as the cause of the cancellation and promised to reopen Saturday. Acts scheduled to play Friday include Kx5, Galantis, The Chainsmokers, Excision and many more.
“Despite our tireless efforts and round-the-clock commitment, we have made the painful decision to cancel the first day of Electric Zoo,” organizers wrote. “This year has presented unparalleled challenges for everyone. The global supply chain disruptions have impacted industries worldwide, and, sadly, our beloved festival has not been immune. These unexpected delays have prevented us from completing the construction of the main stage in time for Day 1.”
Fans who bought tickets for Friday will receive a refund. Fans with multiday tickets “will receive credit for one of the days” to be applied to a future event. The festival will now open at 1 p.m. on Saturday, and “we look forward to uniting with all of you to celebrate life and music, and dance through the sunset with the iconic backdrop of the New York skyline, right in the heart of New York City,” organizers wrote.
“While words cannot fully express the depth of our remorse about Day 1, please know that this decision was not made lightly,” organizers wrote. “We ask for your forgiveness and understanding during this challenging time. We are profoundly sorry for all the inconvenience and disappointment this will cause.”
Dear Electric Zoo Family,It is with a broken heart that we deeply regret to inform you that, despite our tireless efforts and round-the-clock commitment, we have made the painful decision to cancel the first day of Electric Zoo.This year has presented unparalleled challenges… pic.twitter.com/m5tunuANZY— Electric Zoo Festival (@ElectricZooNY) September 1, 2023
The festival’s social media pages announced the news just after 11:30 a.m. ET Friday, hours before doors for the event were set to open at 3 p.m.
Made Events, launched by Long Island City husband-wife team Mike Bindra and Laura De Palm and creators of the long-running Electric Zoo festival, was sold to an investment group that owns the Avant Gardner nightclub and venue in Brooklyn in July 2022 for $15 million.
In 2014, Made Event was acquired by Bob Sillerman‘s electronic dance music conglomerate SFX, which filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and eventually landed in the hands of senior creditor Andrew Axelrod. SFX was rebranded as LiveStyle by former chief executive Randy Phillips, who managed the festival properties for Axelrod and led efforts to sell off SFX’s assets to new buyers. Made Event was the last U.S. festival property held by LiveStyle to be sold.
A brawl broke out over the use of porta potties during a Morgan Wallen concert on Aug. 30 at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, Penn. But no arrests were made, the city’s department of public safety said. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news A now-viral clip shows two […]
There is perhaps no hotter Latin music tour going on in the U.S. right now than RBD’s Soy Rebelde tour, which will ultimately have the Mexican pop group play 54 arena and stadium dates across the United States, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico by the end of the year.
The highly-anticipated reunion tour — RBD disbanded in 2008 and have not played together since — is the brainchild of Guillermo Rosas, the Mexican-born manager and promoter who produced RBD’s international tours nearly two decades ago. Rosas — who also manages Chiquis Rivera, Estemán and Edith Márquez, among others — has been doggedly working for nearly a decade to reunite the group made up of Anahí Puente, Dulce Maria Espinoza, Christian Chavez, Maite Perroni and Christopher von Uckermann (the sixth member, Alfonso Herrera, didn’t join the reunion tour). The task was titanic, not only because RBD’s celebrity members all have careers and families of their own, but also because the rights to the RBD name were so entangled that the group’s music wasn’t even available on streaming platforms until 2020.
It was Rosas who insisted on clearing those rights and now has signed an equal partnership with the group. At the heart of his persistence is RBD’s previous success: between Dec. 2, 2005 and Dec. 21, 2008, RBD sold 1.5 million tickets across the 150 shows reported to Billboard Boxscore. The group also landed three albums at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, and a No. 15 on the Billboard 200. Of its 10 entries on Hot Latin Songs, five were top 10s, and “Ser o Parecer” topped the chart.
Still, the reunion has exceeded expectations. “We weren’t really counting on selling out so fast,” admits Rosas, who initially had routed 28 dates, which mushroomed minutes after tickets went on sale, with 1.5 tickets sold in the first 24 hours, according to Live Nation.
It doesn’t stop there. RBD is also releasing new music — a first track, “Cerquita de ti,” came out in August — and more dates are being planned for 2024. In between RBD’s two sold-out Madison Square Garden dates (August 31 and September 1), Rosas earns the title of Billboard‘s Executive of the Week — and explains how it all went down.
I know you’ve been actively working to reunite these very different, and very busy, people for nearly a decade now. Once you finally got everyone in agreement about wanting to tour together, how did you finally lock it in?
We had been talking for at least six months about all the different situations, possibilities, conditions and circumstances that we needed to deal with. Obviously, there were a lot of family logistics because of kids and their schools. It was a lot of leg work to put together the ideal master plan that worked for everyone. Once that was done, and we had the schedule with holds, we had a dinner at Anahi’s home in Mexico City and we had the contracts in hand and ready in case everybody felt like signing right there. It’s a partnership, and no one makes more than anybody else, so it was the ideal situation. We talked about it for the last time over dinner, everyone was making their final statements. And then I said, “Well, everybody seems to be on board, let’s sign right now.” They said, “Oh my God, for real?” And I said, “Yes, let’s make it happen.” And we took the contracts out and signed. We filmed everything with our cellphones, and that’s how we announced the tour. We posted that clip on social media. It was very exciting.
On a personal level, what was going through your head after so many years of working on this?
I was in disbelief. I had in my hands the tour of the dreams of so many people. The first person I called was my husband. The second person that I called was Hans [Schafer, senior vp global touring for Live Nation]. And the third person I called was Jesus Lopez [the chairman/CEO of Universal Latin/Iberian Peninsula, with whom Rosas has a joint venture]. He had been so supportive with me over the years.
I understand the initial dates sold out in hours. Were you prepared to scale?
We had a routing ready but that routing was 28 shows, and now we’re doing 54. We weren’t planning for that. I had a few second holds, just in case, in places where the venues were smaller. But we weren’t really counting on selling out so fast and doing so many nights in one city. But when we went on sale, I had never experienced that in my life. First, because I had never been during an actual on-sale inside the Live Nation building, with 30 people connected from different places, including Ticketmaster and CAA. It’s a huge conference room with big screens and you can see everything as it happens, and how they release the on-sales in each location according to time zones. For example, we started with Madison Square Garden in New York, where I’m sitting right now. We had 12,000 tickets available and there were like 80,000 people connected online to buy, and you can see the average transaction. And every transaction had an average of four tickets. We called Madison Square Garden right away and booked the second night. Those nights went in like 40 minutes and there were so many people left out.
Why didn’t you do Yankee Stadium in New York, for example?
Because the very first time we came in 2016, Mexican pop wasn’t as big, so we decided on MSG. And sales started to go like that everywhere. In Los Angeles, for example, the BMO was gone in 15 minutes. So we added another date, and that was also gone. Within two hours, four shows were completely gone. We could have kept on adding shows but obviously the band couldn’t do more than four shows per week. That was our limit.
Where were you creatively when you went on sale?
I had a set list proposed and we also had a pre-design that doesn’t look like anything it does today. It was great and it was big, but not as big as it is now. The production grew probably three to four times.
Obviously, this will be big business. But personally, how important is it for you to have put this together?
This was not about money for anyone. Obviously, we like the business and the business needed to make sense. But that has never been strong enough to make this happen. Throughout the years, we’ve gotten multi-million dollar offers to do all kinds of things with RBD. And it just had never been considered. None of them collectively ever considered anything. For us, it’s a dream come true. We are all very spiritual and very energy-oriented souls, and we just knew we needed to gift this to the fans and to themselves. Because I think all five of them see it as a gift to their hearts. The universe giving them the possibility to do this twice.
Why did you decide to go with Live Nation versus another promoter?
Among all the different promoters across that world that I’ve worked with, I really liked their transparency, and obviously Hans has the vision for this group that he’s shared with me for years. So in that sense, working with someone like Hans who understands where we want to take this and really believed in it was important. For example, independent promoters would tell me, “Oh, let’s not risk a stadium. Alfonso isn’t in the group, let’s do another venue.” But Hans never doubted it, so I felt very comfortable.
Are you announcing new dates for 2024?
We’re hoping to. We said we’d let the tour run for a couple of weeks, and we have a potential plan for 2024, and then we’ll be discussing it in the next couple of weeks. We don’t have a solid plan, but that’s how RBD is. It’s always a surprise. But I hope we do. Especially because there are so many fans in places like Spain, Eastern Europe, Chile and Argentina. We’re only visiting four countries out of 19 we did back then, so there is a lot to cover to make the world happy.
Although all the group members are stars in their own right, none of them have really been on stage in 15 years. Were you worried?
It’s something they have in their DNA. It’s amazing. They get on a stage and they turn it on so easily. They’re natural stars and they’ve been around cameras so long that it’s so natural to them. Also, there is something about them that clicks when they’re together. They all have the magic on their own, but when they’re all on stage it’s an explosion. And people love it.
When thousands of fans couldn’t get tickets for megastar Taylor Swift’s summer stadium tour, some diehards paid upwards of 70 times face value to see their favorite artist in person — an outrage that prompted Congressional hearings and bills in state legislatures to better protect consumers.
After 10 months, Swift’s U.S. tour is finished, but so are most of the meaningful reforms consumer advocates and industry groups had hoped to pass this year. A proposal has so far failed to advance in the U.S. Senate. Legislation in Colorado was vetoed by the Democratic governor at the urging of some consumer groups.
In California, home to iconic recording studios like Capitol Records and influential clubs like the Whiskey A Go Go and Hollywood Bowl, what started as a robust array of legislation has been watered down to a single bill banning hidden fees, something New York and Connecticut have done and most major industry players have already committed to do on their own.
“That’s it? That’s all that California, the leading state in the nation on so many consumer protection issues, that’s all we’re going to do?” said Robert Herrell, executive director of the Consumer Federation of California. “That’s an embarrassment. It’s not enough.”
The slow progress over changing how tickets should be sold and resold highlights not just the strength of industry opposition, but the regulatory difficulties in a market upended by technology. Gone are the days of standing in line at a box office to find out what seats were available and how much they cost.
Today, nearly all tickets are sold online and downloaded to phones or other devices. Consumers often don’t know how much they will pay until just before they click the purchase button and fees and charges, which can sometimes be almost as much as the ticket price, are applied.
Venues often don’t say how many seats are available for a specific event, according to consumer groups, but instead release tickets in batches, making consumers spend more out of the mistaken fear they’ll miss out.
Some bad actors use software to quickly bulk-buy tickets for resale at much higher prices. They will even sell tickets before they have them, a practice known as “speculative ticketing” that consumer groups say is dangerous and does not guarantee the ticket. Some go so far as to mimic venue websites so consumers believe they are buying tickets directly.
Sharp disagreements among venues, ticket sellers, consumer groups and artists have muddied what may seemingly straightforward consumer rights issues.
Artists and venues want to restrict how fans can resell tickets, an attempt to crack down on “the secondary market to sweep the inventory, inflate the price and price gouge our fans,” said Jordan Bromley, who sits on the board of the Music Artist Coalition, an advocacy group representing artists.
Consumer groups argue buyers can do what they want with their tickets, including upselling. That disagreement is partly why Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a bill earlier this year, despite the bill also containing consumer-friendly policies like banning hidden fees, price increases and speculative ticket sales.
In California, consumer groups have mostly focused their ire on Live Nation Entertainment, the company that owns Ticketmaster and controls the bulk of ticket sales and venues in the U.S. for touring music artists. But the debate is spreading to artists, major men’s professional sports teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco 49ers, and independent venues with capacity for 1,000 people or fewer, including more than 600 in California alone.
Most people are being vocal about “how this is an attempt to shoot at Ticketmaster and Live Nation,” said Julia Heath, president of the California chapter of the National Independent Venue Association. “What’s actually happening is they are aiming at them, but they are hitting everybody else, too.”
The biggest disagreement was over whether to allow teams, venues and artists to restrict how fans could resell tickets they purchased.
A bill to allow teams, venues and artists restrict how fans can resell tickets passed the Senate but failed to pass the Assembly this year after drawing concerns from consumer groups. State Sen. Anna Caballero, the bill’s author, promised to hold a hearing on the issue once the Legislature adjourns.
A bill by Assemblymember Laura Friedman would ban venues and artists from restricting resales. The measure also would have required venues to disclose how many tickets were available for an event to prevent “holdbacks.” Ultimately, the bill was changed to remove both of those provisions after attracting strong industry opposition.
“It’s been very difficult. It had a very strong and concerted effort from the very beginning lobby against this bill,” said Friedman, who added she was disappointed the bill was not stronger.
Industry groups also are disappointed. Heath, who represents independent venues, called it a “do-nothing bill.”
“A lot of the things we took issue with are gone, but we also see it as a missed opportunity,” she said. “There are issues in the ticketing world right now that need to be addressed.”
Not everyone is disappointed. Jenn Engstrom, state director for the California Public Interest Research Group, said while it would be great to solve all of those problems, banning hidden fees is still a win for consumers.
“I’m just all about incremental change,” she said. “This is a good first step.”
Accomplished talent buyers and entertainment executives Jenn Yacoubian and Stacy Vee have been appointed executive vps at Goldenvoice, the AEG Presents-owned concert and festival promoter behind marquee events like Coachella, Stagecoach, Just Like Heaven and more. Vee and Yacoubian will oversee the booking department, headquartered at Goldenvoice’s offices in Los Angeles, while continuing to act […]