The sound of crickets is the last thing a band wants to hear. But in the footprint of the demolished Starwood Amphitheatre in Antioch, you can hear them by the thousands. As nature slowly retakes the grounds, insects have replaced the masses who once cheered for the likes of Tom Petty and Guns N' Roses.
Starting in the 1980s, similar amphitheaters (or "sheds") started popping up like live-music Walmarts on the edges of American cities, playing host each summer to traveling festivals like Ozzfest, Warped Tour and Lilith Fair. Countless Tennesseans saw their first concerts under the pavilion at Starwood, from Aerosmith with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts in 1990 to No Doubt and Weezer in 1997.
But after a disappointing 2006 season, concert-promotions giant Live Nation — which owned Starwood and scores of other amphitheaters — sold the venue to Vastland Realty Group. The new owner leveled all structures on the 65-acre site in 2007 and detonated the main-stage pavilion and dressing room structure. The economy tanked, alas, in 2008 — and so did Vastland's plans to develop "Starwood Commons," a proposed mixed-use development of retail spots and townhouses on the site.
The grounds have sat untouched ever since. Last October, Newport Beach, Calif.-based Orange Murfreesboro LLC purchased the property for $5.5 million in a foreclosure sale. At press time, the company hadn't announced any plans for the property.
One thing it won't have is live music. Today, all that remains of the pavilion's pillars are twisted shards of wrought iron. Birdsong echoes across the old seating area — surprisingly, the natural acoustics are still exceptional — and broken glass litters the ground. Where an auxiliary stage hosted performances from a pre-fame Paramore and Muse in 2004, Google Earth shows only tire-track doughnuts.
The entrance to the vacant former site of Starwood Amphitheatre
The vacant sprawl is visible from Murfreesboro Pike — unguarded, barely remembered. And the record industry that once supported such old-model amphitheaters isn't looking much better. According to Billboard, album sales hit an all-time low last month at just 3.97 million for the last week of August. That's the first time weekly sales have dropped below 4 million since Nielsen SoundScan started tracking data back in 1991.
But you know who's not fazed by all this doom and gloom? Concert promoters.
The live music industry is currently booming. Live Nation's gross annual income — $1.44 billion in 2013, according to The Wall Street Journal's Market Watch — has more than doubled since 2009. (It helps that the entertainment giant owns Ticketmaster, the biggest ticketing company in the business.) Granted, most of that income is driven by sexagenarian classic-rock and pop acts. But when they all lay down their axes, there'll be more festivals than ever before, more hybrid food-and-music events to lure entertainment dollars away from pro sports and megaplex tickets.
After interviewing more than a dozen bands, club owners, bookers, agents and promoters — some of whom spoke on the record, others on condition of anonymity to protect their working relationships — one conclusion is clear: The concert industry is far from dead. It is drastically changing, and Nashville's live music scene is a microcosm for many of those changes.
Not all of them, however, will be for the better.
Starwood was one of four sheds Live Nation put up for sale in 2007, around the time it shut down its Nashville offices. Two are still standing, while another sits in weed-covered ruins outside Columbus, Ohio. The 37,000-capacity Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wis. — one of rock 'n' roll's most hallowed amphitheaters, where Stevie Ray Vaughan performed hours before his fatal helicopter crash — was recently put on the market for $8.44 million.
"Looking forward, we're probably gonna see fewer acts capable of selling 20,000 tickets, certainly on a consistent basis," says Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief and CEO of concert-industry trade publication Pollstar. "Right now, the concert business tends to be fueled by these dinosaurs from the Baby Boom era that don't require a new record to go out and sell out an arena."
Trouble is, the dinosaurs aren't a renewable resource. There are fewer artists with long-running careers and lots of hits, says Steve Greene, senior talent buyer at Knoxville-based AC Entertainment, which co-promotes and books Bonnaroo along with a host of club, theater and arena-level shows year-round.
"As those heritage acts fall off, I think you're definitely going to see more and more Starwoods," Greene says — meaning more sheds cluttering suburbs with grassy ruins.
And yet there are signs Live Nation might have given up too soon on Music City.
Nashville has changed dramatically in the past seven years. And the changes are just beginning. According to the World Health Organization's Global Health Observatory, 54 percent of the world's population now lives in urban areas. Here at home, the Metropolitan Planning Organization projects that the greater Nashville area's population will grow at a rate of 26,730 carpetbaggers per year over the next decade. And the city has a growing number of world-class restaurants to feed them, fashion designers to clothe them, events to entertain them — and in Music City style, bands and clubs to cater to them.
Reflecting that renaissance, Nashville has gone in a remarkably short time from a notoriously terrible concert market — as recently as 2007, the Scene dedicated an entire cover story to the topic — to one of the Southeast's hottest live music destinations.
"[It's the] right time, right place for being in business in Nashville," Greene says, noting that AC is actually expanding its offices here. "We're doing more shows in Nashville because there's more shows [to do] in Nashville. ... It is such a good market that people actually want to play — the volume has increased across the board."
In large part, Greene says, that's because Nashville is attracting the right kind of crowd to suit him and his concert-industry colleagues.
"It's insane the growth projections in Nashville," Greene explains. "It's crazy. And it's the right kind of growth, too. It's the demographic that you want for a vibrant, music-supporting, culture-supporting city. ... The shows that we talk about that didn't used to come to Nashville, they come to Nashville now."
Great news for local musicians, club owners and concert promoters, right? Not necessarily. While Nashville's pool of potential concertgoers is growing, its glut of venues, bands, live-music intermediaries and touring acts is growing even faster. As a result, Music City's various artists, agents, managers and promoters are competing in a newly crowded market. Complicating matters is that the concert industry is facing an overall balkanization — a severe rescaling, fracturing and discarding of old standards of music-career success.
Tomorrow's version of superstardom, in other words, means topping out at the Ryman instead of Bridgestone Arena. It means becoming part of a massive musical middle class of club-level headliners making a working-stiff living — a patchwork of decent "hard-ticket" headlining guarantees, better paydays for corporate cash-grabs, and lucrative appearances at destination festivals like Bonnaroo, Coachella and Lollapalooza. It means acknowledging that the arena-act age is over, with one notable exception — Nashville's bread and butter, country music.
"In the country music world there's probably more arena headliners today than there have ever been," Bongiovanni notes. "And the good news is, they're very young. ... In country music there's a whole new youth movement, with Eric Church and Brantley Gilbert."
But everyone else is getting crowded into the middle. In 2014 there are more bands than ever, creating an artistic infestation that's daunting even to insiders. Between first-class club paydays, overpaying sponsorship gigs and festivals, groups have more ways to make money on the road than ever before. The tradeoff is that they have to tour twice as hard, and touring is expensive. At the same time, booking agents and promoters — who've taken on the artist development role once handled by record-label A&R reps — must populate rosters with freshman bands, road-ready or not.
The concert industry does have a major advantage over the recording industry: No one can digitize the experience of seeing the performer in the flesh, feeling the immediate give-and-take between artist and audience — yet. Hearing a performer live in the same room was the first music medium to be promoted, and it'll be the last one downloaded.
Even so, the music business's refocus on live music is causing tremors at the club level. Now some of the industry's biggest players are moving in on turf once ceded to local promoters and bookers, resulting in a strange new ecosystem. One where the minnows of concert promotion are sometimes dining with the sharks — when they're not on the menu.
Mark Mosley
Abiding by a dress code of jeans, T-shirt, hoodie and black shades, Mark Mosley looks more like a guy who'd play in a rock band than a guy who's booked them for 10 years. And yet if you've seen any "Warped Tour band" on the Rocketown or Exit/In stage in the past decade, chances are Mosley's company-of-one Music City Booking was behind the show. From his perch, he's witnessed Nashville's concert-market evolution firsthand.
"You had to, like, beg bands to play here," Mosley says at his virtual headquarters in Dose Coffee & Tea on Murphy Road. "[Now] I feel like all eyes are on Nashville. Like it's a giant target, I think, for a lot of companies wanting to come here. ... Back then, all the big guys didn't want to do club shows. They were doing, like, Bridgestone Arena shows. They were doing, like, Ryman shows. And now you see AEG's name on fliers for Cannery Ballroom or Mercy Lounge or Exit/In."
AEG, the concert industry's distant No. 2 to runaway rival Live Nation, owns and operates enormo-domes like L.A.'s Staples Center. With growing frequency, however, it has turned its attention to club land, the realm of independent promoters like Mosley and clubs like Mercy Lounge.
Companies such as AEG and Live Nation will routinely buy an artist's entire tour. The big dogs can afford not to sweat the turnout for shows in smaller markets like Nashville — they've got many more dates to make a profit, while a local promoter's fortunes hinge on that one show.
"They overpay," says one booking agent whose roster includes a host of mid-level club and theater headliners. "I have many specific examples of where Live Nation venues have tried to pay me twice what the guarantees are at other venues." But in rock 'n' roll, where coolness is king — and the concert world, where connection and experience drive artists' relationships with their fans — value isn't as simple as the bottom line.
"Nine times out of 10, you go with the venue [you want] or you have a shit show," the agent says, explaining that Live Nation applies its cookie-cutter amphitheater model — economically driven by ticketing fees and food and beverage sales — indiscriminately to clubs it manages and chains it owns. But while it can write big checks without blinking, it can't offer the priceless vibe of a room like New York City's Bowery Ballroom with the same ease. It'll use one of its own venues instead — and as a result, the booker says, "The show will be under-attended, and the ticket price will be too high." Emails to a Live Nation representative for comment were not returned by press time.
The stakes are much higher for smaller promoters, forced to compete more with the cash flow of corporate competitors.
"The thing is, for me, being a truly independent promoter, when I lose money, I'm losing my money," Mosley says. Luckily for him, AEG often times teams up with indie promoters, calling on them to co-promote club-level indie shows. It's a live-and-let-live consolation.
"It is better to make 50 percent than to make zero percent," Mosley explains. "So if I know that, for example, AEG is submitting an offer for a show, I'll just reach out and co-promote the show with them instead of trying to compete with them, because I can't compete with AEG. I can't."
The dynamic among Nashville's various promoters isn't always competitive. A partnership between an independent promoter and a big entity like AEG or AC is often mutually beneficial — it reduces risk for the little guy, while allowing the big companies to use a local promoter's connections and resources.
"We do a lot with AEG and NS2," says Todd Ohlhauser, co-owner of Mercy Lounge and Cannery Ballroom. "They want to be in the club business because they want to build [artists] to the theater and the arena level, and they're taking the risk on the guarantees and we're making money off the bar. We love working with outside promoters." Those connections can also pay off. In 2004, Mercy Lounge and Live Nation booked Brit-rock superstars Muse at the club. Nine years later, the band held an after-party there — for its second Bridgestone Arena gig.
Whether those bonds will hold, however, is about to be tested. The competition is heating up.
"It is a constant conversation with everyone I know who is an independent club owner or business owner in Nashville: 'When is Live Nation coming [back]?' " Mosley says. "It's not a question of if, it's when."
There's been much speculation that Live Nation will open a House of Blues in downtown Nashville. One development isn't just rumor, though: Last month Live Nation won its bid to operate Nashville's forthcoming riverfront amphitheater, in partnership with Red Light Management, the Nashville Predators and the Nashville Symphony. Significantly smaller than the Starwood property, with an expected capacity of 6,800, it's slated to open next year.
"The amphitheater they're [building] in Nashville is the right size," Bongiovanni says. "That's really the future — it's not the 20,000 seaters, it's the 8,000-12,000-seat venues, especially if they're centrally located like that one is."
But one large-scale promoter tells the Scene that only proves how much business has dwindled.
"I think that greed has taken over the music industry," the promoter says. "The pie is actually shrinking, so everybody's fighting over little slivers."
"AEG and Live Nation — they can go head to head and fight over stuff, but all that does is drive the cost of everything up, which ups the risk of everything," Mosley says. "Which means when they lose, they lose bigger — which, that's tough to sustain."
The little guys have one factor in their favor: the loyalties they've cultivated at the club level. While the corporate biggies can dangle golden carrots in front of smaller, cash-strapped bands, indie promoters have solid relationships with managers and bookers from pushing ground-level bands at dive bars, before they have hard-ticket value.
"The only reason why I am able to continue doing what I do is because of the relationships I maintain," Mosley says. He books shows he knows don't have a huge draw, he says, as an investment in getting in on the ground floor — not just with bands, but also with booking agents, who reward the risk when the band becomes valuable. One agent who handles many local shows is Stu Walker at The Agency Group, the industry's largest independent booking agency.
"Independent promoters in general, [I] try to work with them, just because they're really the lifeblood of connecting from city to city, and they'll be the ones that stick with you," Walker says.
Yet his role in this system is changing too. He explains that as rock stardom becomes more scarce and record-label staffs shrink, he and other live-music professionals have taken an increasingly proactive role in artist development. For agents, that means signing more "baby bands" fresh out of the incubator.
"You can't really depend on a label to develop them," another agent says, "so that falls on management. A lot of times a young band may not even have a manager, so who's going to develop them?"
"There's so much competition on the promoters' level that you can't sit and wait to cherry-pick [artists] once they're worth 2,000 tickets," one major Nashville concert promoter says. "The agent, the manager and the competition is deeming that you've got to get in at 500 tickets and grow them to 2,000 tickets."
Does aligning early with clout-wielding agents sometimes inflate a fledgling band's guarantee? Sometimes.
"As soon as you have an agent, you have a [better] chance of getting a guarantee," says AC Entertainment's Greene. "If you're out there booking yourself, it's a lot harder than if you're being booked by an agent, or an agency, that books lots of other bands that are much bigger than you."
Musicians getting paid more to perform — how could that be a bad thing? The problem is, as younger and younger artists vie for niche indie-rock stardom, the field of bands is becoming a fogbank.
"I feel like there are too many bands," says booking agent Walker. "It dilutes the ability to get people to pay attention. It decreases the amount of time and energy promoters have to promote your specific band that you want them to promote, because they have to do it with a thousand others. ... To me, Nashville is just inundated with clubs."
"There's so many times where there's two or three shows that are really in the same genre in one night," veteran Nashville promoter and talent booker Rick Whetsel says. "And that's gotta make it tough for anybody to make any money." After all, the competition for nightlife dollars isn't just club shows.
"There's also just more shit [to do]," Mosley says. "There's just a lot to compete with."
"People have so many more options on how to spend their money now," says Mercy Lounge's Ohlhauser. "You have a new fancy restaurant opening every week. ... Before, it was us, Exit/In and 12th & Porter — 10 years ago that was it. There was, like, two nice restaurants 10 years ago."
To compete, Mercy Lounge — part of a four-club complex that hosts corporate events and weddings multiple nights a week — is forced to creatively counter-program. "We did metal," Ohlhauser says. "Our big shows were metal this summer because all the indie-rock bands are playing Bonnaroo." The club's bottom line has risen steadily each year, but so have operational expenses in manpower, marketing and booking.
"Every year it seems like you work harder and harder and harder to make a slight increase," Ohlhauser says. "Nobody's getting rich owning a music venue in Nashville."
With more festivals and more shows, bands have more opportunities to make money on the road. But touring is expensive, and without big labels providing their tour support, artists have to gamble on whether spending their own money will pay off. Financially, starting a touring band is like opening a restaurant — without a benefactor, most fail.
Crowd at Live on the Green
"I feel like what's happening with venues and what's happening with promoters and how you book shows is directly connected to how people are consuming music," says Keegan DeWitt. His band, Nashville electro-pop outfit Wild Cub, has the momentum of a major up-and-comer. They appeared on Conan. They played to more than 10,000 people at Live on the Green, then headlined The Stone Fox's free Nashville Outlines event two days later. The video for their song "Thunder Clatter" — a single from 2012's Youth — has more than 600,000 YouTube views.
Yet though they've headlined at top-tier clubs like L.A.'s 771-capacity El Rey Theatre, they still haven't headlined a hard-ticket event — i.e., a paid show at a club — in their hometown.
"It's harder and harder to maintain people's attention and their investment in an entire set and an entire night of music," DeWitt says. "More and more as I talk to people, they have iPhones that are filled with single songs or bands rather than entire records. ... It feels like it's more and more impossible to encounter an entire record and therefore invest in a band's entire existence, and that's what I feel like it's going to take to get people to come to more than one show by a band. Or even one show that's just a headlining show."
Wild Cub travels to what DeWitt describes as "a ton" of radio events — free events where the band plays for nothing in hopes of cracking a station's playlist. After expenses, he says, the band is frequently several thousand dollars in the red for each event. A manager who handles another popular local band says his act is in a similar spot, offsetting travel costs with things like five-figure private frat parties.
"[We] did Live on the Green for way less than we'd get playing our own show at the Cannery," he says. "[The group is] doing a national radio campaign now; probably by the end of the month we'll have done seven radio festivals in smaller markets where they don't pay you anything. ... Since we've signed up to play those events, we're magically added to the rotation. So you've gotta balance these different things, like getting overpaid for some sort of soft-ticket event versus not getting paid to promote radio and all this other shit."
"Most club-level bands lose money when they tour," Walker says. "So I don't know how they make money, to be honest, unless it's [through song] placements, sponsorships — all the stuff that comes from the non-music world; brands that want to be associated with music. The touring part — you're lucky if you come out in the black.
"But you have to get out there. It's kind of a necessary evil. If you're a young band and you're trying to get discovered, you definitely have to tour, because your fans want to see you, and that's the way you get better as a live band. It's necessary, but I don't think anybody's getting rich off of it."
DeWitt confirms Walker's suspicions: "I couldn't tell you how we would make money as a band without some sort of limited sync licensing — and endless, infinite touring until the end of time."
One thing that can benefit artists, independent venues and independent promoters alike is partnering with corporate entities for co-promoted shows. Through its concert series Sound Select, energy-drink colossus Red Bull sponsors a show each month in Nashville. Recent shows have included Diarrhea Planet at Exit/In and Caitlin Rose at The Basement for a $3 ticket — if attendees RSVP online, that is.
Red Bull Sound Select books its shows by contracting curators — in Nashville's case, former Next Big Nashville/SoundLand honcho Jason Moon Wilkins, Basement and Grimey's founder Mike Grimes and Marathon Music Works and Exit/In owner Chris Cobb — to select headlining talent and place developing artists on the undercard.
"The touring industry is so different than it was," one agent tells the Scene. "The amount of money you can make now on touring, that just did not exist back [in the '90s]. ... Those Red Bull things are great. I've definitely had acts play things like that where they were overpaid, and it was good for everybody. ... And when I've done stuff like that, I've tried to push it towards one of the independent venues."
What does a big company like Red Bull stand to gain by getting into the live-event business? Associating their brand with hip young talent, for one thing. For another: data.
"Buyer data is what it is, really," says Jesse Baker of Exit/In and Marathon Music Works. "It's emails. The brand association is obviously huge. ... Facebook accounts, stuff like that. That's the whole reason for the RSVP thing."
"We were doing a bunch of festivals and different events, and we saw sponsorship becoming a bigger and bigger piece of what we were doing — to the point where it went from being a nice ancillary piece of business to the point where without sponsorship, live music would be dead," Whetsel says. Seeing where the business was headed, he shifted his efforts from his local promotion company Great Big Shows to working for G7 Marketing, which handles sponsorship.
"It just was an easier ride, for me, to start working with these brands and deepening my relationship with these brands and working with them to their events, as well as help them do deals with artists that want to go out there with their tour sponsorships," he says. "I think for the most part, the sponsors help the promoters."
Plus, with G7, Whetsel routinely books superstars like Metallica, Green Day, Bon Jovi and Red Hot Chili Peppers for corporate events — sometimes even private parties with arena-sized crowds. "You'd be surprised at how many shows happen in Nashville that you have no idea because they're corporate," he explains. "It's a huge, huge economy. Massive economy."
With album sales no longer functioning as a primary revenue stream for up-and-coming bands, concerns over that kind of "selling out" are a luxury. Usually they'll dance with the devil and take the outsized paydays out of necessity.
"Before, [bands] would never ever dream of playing a corporate event, because it would affect their credibility, and it would look like they sold out," Whetsel says. "Now, these guys are all playing corporate events."
Or they're playing festivals. Since Monterey Pop in 1967, outdoor rock and pop festivals have been a mythic part of American counterculture. In the '90s, these cultural and musical bacchanals took the form of mass-niche-oriented, amphitheater-ready traveling festivals, from Lilith Fair to Ozzfest.
A generation later, with exceptions such as Warped Tour, these traveling festivals are largely extinct. In their place are multi-stage, multi-genre, multi-day destination festivals such as Bonnaroo. Instead of every market having an amphitheater, most markets now have festivals. The rise of such events alongside the long goodbye of arena headliners isn't a coincidence.
"We're seeing more and more large festivals more or less get a permanent, annual place on the calendar, which is similar to what the European concert business was like for many years," Pollstar's Bongiovanni explains. "In the summer it was always all about the outdoor festivals because they didn't have the indoor arena infrastructure that we have in the U.S. Today they do.
"The biggest problem that we have is — it's a global problem, really — if you look at the number of festivals all over the globe, it's enormous. It's staggering, actually, the number of events that are occurring. And everybody, by and large, is chasing the same pool of talent. ... At some point we're gonna max out on the number of these festivals, because of the exclusivity clauses."
So-called "radius clauses" — which prevent bands from booking shows up to 350 miles from any festival they're playing — are a yearly hemorrhoid to local promoters. They lose dozens of shows during festival season, which kicks off in late spring with Coachella and runs through early fall with Austin City Limits. Such losses cut deeply into the local scene's club and concert revenues.
"It's a bitch," one booking agent candidly tells the Scene. "It's a problem, because the clauses are so big, especially with things like ACL Fest being two weekends. What are you supposed to do for that week? Now you have to think about, 'Is playing Bonnaroo worth me not playing Atlanta, Nashville, Louisville, Chattanooga, Birmingham, all these markets? If I add up what I'd make in all those markets, does that equal a Bonnaroo play?' "
"There's so many festivals in the Southeast, radius clauses just fuck us left and right," a prominent local concert promoter adds. "The month of June, you might as well nail the goddamn door shut in Nashville, because Bonnaroo just wipes everything out."
But festival promoters are fighting the same problems as clubs: more competition for thinning returns. Greene, whose AC Entertainment launched the Bonnaroo juggernaut, says the purpose of exclusivity clauses isn't to compete with clubs and hard-ticket concerts, but with other festivals.
"There's so many festivals now, that it's become really challenging to achieve [a unique lineup]," he explains. "Obviously the elephant in the room is Bonnaroo and Nashville. But the way that I look at the festival world and its effect on club land is that, you know what, Bonnaroo is maybe gonna make your June and July a little bit slower with certain types of acts, because they're playing Bonnaroo. But ultimately the influence a band playing Bonnaroo can have on that band's trajectory in the region is huge."
Greene goes on to say AC does let artists break radius clauses on a "case-by-case" basis. That doesn't sit well with competitors, who contend that AC's deals booking Marathon Music Works and Exit/In give those venues an unfair advantage when AC can essentially waive its own radius clauses at will. Not to mention that artists, managers and agents might inevitably see a festival-sized incentive to stay in AC's good graces.
"It's not fair," Mercy Lounge's Ohlhauser says. "But business isn't fair, you know? They have a huge, fantastic festival people want to play at, and they can use that as leverage to get shows at their venues, rather than ours. And one of the ways to do that is, 'Well, there's a radius clause, but if you play our venue ...' It was the same thing when they were doing shows with us — we had St. Vincent the night before she was playing Bonnaroo, because it was AC's show. It sucks for us, but it's business."
Greene counters, "I'm sure that there are managers that say, 'You know what? We've got offers from all these different people to play this show and we're really hoping to get on Bonnaroo, so let's go with the AC [offer].' But I don't think that it happens as often as I think people might assume. ... We [don't tell bands], 'Look, you've gotta play with us or you're not gonna play Bonnaroo.' That's a really short-term model and way of operating and relationship building. Agents don't like to be told that. Managers don't like to be told that. ... When it comes to breaking our own radius clauses, we try to be really cognizant of that."
As Ohlhauser paces through an empty Mercy Lounge late on a Monday afternoon, indie garage-punk star Ty Segall and his band — who triumphed at Bonnaroo this year — are loading in for a sold-out show that night.
"Well," Ohlhauser deadpans, "that's one that we got."
Whether they're bands bleeding out financially to tour, club and concert promoters spending more than ever to market and make shows happen, or agents functioning as de-facto A&R departments, a lot of live-music professionals are straining to be Swiss Army knives. It's an expensive business, and shortcuts are few.
"If nothing changes, the independents, I think, just lose and go away," former Mercy Lounge general manager Drew Mischke says. "I don't see how that business model is sustainable."
That's one reason Mischke, Beth Cameron and Tyler Mahan Coe left their posts at Mercy Lounge this summer to start Show This, a company specializing in concert management, music-venue development and live-event consulting. As Mercy's general manager, Mischke grew advance-ticket revenue by upwards of 400 percent. Cameron and Coe are both performers — Cameron has fronted indie-rock outfit Forget Cassettes for more than a decade, and Coe spent 12 years touring as guitarist for his father, outlaw country legend David Allan Coe. Cameron put in time at Exit/In and helped open Marathon Music Works, while Coe managed the social-media accounts of Mercy's various clubs.
From Left: Beth Cameron, Drew Mischke and Tyler Mahan Coe of Show This
"I left Mercy Lounge because I feel like in order to be successful over not just five years, but to build something that would be successful 10 and 20 and 30 years from now, you have to be looking at how is the industry going to change," Mischke says. "And how can we be positioned ahead of that, and how can we be the people who are changing before everyone else so that we're the ones that people are imitating."
Is the Show This role one that necessarily needs to be filled?
"I don't really think that things are shifting that much," says Exit/In and Marathon's Jesse Baker. "I think the more important part of it is, how you market a show is just this ever-changing, constantly in-flux scenario. There's always going to be some hotter way to do it. ... [With Show This] we're talking about people who have a great reputation because they're professional and because they know what they're doing. I believe that that could result in a clientele here, definitely."
It already has. One of Show This' first gigs was Warped Tour's Nashville date. The traveling festival — which catered to more than 12,000 alt-punk youngsters — had a stop July 29 at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds, which was co-promoted by Mark Mosley's Music City Booking. Mosley outsourced staffing to them without a second thought.
"I'll pay a premium to make one phone call instead of making 30," says Mosley. "Absolutely. And know that the people that [they're] going to hire are going to be worth it? No problem. I'll pay a premium for that. Absolutely. Because I could go out and get all those same people, or people that are similar, but I don't want to make 30 phone calls. I want to worry about other stuff. They are exceptionally good at what they do. I mean, [Mischke] knows the best people. He doesn't hire shitheads."
"There's so much room for innovation in the concert industry, but nobody wants to touch it, because it's so insider," says Cameron. "Because nobody knows where to start. It's hard to explain the process of booking shows, and what all goes into it, and where you can lose money and get money. It's all very complicated. So you have to have somebody that's already inside the industry that's going to make those changes. You have to. It's the only way."
So why do these people — your Drew Mischkes and Beth Camerons, your Steve Greenes, Rick Whetsels and Mark Mosleys — remain in an expensive business fraught with shifting sands and a lopsided risk-to-reward ratio?
For one thing, concert promotion is always going to run on elbow grease. It may be easier for bands to record in their homes and get their music out without a label or a distribution company. But so long as people are going to shows — and they are — somebody will have to set up and break down the stages, pay the bands, sell the tickets and work the door.
That's not what keeps them doing it, though. In Whetsel's words, "The emotional impact of going to a show can't be duplicated." As Greene says, "It sounds cheesy to say, but a lot of times, it's actually shit that we care about and are interested in, and actually want to see succeed in the long-term."
"I'm willing to sit at The End and work the door, when two days later I might have a show at Bridgestone Arena," Mosley admits. "I'm still willing to do that. I like to think of myself as still being a punk-rock kid somewhere."
Drew Mischke believes the people who remain in the turbulent industry do so because of a deep emotional connection with live music, and a respect for the artists who make it happen.
"The people who have the real money that are overpaying the local band to play their free event or whatever, what they realize is the value isn't in the concert ticket," says Mischke. "The value is in the experience, and that odd emotional experience that happens inside of a large group of people at a hyper-emotional state doing something they really enjoy."
"Which is why, for artists, that is where their power is and will always be," Cameron adds. "As long as artists can control their connection with their audience, that will always be the power that artists have."
The only sound nobody wants to hear?
Crickets.
Email editor@nashviillescene.com.
