Indie Club Bookers Forum
Moderator
Tom Windish | Windish Agency
Andrew Dreskin | TicketFly
Michael Goldberg | Belly Up Aspen
Tom Hoppa | APA
Nick Miller | Jam Productions
Bryan Smith | The Troubadour
Bruce Solar | The Agency Group
The forum featured a diverse panel of club bookers, independent promoters and agents coming together to talk about a range of subjects from festival radius clauses to Twitter to the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger.
Club bookers and indie pro-moters by themselves are feisty enough, but moderator Tom Windish managed to keep a roomful of both focused.
A theme that recurs virtually every year is the flexibility and adaptability of independents.
“Independents have a good grip on their markets,” Tom Hoppa of Agency for the Performing Arts noted. “I know when I’m talking to an independent that they know their market inside and out.”
Jam Productions’ Nick Miller also extolled the virtues of being independent, because “working as an independent means you can usually turn on a dime as long as it makes sense, which is good for both the company and the artist. With corporate promoters, there seems to be a chain of command. Arny [Granat] and Jerry [Mickel-son] pretty much let me and my department do what we want as long as it makes sense.”
Miller dropped the pretense of “corporate promoter” eventually, saying that Jam does compete with Live Nation, but his com-pany is more concerned with artist development and “facilitating an artist’s career in Chicago. There’s a lot of freedom and a lot of satisfaction.”
Michael Goldberg runs the Belly Up Aspen in Colorado, and being in a tourist hub a couple of hundred miles away from a major city has its advantages and dis-advantages.
“Aspen is very much not a primary market,” Goldberg said, laughing. “It’s a town of 6,000 full-time residents. We rely on tourists but we also rely on locals. We’re able to break all of the rules for instance on ticket pricing and advertising, booking and so on,” he explained.
“There’s disadvantages, too, like no major radio market. One challenge is convincing people like Tom [Windish], Tom [Hoppa] and Bruce [Solar] that we can do sometimes outrageous things to break the rules while at the same time convince them coming here is a smart thing to do and we can perform. We have, by virtue of being in a town like Aspen, strengths and weakness.”
One of those strengths is a kind of immunity to what se-veral of Goldberg’s fellow panel-ists considered a bane of their existence: festivals and their conjoined twin, the restrictive radius clause.
Miller said radius clauses are a major problem in Chicago be-cause there are two major annual festivals there: Lollapalooza and Pitchfork. Radius clauses vary in length and distance, but essentially it locks an artist out of the festival’s market for additional plays so performers don’t indivi-dually compete with the festival.
“It’s had a pretty negative effect in Chicago for us,” Miller said. “Lollapalooza’s radius clause has exclusions for six months prior and three months after the fest. Lolla is in late August and sucks up 150 bands. It’s a big problem for venues like the Empty Bottle and Schuba’s, especially in winter and spring. The artists are being kept out nine months of the year.”
TicketFly founder Andrew Dreskin, who co-produces the Virgin Mobile Festival with I.M.P. Chairman Seth Hurwitz, said that festival is an anomaly. “We have a unique situation at Virgin. Seth drains talent from his own venue for the Virgin Mobile Festival.” The festival has taken place either at Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course or Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md.
“What’s needed is for every-body to stand up and say this is too much and it’s really affecting us,” Dreskin said.
Goldberg has found that “maybe we’re being contrarian” about the hated radius clause: “We’re three hours out of Denver and if any-thing we might get a call from, say, Thievery Corporation that has maybe played Mile High Festival. We have a late-night venue and we’ll get calls around festival for late-night plays.”
He added it took a number of years to convince people it was a good idea, but it’s paid off. One example Goldberg gave was Warren Haynes. The Allman Brothers Band has done shows in Denver, and Haynes headed to Aspen afterward to play an after-show.
“We’re taking advantage of the festivals creatively,” Goldberg concluded. “I wish there were more festivals.”
Bryan Smith is talent buyer for The Troubadour in West Holly-wood, Calif., and he probably wouldn’t be inclined to agree.
“It’s a struggle in L.A.,” he said. “There are festivals year-round, now. It’s getting tougher with Coachella. It seems like everyone has a festival. Want to make some money? You have to have your own festival.”
Miller said that Chicago does benefit somewhat from Bonnaroo, because it’s just far enough away that Windy City venues can still draw artists looking for an extra play while they are in the eastern U.S.
But the agents on the panel were clearly getting at least some mild heat for the practice.
Windish said he understands the concerns of the promoters and talent buyers who get caught near a festival, but ultimately he has an obligation to his artists.
“As an agent I get pressure to put my clients on these festivals.
I could argue there are benefits to my clients,” Windish said.
“That indie band you want might get paid three times the amount of a regular gig [by playing a festival],” The Agency Group’s Bruce Solar reminded the panel. “It’s gonna go with the money
every time.”
Windish asked the panel what their thoughts were on the recent Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger, and many expressed optimism that the mega-merger would only create new opportunities for business, especially in ticketing.
“Ticketing? Isn’t the company that does all the ticketing an artist manager now?” joked one panel-ist. “But they have a firewall!
They promised the Department of Justice!” smirked another. “If you buy your tickets at Walmart, you’re gonna get a toaster,” quipped a third.
But overall, most acknowledged there are more ticketing options. However, many venues will have to wait until their present con-tracts with Ticketmaster expire before exercising any of them.
“If you’re a competitor [of Live Nation’s], it’s time to run away from Ticketmaster as quick-ly as possible,” Dreskin said.
“If you’re a club and you have a Ticketmaster deal you probably want to get out of that contract as soon as possible.”
But there’s good opportunities out there for existing ticketing companies to step up and do a more sophisticated job, though most club buyers on the panel acknowledged that TM has “a really great system.”
Still, Goldberg said his club went to Front Gate Ticketing in Austin, Texas. “We use Front Gate precisely because they have the flexibility to handle our no-fee policy at the box office. They listen to our ideas, not just tell us what we have to do to work with their system. They’re smaller like we’re smaller, and can react quickly.”
Solar pointed to The Bowery Presents in New York City. “They went into the toughest market in the world, gave people straight percentage deals and to this day they do not charge facility fees.
I think [mergers] work in the independents’ favor,” Solar said.
“This is the most interesting time in the history of ticketing,” Dreskin said. “There’s a sea change happen-ing, whether it’s Front Gate or [TicketFly]. It’s remarkable what companies can do today com-pared to Ticket-Web in 1995.
“The ability of the promoter to leverage the ticketbuyer as a distribution channel on their path, whether Facebook or Twit-ter, is amazing. As the cost of tech comes down, it’s possible for upstarts to jump in. There’s a tremendous number of options to power indie promoters’ Web sites, ticketing and fan clubs.”
It’s not surprising that Dreskin would focus on tech or social media, but the tech story of the day on this panel came from Gold-berg.
“I love Twitter,” Goldberg said. “Lance Armstrong comes to the Belly Up, takes a picture of Buckethead, and by the next morning, 35,000 people have looked at that picture. I took the same picture. Maybe 200 people saw it. People pay attention now. But mostly, I have to invite Lance in more often.”
|Deborah Speer|