Promoters Irked By APG Comparison

Harry Jenner has been quick to point out the new venture he’s set up with long-term partner Ewald Tatar and fellow Austrian promoter Richard Hoermann won’t bear any resemblance to the ill-fated Austrian Promoters Group.

Although the business model bears some resemblance to APG, which collapsed in 2002 within two years of being founded, Jenner says the units within new company Nu Coast will continue as separate entities.

“We just combine some parts of our back-office and look for synergies, but every company is its own entity and works completely independently,” he explained. “So, for example, if one fails the whole thing doesn’t fail as it did with APG.”

The APG was an amalgamation of many of the leading promoters of the day and was an attempt to build an Austrian entity strong enough to resist the market entrance of German promoters including Marek Lieberberg and the ongoing expansion of what was then SFX Entertainment.

Rock Produktion, the section run by Wolfgang Klinger and Andi Egger (now head of Österreich Ticket), went bust for euro 2.5 million and the rest of APG followed when parent company Libro Entertainment went down for euro 436 million.

An audit by corporate recovery specialists KPMG confirmed that about euro 2 million was “missing” from the APG accounts.

Tatar departed before APG collapsed, apparently disenchanted with the way it was operating, setting up a new entity with Franz Bogner, Paul Debnam and Thomas Zsifkovits. The latter is still with him at Nova Music and is also a shareholder in Barracuda Holdings, the company through which Tatar and Jenner will hold around 50 percent of Nu Coast.

Some Austrian live music market watchers believe Hoermann, who has worked closely with Live Nation before and has replaced Klinger as Live Nation-Solo chief John Giddings’ main promoter in the region, may see the move as a way of attracting the interest of the Los Angeles-based company.

The reasoning behind the argument is that Hoermann, who has worked with LN several times in the past, may be a more attractive proposition for LN if Jenner and Tatar and their successful outdoors were part of the package.

Although Live Nation international chief exec Alan Ridgeway has said his firm continues to look for opportunities in markets where it hasn’t already set up shop, and Austria certainly fits that bill, he recently told Pollstar he isn’t in negotiations with any companies from that country.