Executive Profile: Joel Zimmerman

Picture this: a clever high school radio DJ and student government leader in Carmel, Ind., discovers administrators have canceled the annual battle of the bands over mosh-pit liability issues.

Kid sees an opportunity to make the school’s event his own. He scores a permit from the mayor’s office to produce “Houndstock” in the town square, brings in local concessionaires and vendors, and even gets the city to invest in the festival.

While the story may sound like it came straight from a page of the Ferris Bueller playbook, it was actually Joel Zimmerman’s first foray into concert promotion, and he was hooked.

“Basically, I did a smoke and mirrors operation of taking it off the school campus, doing it down by the city square and calling it a different name,” he said. “It actually ended up being a huge success and they continued doing it after I left.”
Zimmerman broke into the agency biz years later with companies including AM Only and TCA before launching his own agency, Division One, and joining William Morris Endeavor Entertainment as the chief of the electronic division in 2008.

.

Click here for PDF version

Also see: Executive Profiles Archive

.

The department, a joint venture that tapped the collective wisdom of DJ Pete Tong, Zimmerman and fellow WME agents David Levy, Sam Kirby and Marc Geiger, has become a major force in the electronic space. Artists on the roster include Deadmau5, Kaskade, Afrojack, LMFAO, Avicii, Swedish House Mafia, Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, Paul Van Dyk, Groove Armada and The Crystal Method among a list of more than 150 clients.

Before Zimmerman got a taste for repping acts, he majored in political science and film and interned with Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer at ABC while attending college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

You might say he also minored in event production as he started hosting a “full-fledged nightclub” for his fraternity in a Frank Lloyd Wright mansion the brotherhood had taken over.

The cops showed up one night, padlocked the door, carded all attendees and slapped Zimmerman with a $120,000 liquor violation, which he calls “a low moment.”

But the incident also set the wheels in motion for Zimmerman to further his education in the concert biz. He began coordinating with the university to produce a series of alcohol-free events to combat UW-Madison’s ranking as the No. 1 binge drinking school in the country.

So instead of kicking you out of school, they decided to put you to work?

The directors and the chancellor, John Wiley, were forced to put together a task force. They wanted to do non-alcoholic programming, and because I was really into putting on shows and knew the kids at school wanted to party, but didn’t necessarily need to be drinking, we ended up getting a bunch of state money to put on these events.

We did one show that ended up being at 15,000-plus people with Run DMC. We did small indie rock bands and DJ events or shows alongside when U2, or the Stones, or Dave Matthews, or Phish came into the school. There was a lot of that kind of programming going on. It was a really big opportunity to get a perspective on being a promoter, see how things worked on the inside, know who to call and what the process is, and actually have that kind of visibility with scale.

At the same time, I was running a fraternity that wasn’t allowed to have any parties because we had a magnifying glass on us. Finally I asked some of the people I was dialed in with, “How can I do a party and not put myself in a liable position?” Some of the people I was working with took me to city council and I got myself a third party liquor license.

So I hired a wedding caterer and tuxedoed guys to serve keg beer. People came to the front of the house and got carded like they were going to a bar. I used the leftover money and paid for Funkmaster Flex to fly in.

We ended up using that model for another whole year where I was bringing in a new DJ every month – Funkmaster Flex, DJ Skribble and some of Paul Oakenfold’s DJs. I got really into the DJs where you didn’t have a band that had a bunch of extra expenses. You just had to deal with one tour manager, one artist and one agent.

What did you do after finishing up college?

I’d worked over at ABC for two summers and it ended up evolving into a job opportunity after I left school. Next I went to New York, and within a month or two, the Disney stock started to plummet. People that had been working at the company for 30-plus years were losing their jobs. I got a taste of corporate America and decided to make a swift exit.

I started to sniff around in the music business. I met with a bunch of agents and managers and labels but everything was in flux because of file sharing, Napster and the growth of the Internet. I met with one agent in particular – Marsha Vlasic – and at that time Marsha had a client, Moby, who’d sold 19-million plus records. He was an electronic music producer who had every single song on his new album synched in television, advertising and film.

We started talking and she said, “You should look at being an agent if you want to make it through this whole state of affairs in the music business, but you’ve got to find your lane. You’re not going to be able to get into hip-hop because there’s too many roadblocks. The rock business is an institution and it’s going to be hard.”

I mentioned that I was doing a lot of stuff with electronic music and we talked about Moby. It dawned on me during the conversation that electronic music was underutilized and explored. There wasn’t really a huge industry that I knew of.

You cut your teeth with indie agencies AM Only and The Collective. Was there a learning curve?

When you’re a young person in the music business in general, it’s kind of hard not to be immersed in it. In the electronic world, there was an underground global thing happening, but you didn’t really have the visibility that you have now online. So I went and did a lot of research on the scene. I lived in a record store. I wanted to learn everything about who was making the dope new music and where it was made. I went out at night a lot. I just went for it.

And during that period of time, I represented a variety of different acts. There were so many different sub genres of electronic music, whether it was house, or tech house, or a live electronic act or indie electronic. I wanted to represent the best in class in each category, but in order to master each category some of the biggest challenges were trial and error.

You’d go in and work with a talented artist and try to make them the best and sometimes you’d fail and fall on your face. And dealing with that, and taking that calculated risk is part of the process, but also part of the biggest payoff.

Another challenge was not getting caught up in the drama and more about getting caught up in the results of what we set out to do – getting the process down and getting the relationship building down. I knew what I wanted and what I’d set out to do. It was just a matter of how I was going to get there with my clients.

How did your relationship with William Morris come to be?

I got a call from Marc Geiger at William Morris. He said, “I’ve been hearing about you. We have a bunch of electronic acts that we’d like to service better. We hear you have your ear to the ground. Would you be interested in coming over to William Morris?”

At that time, William Morris to my clients was too corporate. It was corporate America – too big, too legitimate, the establishment. And when you’ve got a lot of anti-establishment people, it wouldn’t really be a great marriage immediately.

Marc and I knew that somewhere down the line there was going to be a time when everyone was going to want to legitimize. So I said, “Why don’t we have a strategic partnership, where I’m an affiliate agency for WME? I’ll service your electronic acts, we’ll split the commissions and we’ll figure some type of deal that works for each other.” We ended up doing the deal. I worked with them for three years as their electronic music expert.

I started my company and continued the relationship with WME. Another year passed and William Morris had invested in building up their London office. We began kicking around the idea of starting this new department that could address the emergence of electronic music that was playing really well into the digital landscape. A year later I rolled my company into WME.

Unlike just starting something green, it was actually a really good combination of a lot of different ideas and people from different backgrounds that had a similar affinity for electronic music, but different approaches to it. In 2008, it was six agents over three offices – New York, Los Angeles and London. Fast forward to 2011 and we have 40-plus agents. We have some in the soundtrack world, some folks in the TV and film world, digital distribution and social media people. Now it’s a full-fledged, robust department.

Did you have a vision for WME Electronic when you became the head of the department?

Earlier when I started in the business, I wrote this business/career plan to get things moving. It had a three-phase attack. I started writing all these ideas down so if the market started to develop or become red hot, what could we do to make it bigger and better, make our artists bigger and better and make this area of music more relevant? And could I actually manage my own career and have a career path? So some of those things went into the WME business plan. In each phase, we unfolded after we hit X amount of growth, in terms of business, whether it’s revenue or amount of clients.

I had one of my MIT friends write a reporting model that would take data off of our booking program and would pull me a report to allow us to track the growth of the business.

So we would track the business by seasonality, by region, by number of working acts per quarter, by average fee per event, annual revenue per client. It’s come in handy. This area of music has exploded over the last two years. Had we not kept our eyes on the business quarter to quarter, we would have probably been understaffed and not been able to adapt.

What happened in phase one?

We wanted to make sure we were identifying emerging markets and investing our time into developing those markets. If you’ve been reading about what’s been going on in Las Vegas, the press has been calling it the next Ibiza. As a company and a group, we’ve considerably changed the landscape of that town. The economy has been upside down.

We met with all the casino owners, operators and promoters and put together music programs that were cost effective for them but also lucrative for our clients. Because Vegas is a town built on residencies and DJs and electronic music producers are used to that kind of culture as well, they’re able to have acts play the market on a monthly or weekly basis depending on their strategy.

We also ended up building relationships and educating the music industry. We identified the best partners we possibly could have so we identified a bunch of festivals and said, “Look, this doesn’t need to be with just our clients. It’s about this area of music being represented at some of the biggest events to happen in music. Let us help you do it correctly. We’ll help you program it and be the best partner we can be to you.”

One of the last parts of phase one was to take the music out of the nightclub and the underground and turn the acts and the experience into a concert attraction. Instead of going into a nightclub, we would take acts into a rock venue, bring in unique production and actually make an event out of it. And instead of just working with club promoters, we’d bring club promoters out of their comfort zone, marry them with rock promoters and teach rock promoters how to do these things the right way.

And the next phases?

Our phase-two attack was to partner with established promoters and build new platforms that could be assets to our business and our clients and be active launching pads for our developing acts.

This summer we ended up launching 20 festivals with Live Nation in their amphitheatres called Identity, which allowed kids that were on the fence about electronic music to have the opportunity to actually go and experience something without sucking the life out of their bank accounts.

For a first-year festival we ended up doing extremely well. We reached over 10 million people through our social media network, which remains one of the most active Facebook pages to date for electronic music. It was a situation where, in the background, we had full visibility on what direction programming would take and how we could take acts that were on the fringe of becoming headliners and make perception a reality.

We’ve also wanted to protect the promoters from the core electronic scene because there’s been such rapid growth. There were so many promoters that wanted to get into the business. We didn’t want to exclude them from getting in, but we wanted to make sure they also took care of the people that had been here since the beginning.

There are some people that have been doing this the last 15-20 years and they deserve to stay in business. We ended up forging new partnerships and co-promoter situations and what ended up happening is promoters that were just club promoters have gained more experience and been able to raise money. Now they’re starting to launch their own festivals and doing them in safe environments – without the old stigma of raves.

The last thing is that because social media has been integral in helping kids get into this world and this scene without even stepping out of their bedrooms, we’ve been consciously building in a community that lives online that can kind of act as a music cluster. We can use it as a platform so our clients can monetize on new business models, release their music in innovative ways and have the power to cast the widest net possible virally.

So whether it’s us launching a festival, or our act has a new tour coming out that we want to sell tickets for, or an album launch being done in a non-conventional way, we have the ability to speak to a very wide group of people across the globe through technology.

How has WME Electronic managed to differentiate itself from other boutique electronic agencies out there?

One thing I’ve kind of ingrained in the younger agents we have in our department is that we’re not in the let’s-book-shows business. We’re in the artist-development business. So instead of just going in and booking a DJ or a band just for the money or to fill their diary up, we need the right strategies and to act as if we were the artist or the manager and work on a career path.

A lot of our acts have had either very young management or no management at all and we’ve needed to play a bigger role in shaping peoples’ careers. I had always approached working with my clients that way and I think WME in general has that kind of culture, but in the electronic music space this philosophy didn’t exist.

Instead of just signing and signing, we end up signing a few developing acts each year, we sink our teeth into them and we invest our time and energy into making them the best they can be. We’ve had a huge success rate turning a lot of these acts into concert attractions instead of club acts.

Technology has made it easier than ever for artists to get their music to the masses online. How do you cut through all the noise and find new acts?

I’ll turn off. And when I turn off, I don’t use social media, I don’t use the Internet, I don’t use anything but email and the phone. If I hear someone named four or five times in a week or a month, I probably need to check that person out and investigate. Everyone’s so switched on, but if you talk to enough people, you hear about things just by being in this business and having the right network. It actually acts as a nice filter. If I’m in the mode of wanting to sign more acts, I sometimes shut things down and let the world speak to me.

Do you think there’s a different strategy behind developing an electronic act versus a traditional rock act?

Building a traditional touring act or a rock act, you have some things at play – a label’s agenda to sell records and an album cycle. In electronic music for the most part, you have the touring artist that doesn’t stop making music. They can make music on the road, they can make music in their bedroom – pretty much anywhere. They typically have a release strategy that continues to feed the fan base, where they just keep churning out tracks.

Because we don’t have an album cycle and we don’t have the supply and demand that play into the economics around touring like that, we have to write out strategies so the artist doesn’t stay in the market too long and oversaturate themselves. If we build in an album cycle without the album, it allows them to come in and out of the market. So they’re constantly touring but they may not be in America. They may be in Europe at a certain time. We actually track all this and we model out the touring strategy so that we can play into basic supply and demand.

Speaking of Europe, would you say that it’s still a bigger market for electronic music than the U.S. at this point?

The U.S. has the ability to get larger. It’s a little easier to navigate than Europe because you have a more homogenous culture across the United States and Canada than you do when you have a new culture in every country you go into when dealing with Europe.

You mentioned Vegas as a big market for electronic acts. Do you see any other emerging markets in the U.S.?

Domestic, there’s a lot of markets that have gone dormant. Because we’ve been doing this for a decent amount of time, I remember when Pittsburgh was a place I used to send my acts all the time and it went away. So when we did the Identity festival, we ended up going into a lot of the markets we knew were going to be big winners, like New York, San Francisco and San Diego. But then we also went into Charlotte, N.C., Pittsburgh and Detroit. We went into a bunch of markets that have been depressed for a while. They haven’t been red hot. But we knew there was something there – they had the capability of becoming big, they had the population to support it, and it was basically about turning the market back on.

There are a bunch of markets in the U.S. that are emerging or have the ability to be great again, especially for this kind of music. Electronic music is a bit more of a global culture, digital age kind of genre. You can’t put your finger on it. You can’t put it in a box. You’ve got urban acts, pop acts and techno acts that are all doing electronic music now. It’s kind of an all-encompassing type of genre. It’s actually a good thing when it comes to emerging markets because if there’s a market that does well with rock ’n’ roll, and you’ve got a whole bunch of rock-leaning electronic acts, you can kind of play into the marketplace.

Given the current economy, how do you set ticket prices for your artists?

We have the data from all the artists that we have touring. We know that if something works for one, it may work for another. We also have control over the ticket price, which has been one of our monsters since we started bringing acts into the touring world. When this stuff was in nightclubs, one night it would be $10, another night the cover would be $50 and you wouldn’t really have control over it.

When you start going into more traditional concert venues, we know based on having some of the biggest acts in the space what the market can bear. And we don’t really try to push it too hard either.

Another thing that a lot of our acts do is speak to their fans directly on Facebook and get feedback, whether it’s marketing a tour or it’s ticket prices or whatever. You have a switched-on community that likes to participate.

That’s basically our guide. The artists like to make money and the promoters like to make money, but you have a core community of people in electronic music that want to see this area succeed and thrive. If you just go for the jugular and take advantage of the moment right now, you’re not going to have longevity.

What’s the best thing about your job?

Shared successes. When you sit down in a room with an artist and map out how you’re going to get them from point A to point B, and they’ve never done this before or even thought they could take it to the level you’re talking about, the fear and excitement that goes into that is probably the reason that I wake up every morning.

This is an exploding area. WME is at the forefront of this and is creating a lot of noise, excitement and opportunity for our clients and for the business.

It takes a certain group of collective minds to actually make those things happen. We’ve fortunately assembled a roster of acts that have that common theme and a great group of agents that have that similar philosophy.