13-Year-Old Makes Debut As Promoter

It’s not every day that you talk to a 13-year-old promoter. But maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that she’s breaking into the concert biz at such a young age. After all, her father, John Brown, founded Brown United at age 17 after starting to work for his father’s scaffolding business at age 14. Brown United provides structural projects and services for the entertainment, sports, special events and corporate industries. Offering touring and concert roofs, bleachers, grandstands, mobile stages and more, the company has worked with clients including Paul McCartney, Jay Z, Phish, Coachella and Bonnaroo.

The charity concert is scheduled Jan. 10 at Flintridge Preparatory School. With only 200 tickets available, seats are expected to be sold quickly. Especially because tickets include a meet & greet with Whitesides and all proceeds will go to Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, which is based in Southern California.

“It’s amazing,” John Brown told Pollstar. “She reached for the stars and did it. She appealed to Jacob Whitesides, who just turned in a top 200 hit on iTunes, which is now rising. He also has two other hits.”

Delila Brown told Pollstar that although her dad has a friend in the industry who helped her book Whitesides, it was her idea to pick the singer/songwriter as the performer.

She said, “I was talking to my teacher and we decided that doing a drive isn’t really doing much other than just setting a box out and hoping people will put stuff in it. And so I wanted to do something bigger.”

Delila also had a hand in choosing Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, which provides mental health care and substance use disorder services including a suicide prevention center.  

“My teacher gave me a list of organizations and this one spoke [to me] because they also have a 24/7-hour call helpline, which the other organizations didn’t have,” Delila said.

John mentioned that Delila was inspired to help raise funds for suicide prevention and awareness after observing young girls at meet & greets.

“She always goes to all the Justin Bieber concerts and all that,” John said. “She loves those guys. Well, every concert she goes to, these girls go [to] the meet & greet [and] they start crying first of all, and then they say, ‘You’re so great, we love you. You saved my life.’ And she thought about that for a minute – how did they save these girls’ lives? And she said, ‘You know, they must have had some need to reach out to a pop person who said kind words about them.’ … And she started looking into suicide prevention and awareness and found this Didi Hirsch foundation, which is local to her.”

As for whether Delila will continue promoting/producing shows in the future, she said, “I might. It’s a lot of work but it’s fun at the same time to see the impact it has on people.”

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