Executive Profile:
Nick Meinema

Nick Meinema co-runs United Talent Agency’s office in Nashville. 

In a city filled with names like WME, CAA and Paradigm, UTA has established its footprint with a lot of elbow grease and a couple of acquisitions here and there. However, it all started with the efforts of one man who wanted to get out of a small town in Canada. Meinema, who is in the running for Pollstar’s Third Coast Agent of the Year for 2015, came to Nashville to set up what he called a “satellite office” for The Agency Group in 2012. In the short amount of time since then, he turned it into a fully realized Nashville agency.

If the big boys weren’t paying attention before, they certainly became aware of TAG’s presence in Music City last year when Meinema guided the agency’s purchase of The Bobby Roberts Company, a company not only known for the long career of Lance Roberts’ father but as a business woven intrinsically into the city’s musical landscape. The name Bobby Roberts Company was retired with the acquisition. Together, the client roster has more than 100 names.

There was another acquisition on the way: The Agency Group, with offices in London, Los Angeles, New York, Toronto and Miami, was itself absorbed by United Talent Agency in August. Instead of beginning this interview with questions directed to Meinema himself, we got the basics down first.

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See also: Executive Profiles Archive

With all of the changes over the past two years, how is the office now structured?

Over the past couple of years it changed when The Agency Group acquired The Bobby Roberts Company. Lance Roberts and his team came in under our fold and Lance and I run the office together. We adapted the Bobby Roberts territorial system in the Nashville office of The Agency Group and have continued through the transition to UTA to do that.

We have, as I call it, an augmented territorial system. We have some RAs that are traditional in the way that The Agency Group did it but we also have a territorial system in which the RA places the artist into the system if they see fit and we work together as a collaborative team as opposed to a silo. The territory system is how WME, CAA, ICM Partners, and APA operate and that’s the system we adopted here, through Bobby Roberts, at this time.

Lance and I have described each other, publicly and privately, as a great yin and yang. What I lack professionally, he has, and vice versa. We work well together and we like each other which is shocking in this day and age, and we have the same work philosophy. We just have two personalities, but they work great together. Regarding The Bobby Roberts Company, it’s gratifying to have the opportunity to work with their clients, but I was very selfish to push and get the deal done because I wanted to work with Lance for many years, before I even moved to Nashville and was just visiting. I enjoyed him as a person, the way that he worked and the respect that he had in the market. He’s a family guy and a loyal guy. The way to work with him was to essentially acquire the company that his father had started, which worked out beneficially for everybody.

Nick, Kevin Costner and his band go over the setlist before a show at the Festival Jardins DE in Barcelona July 2014.

How have things changed in the office after the UTA purchase?

We have a nice, well-oiled machine here. TAG saw it and UTA sees that. They have complete control over the office. Jeremy Zimmer, who runs the company, is the boss; there is no question about that. Everything is run by management in L.A. as far as decisions we make here, but they have been very supportive of what we’ve got going on and have been very open to our ideas of growth and expansion.

What are the staff numbers currently?

Oddly enough, we are talking today (Oct. 30) on the one-year anniversary of coming under one roof. All the Bobby Roberts agents and assistants moved into our new, Cummins Station / Nashville offices. We’ve added a couple of people but a lot of this year was about maintaining the roster. We have a few artists that started to take off this year and we’re making sure, to our best ability, to take care of the artists that made this move from a fantastic Ma-and-Pa situation to a larger, international company and still feel comfortable.

In that case, what do you see in the future?

We have extensive plans for growth not only in this office but UTA’s offices worldwide. I can’t get into the specifics but this office has grown from being a very small operation – almost a satellite office for The Agency Group three and a half years ago – to 24 people working in this office. The roster is growing with developing talent and we’re in conversations with agents to join.

Any concert or concerts stand out to you after the thousands you’ve seen?

The concert that got me intrigued was in 1992 at the CNE in Toronto. Garth Brooks with Martina McBride opening, but nobody knew who she was. I was enamored. I grew up in a little town with 1,200 people, and I listened to the radio and watched TNN but this was a mega-concert. There must have been 30,000 people. It was between Ropin’ The Wind and The Chase coming out and there was nothing hotter than Garth Brooks. We had nosebleed seats and my mother, who has since passed away, took me to that show. I remember everything – the setlist, what he was wearing, him swinging on that rope. It has stayed with me through becoming a fan and going from looking in from outside – I was 12 years old in 1992 – to transforming my career. Meeting Garth Brooks at a fundraiser in 2013, it’s come full circle.

The concert motivated me to get into the industry. I don’t take many photos with artists but that deserved an exception. There’s another one. I’ve represented Kevin Costner & Modern West for the better part of the last eight years and there was a weather-related stage collapse in Camrose, Alberta. Our tour manager was hurt. Kevin was under the stage. I was under the stage. One of our guitar players, Park Chisolm, was hospitalized for a short period of time. And a woman died that day.

Her name was Donna Moore. We came back a year to the day and played a show – that very show. We returned to it. I remember the moment Kevin walked onto that stage, and I also remember having goosebumps that a year before we came so close to being hurt or killed. He sang this song “Angels,” and there were 25,000 people there and it was as if he was playing to one. It was so quiet. I’ve never been at a festival that was that quiet. The story that he told, the way he brought 365 days together. It’s amazing to me how music bridged that gap. It didn’t bring Donna back or bring less sorrow to her family but there was a moment that I can’t even explain and it has stayed with me for five years.

I’ve never forgotten that woman’s name. I met her family, I met her children when we returned to play. People were there enjoying a show with their friends or family and something tragic happened. It would be easy to say “A woman died that day” and not remember her name but I never will. Not only because I was there but you get selfish, for a moment. That could have been me. Then you think, “I shouldn’t think that” but you do. The stage collapsed and I was underneath it, not 30 feet from where she died. It stays with you. So Garth Brooks was an eye-opening, I-can’t-believe-I’m-here moment, and then there is the moment Kevin took that stage a year after the tragedy. It stayed with me – not only me but with every member of the band and the crew. Whenever “Camrose” is said, we all go back there.

Nick and his son Gavin watch Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at the Sound of Music Festival in Burlington, Ontario, June 21.

There is more to the business than phone calls, tracking down guarantees and the daily problems.

I’m one of the lucky ones. People who get to do what they love for a living – whether that’s working construction or being a baseball player or being an accountant – if it’s what you love, it’s what you love. I’ve loved music my whole life and I love being involved in it. There are so many beautiful stories that come out of what we do every day, and those stories should be celebrated. There’s a business to it – we have to go collect the money, we have to get the guarantees. Some shows sell and some don’t. People sometimes get hurt. There’s a lot that goes into the uncertainty that is the music business and what it entails, especially with buses, trains and airplanes moving from town to town. But there really is a beautiful circus environment that comes from it.

I’ve never said this on record but to my friends and family: you can get a bunch of lawyers or doctors together in a hotel bar and they’ll have various stories. You get people in the music business together and we all have the same story with the same or different characters. We all know mostly the same people. We all have a story about the crazy ones. We all have a story about collecting. Although the business is vast, it really is a small community. There is nothing like getting a bunch of people in the music business – artists, managers, labels – and letting them chat. Maybe I’m biased but I truly believe there’s nothing like it.

For being 35, you’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time in the music business.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing but I wanted to be in a band. I sang in a band, I played in one. I wasn’t very good but I wanted to do it. I had an option to go to college and take a music business course in Canada. I was interning at a recording studio not far from my home. The guy who ran the studio was a musician. I interned with him for two years in a co-op class in high school and I said I was planning on going to this college that was nowhere near the level of a Belmont and he said, “You want to be in a band and you want to be in the music business?”

I don’t know if it’s great advice for everybody but he said, “Get a van, put a band together and get on the road.” And that’s what I did. I was ripped off by club owners, I’d show up to find the date was double-booked. I had great triumphs playing in a band, as well. But I got my start and I learned how to book bands by booking my own – with other agents who were booking clubs at the time. I got a great education. I was living the D-life of the music business but the only thing that ever changes is the decimal point. Money goes up as the grade goes up.

What’s the expression? You don’t pay for playing, you pay me for the waiting around?

Yeah, the waiting around, the traveling. The show is free. I think in 2003 I started booking bands outside of my own and in 2004 I was hired at a little Ma-and-Pa shop in Canada called Live Tour Artists. I built a roster and made a living as an agent. So in 2007 the Canadian Country Music Awards was in Saskatchewan and I had a good night. I had a couple artists win, I was thanked from stage. Steve Herman and Jack Ross from the Agency Group came up to me and asked me to dinner. I was so green and naïve I graciously said no thank you.

I’ll never forget it: Steve grabbed me by my arm and said, “A dinner can’t hurt. Take the fucking dinner.” We met in Toronto two weeks later. Ralph James, Steve, Jack and I met for two hours. I said the only prerequisite I have is that I end up in Nashville. If I can go there in the foreseeable future, I’m in. We did a deal and I started working in the Toronto office October 2007 with Rob Zifarelli, Colin Lewis (now in our L.A. office) and Omar Al-Joulani, who’s now at Live Nation. I moved to Nashville in 2012 and opened what could only be referred to at the time as a satellite office, but I wanted to build a business for, and with, The Agency Group. When we opened this office there were no talks of mergers and acquisitions. I’m grateful that they gave me, in the very least, the opportunity to come down and make something happen.

You recently said, to paraphrase, that some agencies are the best “at what they do,” but you guys do “what you do” better than anyone else. Can you expand upon that?

Artist development. There are many sides to an artist’s career. There’s the rise, the explosion (if they get it) and then there’s the lull to, hopefully, another explosion. But I think the development, in the early stages, of getting into the corners is essential. For example, and this will speak more to Lance Roberts, but the philosophy is the same. Chris Janson, without a hit on the radio, was out working clubs, fairs and festivals and had relationships built from Lance and his team at Bobby Roberts. When most were saying you need a hit on country radio to go out and play, he had a very healthy business prior to the explosion of the Warner deal, “Buy Me A Boat,” and T.K. Kimbrell and Kelly Janson co-managing. They had their eyes on that prize, knowing that if people can see Chris live they can build it on the road. We pick up the phone and we give more than a great meeting.

Nick and PGP’S Troy Vollhoffer take on the “other side” of the music world, fronting the Kal Hourd Band, playing to 10,000 people at PGP’s Craven Country Jamboree in Saskatchewan last year.

Country artists play every Thursday to Sunday, year-round. How does an agent work hours around that?

Well, no agent lives in a 9-to-5 world …

No, from what I’ve heard they do: Nine in the morning to five in the morning.

You got me on that one! I think this is a 24/7 business. Your artists, whether they’re touring months at a time, doing consecutive dates, or they’re just doing weekends, you should be available when they’re working. And they work primarily on the weekends. Every agent would have a story about being at a family function, birthday party or a wedding and having to step outside and deal with something. It’s part of the adrenaline of being an agent. That’s what we do. It’s not just negotiating the deals and getting the money; it’s facilitating the deals. Sometimes things don’t go according to plan and you need to be there as a resource for the artist and the touring staff.

When Dick Alen ran the personal appearances department at William Morris, he would tell new agents two things: One, be honest and, two, your clients will fire you. It could take 30 years but people get frustrated and they need someone to blame.

I would say that 90 percent of the relationships in this business are like that but there are those beautiful relationships, say a Steve Kaul / Ralph James and Nickelback.

There are longstanding, beautiful relationships whether there are ups or downs. The secret is the same as it is in a marriage: nobody gets into a marriage going, “Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce so we have a 50 percent chance of making it.” You get into it with the best of intentions and if it’s truly a “perfect” relationship you’ll go through ups and downs but you’ll find your way to the end. I think the relationships you have with your clients and your clients’ managers are much like marriages. Some of them have a burn factor and some are lifelong.

Anything you wish to add regarding your client roster?

I’m always hesitant to do these in any situation. If you say one, you’re leaving another out. But I will say in the Nashville office, specifically, we have some very exciting things going on.

Chris Janson is very exciting for all the reasons – “Buy Me A Boat,” the second single off to a great start at radio, a great calendar of touring. We have this young band, High Valley, whom I’ve worked with for years, signing a beautiful record deal with Warner, coming out in the first quarter. And if I think we’re going to talk about clients, let’s talk about developing clients as opposed to established ones:

We work with Dallas Smith who is on Blaster Records-Big Loud Records who was the singer for alternative rock band Default. I’ve been Dallas’s agent for eight years now. To see him chipping away on the Americana side of things is exciting. He’s out playing fairs and festivals and he’s trying to make a name for himself. We’re behind him whole-heartedly.

Nick snaps one with Merle Haggard alongside Lance Roberts and Golden Nugget Hotel & Casino Entertainment Director Ron O’Neal in Las Vegas last year.

Any particular shout-outs to promoters or venues?

I came down to Nashville on the premise that I would run our fair/festival business. There are many people who went out of their way to accommodate the business that we’re having but I don’t think any moreso than Troy Vollhoffer at Premier Global Production. His festivals are the Country Thunder festivals and Craven Country Jamboree, and now the new Country Thunder in Calgary.

And Gil Cunningham at Neste Event Marketing and his team. Not only have they been wonderful to me and The Agency Group but they’ve been tremendous to my partner, Lance Roberts, over the years. And that doesn’t take away from the Romeos, Variety and Triangles, but if I need to go out on a limb and say who has been more embracing and welcomed us into the community I don’t think could say two names more so than Troy and Gil (and his team). When we first opened the office, they were there to help me any which way I needed. I’m thankful and I call them friends.

When you get calls from your tour managers praising or complaining about a venue or event, what are the most prevalent common factors – catering, staff, equipment?

Each artist is different. Everything you touched on. An artist may say, “It wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing venue but the vibe from the crowd, or the response, or the sound, or the catering, or the stage manager.” There’s a variety of reason why people want to go back, or not go back, to certain venues. It’s not just the artist. The artist can have a great show but if the load-out is tough on the crew, they’d rather skip that one. It’s personal; it’s like asking for a favorite ice cream flavor.

What’s the advice to a venue owner?

Listen to the advance. The production manager or the tour manager is the conduit to your great day. Not all of them are great, but they’re your conduit to the information. Everyone has something different. I don’t think there’s anything more debilitating to a touring operation than to show up and have something advanced not there the day-of. That’s the surefire way to start everything off in a bad way.

And you will remember that promoter or venue the next time they call.

Yes, but one of the great things about this business is it’s not black and white. There is a lot of grey. Circumstances change, riders change, you book a show six months out and there’s personnel changes. There has to be an ebb and flow but, again, at some point the artist and the touring entourage’s needs must be met so we can bring the music to the people. There’s a reason why the artists, musicians and staff leave their houses, wives, husbands or girlfriends and get on buses, planes, vans or cars. It’s to bring the music to the people.

Most of your roster could be classified as Americana or Country, but then there’s stuff like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

What I really enjoy doing is working collaboratively with everybody. I have some RA clients that I’m passionate about but I’m not the RA for Chris Janson; Lance Roberts is, but I love bringing opportunities to the table. I’m not the RA for 3 Doors Down but I enjoy the business I’ve done for the band. I’m in a unique situation where I get to play on both sides of the fence; I get to RA and work with artists I’m passionate about but I also get to have a significant hand in the pie, working with our roster as a whole because of the fairs and festivals. That’s a choice I have. It’s not mandated; I enjoy it. I enjoy the collaborative effort I get to have with the company and the clients. Not every agent has it or wants it, but I choose it. If you’re going to be in the music business and choose it as a profession, you should do the things you like within it.

What would be the one thing people would be surprised to learn about you?

That I’m from Canada and I don’t like hockey. It doesn’t go over that well – anywhere – but it is what it is. I’m a baseball fan. I think it’s a beautiful sport.

What are some career highlights?

This segues nicely: I’m a huge baseball fan and I’ve worked for Kevin Costner and his band for several years. We were able to put the 25th anniversary of “Field of Dreams” concert and baseball tournament together at the Field of Dreams site in Iowa last year. There was a concert with it but being able to put something together was special to me because I was tied to the movie before I met Kevin.

You know the line from the movie, “Hey dad, you wanna have a catch”? Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters lined up along the first-base line and, for the better part of an hour and a half, Kevin played catch with 500 people, throwing the ball back and forth with each person a couple of times. He literally walked up and down this line. Music brought it together – the band playing that evening, and we worked on it for a long time – but seeing little kids, their dads and their grandfathers getting to throw a ball back and forth and take pictures with Kevin Costner where Field of Dreams was filmed was amazing.

What is an “I-can’t-believe-that-I’m-here” moment?

Through the Bobby Roberts acquisition, and through Lance Roberts who has represented Merle Haggard for almost 20 years, I got introduced to Merle. To be introduced into his life, to work with Lance on Merle’s touring, to walk onto Merle’s bus or into his studio like we did yesterday, and for Merle to know my name gives me shivers.

I’ll walk backstage and he’ll say, “Hey, Nick,” and it brings me chills. He’s not only a legend and an American institution, I can’t believe I’m a guy from a little town in Ontario and Merle Haggard knows who I am. I still can’t get over it and I’m thankful to Lance every day for that. Moments like that make you thankful for what you do, and it makes the hardship days a lot easier.