Russia Goes Pro

CEO Andrey Matveev explains to Pollstar the reasons behind this new venture.

“No one in Russia knows how many promoters or how many venues there are,” Matveev explained. “There was a need to understand the numbers and have the contacts.” Secondly, the Russian “concert and event market is a gray area.”

Not all cash that changes hands is accounted for in a contract. Soyuzconcert functions as the promoters’ trade union and serves as a “platform of responsibility between promoters.” Matveev identified SAV Entertainment (headed by Nadja Solovieva and Vladimir Zubitskij), PMI (Eugeniy Finkelstein), TCI (Ed Ratnikov), Melnitsa (Sergey Melnikov), Pop Farm (Dmitriy Zaretskij) and NCA (Michael Shurigin) as the country’s biggest promoters

. “All of them are Soyuzconcert members now.” According to Matveev, the three biggest challenges the Russian live sector faces at the moment are “falling ticket sales, the strong domestic currency that affects concerts with foreign artists, and the severe conditions for obtaining bank loans.”

The Russian live music scene in general isn’t too different from the rest of Europe. “Perhaps we pay more attention to anti-terror safety and security, because we were faced with terrorism at concerts much earlier than [the rest of] Europe.”

Clubs, which host around 30 percent of all live music events (50 percent concert halls, 20 percent arenas), are struggling. “Prime locations for the construction of clubs in the cities are expensive. People today have high standards when it comes to the club’s quality,” he said. “Another problem is the decline in ticket sales. This is true for Russia’s concert business as a whole.”