‘The Audience Is Boss’

“Change is going to take place more rapidly and comprehensively than anything we’ve experienced so far,” he said. Schoneberg grew up in the live business. He is the son of Josef Schoneberg, who brought The Rolling Stones to Germany for the first time in 1965, when Till was only 4. He got to know impresarios such as Karsten Jahnke and Fritz Rau at the age of 6.

He remembers concerts from Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Tina Turner at the age of 7. Back then, the entire live scene consisted of nothing but enthusiasts. Nobody was a full-time promoter; everyone had a different job for a living. “Somehow they caught a virus and built this business,” Schoneberg told Pollstar. He also recalls the peculiar situation in federalist Germany in the ’70s, when national promoters were working with local promoters who knew the different local markets.

Over time the national promoters started exploiting this setup by forwarding all the risk to their local partners. “It was a thorn in the side of the English agents, who wanted one point of contact on site, not two,” he explains. Which is why the Konzertbüro Schoneberg is one of the companies in Germany breaking up these old structures. This doesn’t mean that Schoneberg isn’t working with local promoters, per se. In cities where he doesn’t have an office, where he’s unfamiliar with the infrastructure, he does.

Those partners include Landstreicher Booking in Dresden and Leipzig and Chimperator Live in Stuttgart. “Because we’re promoting most of our shows ourselves, we can make more relaxed deals with our partners. We’re not concerned with anybody else taking on our risk. My knees don’t buckle when I’m promoting shows. Schoneberg says, “promoters are better when they’re working with their own money. If somebody pays you a guarantee to take your band on tour, you might end up promoting a band you don’t even care about.”

His main concern has always been the customer, not the artist. “The audience is boss,” he says, which is why he takes care of the few complaints his company occasionally receives personally. “I have to do that because the customer has a contractual agreement with me. If I didn’t deliver, even if the artists on stage didn’t deliver, I need to deal with it.” Taking on personal responsibility is one of the key qualities people working at the Konzertbüro have to bring with them.

Schoneberg selects his staff according to their personality (“we don’t want assholes”), and he likes to give them time to develop at their own pace. “I never understood people who choose somebody for who they are and then try and change them to what they want them to be,” he said. And he wants them to share. “Everyone is allowed to know everything. That includes all contacts. I want everyone to have all the information available,” he said. The live entertainment market has become very crowded.

What once was a back-of-the-napkin business has turned into a highly professionalized industry. Everybody needs to operate on top of their game. “Live Nation are doing a great job,’ he told Pollstar. “It’s our job to match their standards in all areas: communication, marketing, graphics, back office, accounting, ticketing. You have to be able to perform on the same level.

“The difference lies in the fundamental approach to the business. And you’ll always have artists and managers who want to work with independents. You might even have a manager who advises one of his acts to work with AEG and another one to work with an independent promoter.” 

The promoter says he learns a lot about the future from his kids.

And while owning music on a physical medium has no relevance for their generation, people are always going to pay money to go to concerts. Of that, he is sure. It is one of the reasons Schoneberg believes that ticket prices are only going to increase in Europe. “I think we’ve got a sensational product, that won’t ever disappear. And I think we can charge more for this experience.”

He is convinced that the industry will start pricing tickets dynamically going forward. “It’s reasonable, and it helps everyone involved. It is also the only valid method to curb the secondary market in my opinion. And it will lead to more sold-out shows.” Pricing isn’t the only change he anticipates. “Artists are paying much more attention to costs, as live is their No. 1 income stream. Thus, transparency will increase. The trend is for promoters that operate on an industrial scale to increasingly promote shows entirely on their own, without a local promoter that needs to be paid as well.”

Schoneberg understands that this worries many of the smaller companies that rely on the big content to operate profitably. He also understands, however, that you cannot blame anybody for conducting their business in the way they do. Schoneberg feels quite comfortable about the future, one in which he’d like to accomplish two things: growing faster than the market on average and improving results year-on-year. “I don’t need to grow in a dramatic fashion, but I want to have a nice annual result, even in bad years.

Among other things we’ll need reliable and resilient long-term partnerships to achieve this. We won’t be looking into venues or festivals in the coming years. I don’t think there’s a need for more festivals, and why should we enter a market that’s saturated?

And Schoneberg has one bit of advice to share with up and coming promoters: “No concert in this world is worth a sleepless night. If you’re not able to sleep well after making a deal, it means you shouldn’t have done it. You cannot threaten your existence for a bloody concert.”