Midem 10: European Executives Making An Impact

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To go along with our debut Impact 50 list, we have selected 10 European executives impacting the continent’s live market. This dovetails with the June 4-7 Midem conference in Cannes, France – where Pollstar is programming the Live Summit content.

While this group is by no means comprehensive, it is meant to highlight the individuals without whom Europe’s live events scene wouldn’t be the same today.

Lucy Dickins
Lucy Dickins, head of WME’s UK music division from June, is having her busiest year yet. Fresh off a tour with James Blake, who completed a U.S. headline run in March, she’s been on the road with Mumford & Sons, which is currently playing European arenas. The band completed the first North American leg of its ongoing Delta tour with a sold-out performance March 31 at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, drawing 17,157 and racking up a $1.2 million gross. It was one of three shows that catapulted the Grammy-winning rockers to the top of Pollstar’s new LIVE75 chart in April.

– Lucy Dickins

Mumford & Sons is the perfect example of an act who “really grass-rooted it,” according to Dickins, who remembers, “We played every single venue regionally. There was a moment when you could just tell by the vibe in the room, and how quickly we were selling tickets out, that something was coming.”

Dickins says she’s met “everyone I work with today at small grassroots venues, where they all started out.” That includes Laura Marlin, Jack Penate, who introduced her to Adele, and Jamie T, whose comeback in 2014 Dickins considers a career highlight.

Another one was Adele’s two nights at Wembley Stadium in 2017, where she played to 98,000 per night, breaking the attendance record for concerts at the venue. Dickins says, “The memories of that whole tour will stay with me forever.”

The show that had the most impact on her career, seeing that it was the first band she signed and broke, was Hot Chip at the Astoria in London some 14 years ago. “That was like: ‘I’ve made it. My band’s got to the Astoria.’ Looking back, what was it, like 1,000 cap? But at the time it was a real benchmark of your career when you got to play the Astoria.”

Other artists on her roster people should have on their radar include Rex Orange County, MorMor, King Princess and Mabel. “I’ve got quite a few,” says Dickins.

Jackie Lombard
Jackie Lombard, Independent Promoter and Producer, Inter Concerts, has been shaping the live industry of France ever since promoting Neil Diamond in 1979. She remembers receiving a call from producer Jerry Weintraub. “He believed in me and was committed to bringing women up in the business. I didn’t have any money to put up, but he gave me the chance to showcase my abilities in marketing.”

– Jackie Lombard

When the concert sold out in a matter of hours, Lombard receiving a call from Neil Diamond himself, who wanted to know if she was joking. “He didn’t know he was this loved in France,” she recalls.

From then on, Lombard started receiving calls from the representatives of some of the world’s biggest acts, which over the years included Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Madonna, The Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, George Michael, Queen, Celine Dion, Pink, Paul McCartney, Lionel Richie, U2, Adele, Beyoncé and many more.

“Promoting or developing each of those artists changed my life, a different way every time,” Lombard says.

Another exhilarating moment: launching Prince in France in 1981. “Nobody knew who he was in France. On the night, he stepped on stage in a bikini holding a guitar, three hours after he was supposed to start. This introduction was a seismic shift in both mine and Prince’s career,” Lombard remembers.

After her first few victories, established French promoters felt threatened by her growing status as the only successful female promoter in France with access to international acts. “Three of the largest French promoters partnered and formed the company Zero Productions to block me from the profession because I was a woman. 

They did everything they could to assassinate my career, including leveraging their friendship with Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, to blacklist me from venues and send tax inspectors after me. Twelve tax auditors crashed the Rod Stewart concert at Palais des Sports to put me down,” Lombard recalls.

“Those were very hard times,” she remembers. “I vowed to take back all the artists they had sabotaged my concerts with, and to put them out of business.” Which she did, with crucial support from Freddy DeMann, who offered her Madonna and later on Shakira; and Jim Morey and Marcel Avram, who represented Michael Jackson. “[They] believed in me and reciprocated the loyalty I built my relationships on.”

Lombard is about to embark on a couple of “thrilling projects” this year, including promoting the Elton John farewell tour in France, and continuing the season with Pink; and Tom Jones, whose 1971 show at the Olympia in Paris sparked Lombard’s love for live music. She also helps curate Touquet Music Beach Festival, Aug. 23-24.

“On top of this, I am producing an exciting Italian feature film, and I just opened my record label,” she revealed, adding that “details will stay under wraps for now.”

John Reid

Live Nation’s President of Europe-Concerts, John Reid is making sure Europeans are being served live with all of music’s greats. From 2016 to 2018, Live Nation’s international concerts, which include those on the European mainland, increased nearly 24% to 10,810 events while fans internationally who attended LN concerts for the same period catapulted up a massive 41% to 31.6 million.

– John Reid

This year looks like it’s going to dwarf 2018, thanks to Live Nation’s extensive festival portfolio covering most markets, as well as a “particularly strong set of outdoor shows,” which includes BTS, Ed Sheeran, Metallica and Vasco Rossi, who are all on tour.

Reid used to helm Warner Music in the UK before joining Live Nation in 2011. He was instrumental in building the global careers of some of the world’s biggest artists, including Michael Bublé, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Madonna, Green Day, Linkin Park, Muse, James Blunt, and Enya (he did pass on Amy Winehouse, though, which he considers his biggest miss).

The thing that made Reid switch from the recorded music sector to live – after being “too terrified to make the jump” for several years – was CEO Michael Rapino’s vision. “His business model has led the way for the development of the industry and it’s been a hell of a lot of fun to be on the team that has executed that vision. They really are a great bunch of people to work with,” he says.

Rapino is also among Reid’s top-three mentors, right behind “Paul McGuinness, [U2’s former manager] who opened a lot of doors for me when I was a young artist manager, and [label exec] Roger Ames, who persuaded me to move from the live business and become a record company guy and taught me how to run a P+L along the way.”

Now that he’s fully immersed in live again, Reid says, “Our focus is on securing headliners and the touring business for next year and 2021, and how we improve our offering and the customer experience for the future.”

Es Devlin
Es Devlin, Artist and Stage Designer, writes visual languages. She is the woman conceiving the stage designs of the world’s major tours. Her sketches on paper are the blueprints for the engineers, so they can create six-story tall, revolving TV screens for Beyoncé to take on tour.

– Mes Devlin

From giant chess pieces for a Richard Wagner opera to shark tanks for Kanye West, Devlin’s aim when creating is to communicate as poetically as possible with the audience.

“When I say poetic I just mean language at its most condensed. Like a song lyric,” she said at a recent TED Talk.

If one scratches the surface of Devlin’s past work, one finds the stage designs for The Weeknd at Coachella 2018 and Lorde at Coachella 2017, plus the most recent tours by U2, Adele, Miley Cyrus, Kanye West and Jay-Z, Take That, Muse, Lady Gaga and many more.

Devlin refers to her work as “stage sculpture,” fully aware that what she’s really sculpting is the audience’s experience, which, according to her, places a great amount of responsibility on the designer.

“When you design a pop concert, the prime material you’re working with doesn’t take trucks or crew to transport, it doesn’t cost anything, and yet it fills every atom of air in the arena before the show starts. It’s the audience’s anticipation. Our first task is to deliver on their anticipation. To deliver their first sight of the performer,” she says.

At Adele’s most recent stadium tour, fans’ first visual experience consisted of a giant image of the singer’s sleeping eyes. If the audience had been able to hold their excitement then and there, they would have even heard Adele breathing.

U2’s huge LED rectangle during “Experience + Innocence” took the audience on a three-decade long journey through politics, poetry and music. It’s one thing to imagine a street connecting the band’s past to its present, but another to have the imagination to project that street onto a LED screen that can be entered by Bono.

For Devlin, it’s a way of letting artists become protagonists in their own poetry.

Many of Devlin’s ideas are initially deemed technically impossible. And, frankly, looking at stage designs like the one for the opera “Carmen” at Bregenz Festival in Austria – Carmen’s hands rising out of Lake Constance, flicking a deck of cards onto the stage – one still cannot comprehend how it was done.

Klaus-Peter Schulenberg
Live Entertainment Europe is ruled by CTS Eventim. The German live entertainment giant comprises 27 promoters across the continent, including the most recent acquisition of TCI in Russia.

– Klaus-Peter Schulenberg

CTS Eventim CEO Klaus-Peter Schulenberg bundled the promoting forces of this network under the banner of Eventim Live. Together they produce 27 festivals in eight countries, as well as some 5,000 live events with 10 million visitors in 10 countries each year.

CTS Eventim was founded in 1989 by Germany’s largest promoters at the time, who weren’t able to keep their competitiveness at bay, even under the same umbrella. Schulenberg, who used to work as an artist manager and concert promoter himself, and had been investing in companies from an early age, bought Eventim in 1996.

At the time, it generated around DM (Deutsche Mark) 6 million per annum. Today, under Schulenberg’s leadership, it makes more than 1 billion, no matter the currency.

In 2018, CTS Eventim sold approximately 250 million tickets worldwide. The company has been acquiring promoters in Europe over the past years, and reporting record quarter after record quarter.

CTS Eventim also owns venues, including Cologne’s Lanxess Arena, which ranked No. 6 in Pollstar’s Year End Worldwide Ticket Sales Top 100 Arenas chart, and the Eventim Apollo in London, which ranked No. 122 in the Worldwide Top 200 Theatres category.

Schulenberg still sees a wide range of options for growth, nearly all over Europe. He told Pollstar, “We continue to benefit from the fact that more and more customers are buying their tickets online. In the long term, we want to develop our web shops from event portals into leisure portals. We believe that in the future we will be able to sell not ‘just’ a ticket, but various related offers as well.”

Peter Smidt
Peter Smidt is the Founder of Eurosonic Noorderslag and Amsterdam Dance Event, two of the world’s most important gatherings of artists and music business professionals.

– Peter Smidt

What really qualifies him for special honor, however, is the fact that, by sheer numbers, he is one of the most influential concert promoters in Europe. In 2003, Smidt’s launched the European Talent Exchange Program, which has facilitated 4,001 shows by 1,444 artists since its inception.

His favorite phrase is “circulation of European talent in Europe,” and his entire career has been dedicated to achieving just that. From seeing his first concert by Long Tall Ernie & The Shakers as a kid to being impressed by Mojo Concerts’ “master of production” John Mulder in his 20s,  it all contributed to Smidt’s love for new music and presenting it to an audience.

This love also inspired Smidt to come up with a concept for a battle of the bands 33 years ago, when he was asked to organize a music event at the Oosterport in Groningen, where Eurosonic Noorderslag takes place to this day.

Eurosonic Noorderslag has evolved from a clash of bands from Europe to one of the Continent’s most important events for new music and business discussions. And the main question has remained the same, according to Smidt: “Are we as an industry able to develop new talent? We need to develop new talent all of the time, that’s the name of the game.”

Fruzsina Szép
Fruzsina Szép’s story is one of overcoming the odds. When she was still a child, her family fled from communist Eastern Europe to Germany, forced to leave her father behind. They were later reunited in a hush-hush operation, which could serve as a script for a thriller.

– Fruzsina Szep

Today, more than 30 years later, Szép is Festival Director of Lollapalooza Berlin. Four years in a row, thanks to the authorities, she was forced to move the festival to different locations around the German capital, which basically meant creating a new festival from scratch each year.

Since 2018 the festival has taken place at Berlin’s iconic Olympic Stadium, and Szép says, “We’re here to stay.” She considers her team’s perseverance with Lolla Berlin one of her most impactful successes.

It doesn’t mean the fifth year doesn’t have its challenges. Thanks to the stadium’s busy schedule the Lolla team has only five days including load in to set up the entire event, which takes place Sept. 7-8. The lineup includes Rita Ora, Khalid, Twenty One Pilots, Billie Eilish and the only Germany shows in 2019 by Swedish House Mafia and Kings of Leon.

Szép is surprised the festival hasn’t caused her to end up in a “psychiatric hospital.” It was the music that reminded her of why she was putting herself through this. “Music is the only drug I take every day and every night, and I want to continue this until I hear the last tune, before I have to close my eyes forever, but for sure never my ears.”

Stuart Camp
What does it take to say someone has a massive impact? Does a tour gross in one year of $432,398,856 qualify? Or ticket sales of 4,860,482?

– Stuart Camp

That’s what Ed Sheeran’s “Divide” tour achieved in 2018, and, according to the artist’s manager Stuart Camp, Owner of Grumpy Old Management, they could have played a lot more if the year had more days. They also could have easily raised ticket prices.

Unsurprisingly, Camp considers this current Ed Sheeran tour his most impactful success so far. And it’s not even over yet. “Don’t want to tempt fate with predictions with four months still to go, but we are on course to be the biggest tour ever in terms of attendance and I think it will be an achievement that will take a while to be beaten,” he says.

Ironically, a tour dubbed “Divide,” after Sheeran’s Grammy-awarded third studio album, will have united more concertgoers than any tour before.

The extensive run officially comes to an end in August, which is when “a relatively lengthy break will commence,” according to Camp, who says he’s always felt a pull from the live side of music, ever since witnessing the show that changed his life: R.E.M. at NEC Arena, Birmingham.

Today, he enjoys seeing the excitement of a live concert on other people’s faces. “Seeing people see Ed live for the first time is always the greatest thing, they’ve no idea what they’re getting … even now, though the number who haven’t seen him is dwindling, of course.”

The success is all the more impressive considering the average ticket price was $88.96, which is $37.79 below 2018’s Top 10 average ticket price of $126.75, leaving a whopping $184 million on the table.

Says Camp: “Our whole MO is to give people a great show, and not stiff them on prices or the experience – and I think these numbers show we have succeeded with that.”

Emily Eavis

– Emily Eavis

Emily Eavis is the co-organiser of Glastonbury Festival, the 12-time Pollstar Award winner in the International Festival category and arguably the world’s most important festival.

The youngest daughter of  Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis, Emily grew up on Worthy Farm, where the festival takes place almost every year. Their farmers’ mindset shines through in each fallow year, when Glastonbury, and 200,000 fans, take a break to give the land a well-deserved rest.

The main fallow year project is social housing on the farm. By 2020, the year Glastonbury turns 50, there will be 53 houses completed – all new rental-only houses built on the farm and run by a housing association. All the stone comes from Worthy Farm quarries and is dressed by Michael Eavis’s workers.

2019 is no fallow year. The Killers, The Cure, Stormzy, Kylie Minogue and Janet Jackson top this year’s lineup poster. They are the tip of the iceberg of what is literally thousands of artists if one includes all the band members along with theatre, cabaret and circus acts.

Eavis recently called it a “spread of performing arts,” in an interview with Apple Music’s Beats 1. The 1975’s Matt Healy once said in an interview with the same radio station: “Glastonbury, give us a year. Reading and Leeds, I’d do it tomorrow,” which sums up the weight the festival carries in the minds of artists.

The festival is constantly announcing new initiatives in terms of sustainability, and still keeps adding to the attractions onsite, even though there’s already too much to explore in a couple of days. Visitors of Glastonbury 2019, for instance, will be able to walk along a full-fledged pier, which includes all the attractions one would expect on a UK pier as well as some surprises.

How does you top all of that for the 50th anniversary? Eavis remains silent. All she reveals is two headliners are already booked.

Barrie Marshall
In every European country, one will find those promoters responsible for building a live business from scratch. And most of them will tell you that Barrie Marshall, Promoter and Founder of Marshall Arts, has had a major impact on their careers, by facilitating his knowledge, contacts and artists, but also daring to go into markets no other promoter or agent would touch. His 20 Pollstar Award nominations in the International Promoter category – and seven wins – are indicative of the reputation he enjoys.

– Barrie Marshall

Marshall just returned with Paul McCartney from a brief jaunt through South America – where McCartney holds a record for most ticket sales in Brazil by any international artist. The shows were part of the ex-Beatle’s Freshen Up tour, which has grossed $45.4 million from 16 performances since launching in September, excluding the box office data from a fall run in Japan, which hadn’t been reported at press time.

Marshall says he has “the continuing honor of working with Sir Elton John,” who is completing the European stretch of his mammoth “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour, “setting records wherever he goes.”

Also currently touring from his roster are Pink, Cher, Herbie Hancock, as well as new talent including Fatai and Brazilian sensation Liniker. “I’ve been in this business a long time – but I believe the priorities remain the same: it’s all about the artist and the audience – both need equal respect, with attention to detail and care for everyone,” says Marshall.

To this day, the veteran promoter, who calls Arthur Howes a “mentor” and Bill Graham a “hero,” arrives at every venue early, and goes through a checklist for seats, the box office, security, front of house and backstage. “I will be at the doors when they open, and around the building until the show starts.

“If all is in order,” and Marshall emphasizes the if, “I watch at least part of the show. Because the show is the reason to do everything else – and to see the audience having a great time.”