Executive Profile: MooTV’s Scott Scovill Not Spinning His Wheels

“We had seven kids that were in Vegas and they went through hell. If you have anyone that was out there, they’re more affected than you know, probably,” Scovill said as MooTV won the Pollstar Award for video company of the year in 2018. “But to talk to them now and to hear them say, ‘I just want to get back out there and make people happy,’ that’s pretty incredible. This is to all of those kids. Thank you.”

Scovill himself has overcome and thensome, with triumphs like the late-2016 opening of the full arena-production rehearsal space Steel Mill in Nashville fully booked and complementing his CenterStaging studio facilities in New York and Los Angeles, and his MooTV and Moo Creative Media handling recent business for Garth Brooks, Chris Stapleton, Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley and many others, including close personal friend Brad Paisley.

He also has music coming out under his own name, available on Apple, Spotify and the other usual outlets, with even a Christmas album in the works. 

Encouraged by a group of friends from Norway, which Scovill nearly calls a second home, he has performed mostly incognito as the sometimes-frontman of The Spinning Wheels. “You can book shows over there and all the websites and everything’s in Norwegian. So, no one’s ever going to see you. It’s like you’re hidden.”

“A little over a year ago, we booked a festival as the opening act on the main stage. And two weeks later, they named the headliner and it was Brad Paisley,” Scovill says of the The Notodden Music Festival. “We hopped on the jet together, and I told his manager before we got on, I’m going to tell our boy something that’s going to blow his mind. Just know I’m not messing with him. I told him, ‘I’ll be there. I’m your opening act,’ and I’m laughing. ‘I’ve been singing in a band in Norway for years.’ I played him a little bit of music and he was like, ‘holy shit.’”

“The secret’s out because there’s no hiding it once Brad’s over there. I mean, hell, he brings 20 people with him I know, and several are my employees,” Scovill said, adding that it ended up being a great show. 

Pollstar caught up with Scovill right as Chris Stapleton’s crew was rolling in for rehearsal at The Steel Mill, and as he prepared to head back for another trip to Norway.

Scott Scovill: MooTV is currently doing Garth Brooks, Hall and Oates, Brad Paisley, Chris Young, Chris Stapleton, Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley, Toby Keith, Maren Morris, Tame Impala…  They’re new. We’ve just been doing some spotty shows with them, but we love working with them.

Part of what has been helping keep everything going is that I have great captains.  MooTV has a new vice president in Jason 

Rittenberry and Jason has been the best fit. He is our kind of person and I’m so excited about him.

It’s awesome to be a part of it. I think our big challenge this year was also a point of great pride. The challenge is he’s only doing about 10 shows a year. So we have this massive amount of inventory a lot of the year. 

Garth is fiercely loyal. Years ago, when he came out of retirement, it was like the golden goose. I had a bit of a relationship with him. And at the end of the day, we convinced Garth that we were the right kind of people to bring on board. In that, I mean that my staff were the sort of people that he wanted to include in his road family. That was the deciding factor for him. We were not the cheapest bid.

Garth plays in the round in the stadium. He’s at one end but he’s in the round. So everything we do is four-sided, which makes it all just four times as much fear (laughs). But that’s great. There are four huge screens pointing in each direction. There’s not a design to the screens because he wanted them to be as big as they could be. So as big as that stage can hold, there’s four huge rectangles sitting, firing in each direction. The four columns that hold the roof in the air, we’ve surfaced with video. Basically everything that could have video on it, has video on it.

If you’ve never seen Garth, there’s something really special about it. Great entertainers make the audience love them, but somehow Garth lets you know that he loves you and that’s what makes it extra special.

I’m as proud of his current show as I have been of one of his shows. The challenge with a guy like him is trying to figure out what to do that’s new and different. And one of the things that makes me so proud to know Brad is that he’s absolutely brilliant. You can hand him any piece of software and he masters it faster than anyone, even really deep animation software. He’s learned that and does a lot of that. You can hand him a brush and he’ll do an oil painting with the big broad Van Gogh-style strokes and you’re just in awe. 

Well, we’re busier than we’ve ever been. We’re always full from January to June, but we’ve started to see some traction outside of that window, which is great. Country music is so seasonal. We’re starting to see more pop and rock action there.

There’s only two spots in Nashville that are rehearsal facilities that you can do an entire show in, and it’s us and the side car off of the (Bridgestone) Arena. Other than that, you’ve got to rent a venue. The room is over 200 feet long and over 100 feet wide and high ceilings and load bearing. We’ve got as much as 68,000 pounds on the ceiling with the Kenny Chesney stadium rig. It’s all engineered of course. It’s secluded, in sight of downtown but not right there. We have tons of parking and you’re not going to get a bunch of guests dropping in to bother your rehearsals. We’re just far enough away.

One of the challenges with the bigger shows is that with a massive high-res screen, there start to be data challenges because there are so many pixels. So you’ve got screens that are over 4K in resolution, it’s a lot of data to push. We’ve been stocking up on 5 mil LED, and we have lots and lots of it. 

There was a time when all your LED was 20, and then suddenly 15 became affordable and everybody wanted it. Then 9 came out. I feel like at 5 mil, the audience can’t see the difference if you’re a higher resolution than that. I feel pretty comfortable that 5 mil will be useful for a long time. Honestly, for most applications, 10 or 12 mil would be great, but the higher resolution sounds sexy and sells. More is more, right? We still have a demand for lower-resolution LED as well for applications where the act wants transparency. Brad Paisley, for example, uses a transparent screen so you can see the star drop behind it and create depth. It’s very effective. 

As usual we need to have some of everything to keep everybody happy. Luckily we stay busy, and tend to keep all of our pixels busy too. 

We’re all out there doing this. God, what a hard way to make a living. Just a really bad idea. Like, “Hey I think I’m going to be a video vendor.” Wow, that’s really dumb. It’s just awful (laughs).

But seriously, what’s really hard for my peers and I is to compete against companies that run upside-down and go bankrupt and we have to compete with them on price. That has killed the industry and continues to and I think probably will continue to. Because somebody’s getting rich while they’re hemorrhaging cash.

The great news for us is that we have a lot of clients that appreciate the difference and they’re willing to pay a little more for us. The drag is, they’re not willing to pay a lot more. But I don’t love money. What I love about this industry and what is rewarding is we make people happy for a living. We make people so happy they stand on their feet and scream. And that’s always been the currency. 

To me, we’ve pioneered an industry and that’s one of the things I’m really proud of. And I know I’m blowing my own horn and I’m sorry for that but nobody was doing content as content. There were people doing it on the side, but nobody was really looking at it as an industry. And so we formed MooTV to be a company that understands the needs of the music industry.