Q’s With Danny Hayes: Danny Wimmer Presents CEO Talks Metallica, Country, Yucaipa Investment

Danny Hayes is CEO of the company, and spoke with Pollstar the day it was announced Metallica would miss both Sonic Temple (Ohio, May) and Louder Than Life (Kentucky, September) while frontman James Hetfield continues to work on his own recovery after entering rehab in late 2019.

Danny Hayes: It’s definitely a bummer but at the same time, you have to respect them. We’ve seen enough in the industry, front and center. 

We really support him and want him to get healthy and we’re really proud of our fans. They seem to understand it and accept it. They respect that we’re going to give them options. Getting the Chilis (Red Hot Chili Peppers) and Tool for Sonic, to get them to say, ‘Hey we’ll cover for you,’ I think was amazing. They both stepped up on really short notice. We’re still working on Louder and what we’ll do there, but we’re very confident. There is no substitute for Metallica, but if you’re not getting Metallica you’re still going to be very happy with what you get. 

We saw signs of growth and the opportunity for Yucaipa came up. We had to find a likeminded partner who really understood our vision and understood what we saw for opportunities. We did not feel we could aggressively grow the company and take risks as an independent. You have to have the resources to take risk. We’ve experienced our share of losses – the 2018 festivals that got canceled in Louisville, we had a big loss at Epicenter – we matured as a company and while we see the opportunity, we can’t just keep taking risks and not having resources to do it. What we also did is secure a large line of credit with First Horizon Bank. They too really understood Danny and my vision to build the company. 

AEG were never investors in the company. DWP and AEG had those events as co-promoters. That’s where our interests aligned. We weren’t actually partners, they just co-owned two of our events and there were some 10 other events they didn’t. 

The lesson we learned from the AEG stuff is sometimes it’s hard to have partners, who may have different business objectives. Festivals serve different purposes in each of our portfolios. For us, Rock On The Range was our big event. For them, it was just one of many events. How you treat that may be very different.

We want to use the capital to buy independent promoters who have one or two or three festivals but don’t have the resources to grow, rather than try to start a whole bunch of new festivals – we’ll always start one or two here or there. The market is obviously overcrowded but, now, it’s about who can do it better and where can you find your margins. We’re very focused on the right independent promoters who need support. It’s getting harder and harder for indies and that’s why putting them together makes a lot of sense. We’re looking for all the young Danny Wimmers.

I think you’re going to see our acquisitions will be more mid-sized festivals. Our festivals have all grown to where we’re doing 25,000 to 40,000 people per day. That’s exciting but that’s also a big risk. So I think one of things we are going to use investment for is to diversify to smaller and mid-sized festivals with a goal not to grow them too massively. If I buy Ryan Fest and it’s doing 12,000, the goal isn’t going to be to grow to 20,000. Let’s maintain in the 12,000 range and set it up as its own franchise but not make it grow aggressively.

We will continue to build on our country platform and we may look to do acquisitions in other genres. We had 35,000 per day at Hometown and we’re really happy about that. We announced the second-year lineup just last week, and fingers crossed it does well, too.