– Rob Prinz

The Negotiators

ICM Partners’ Rob Prinz has been part of an agency team that has managed to weather the storm that is 2020 as well as anyone, and possibly better than most, to the point that it’s been able to hire agents at a time when others were letting them go. 

Rob Prinz, the agency’s co-head of worldwide concerts, attributes at least some of that to portfolio diversification but also to careful management of its assets, including its integration with Primary Talent.

As far as the concert calendar goes, “We’re just trying to do what we can to stabilize the business so we can take off again.,” Prinz tells Pollstar. One area ICM Partners has stood out in in 2020 is support of diversity. In June, the agency’s Travis Merriweather was the lead organizer of a June 7 march in support of Black Lives Matter. Prinz points out the agency has been at the forefont of diversity efforts. 

“For the years I’ve been at ICM, by far it’s been the most inclusive and diversified agency I’ve been a part of and that was before the horrible events this year,” Prinz says. “It’s a long time coming that this change takes place and we’re seeing the world, and our business, reacting and making changes. We’ve been doing it already.”

As long as Prinz has been in the agenting business, nothing beats being ahead of the curve when it comes to discovering and developing new artists.

“For me, nothing beats when you get an artist early in their career and the rest of the world doesn’t know about them yet,” Prinz says. “If you see something or hear something and get involved in a very early stage, and help them become household names, nothing beats that for an agent like me. 

“Whether it’s Jerry Seinfeld, Madonna, Celine Dion, when you sign somebody and take it to the world, that’s to me why I got into the business and gets my engine going every day. And I’ve had the ability to be a team leader. At ICM, what we’ve been able to build here with our young agents is very exciting to me. We’re having fun with it.”

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