‘A Year Of Introspection & Reinvention’: Voices Of Live With Alex Mizrahi, CEO Of OCESA Seitrack

Mizrahi took some time to chat with Pollstar about the many different branches of his work and his approach to what has been one of the craziest years of his career. 

Alex Mizrahi: This has been a year of introspection and reinvention. The technology wasn’t ready at the beginning of the pandemic, livestreaming was easy on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, but these platforms were not set up to put on high-level productions or to sell tickets to performances. The world was not ready. 

But in the first months we found that the artists needed to do messaging campaigns, telling people to be careful, use masks, wash hands. Mexico is a country where the government can’t always tell everyone what to do. People rely on messaging from public figures. They needed Alejandro Fernández to tell them if it’s not necessary to leave, stay in your house, it’s not right to go out right now. So we started out just getting our artists to do this messaging, telling people what they should be doing. 

So as our artists were doing this social messaging and we were working with mask companies, we decided to really look at our approach to marketing and put our resources towards that. For Mother’s Day, we put on a show from Alejandro Fernández, sponsored by Grupo Modelo. Mexican mothers could have a concert on Mother’s Day and it was put on for millions of people. For one of our rock festivals we had a bunch of programming that wasn’t necessarily concerts. One of our artists gave fitness classes, sponsored by a bank, she explained how people could stay in shape while the gyms were closed. 

We looked at the ways artists could give other experiences to people while they weren’t going to venues, and we did about 185 of these experiences in 2020. If you compare the revenue to the approximately 1,000 concerts that we were doing annually, and you add in the revenue we had from January, February and March of 2020 … Seitrack was able to take in 25 to 30 percent of what we normally earn.

This number seems small, but this is the number that was able to save the company. 

We reached a point where we were able to say: “OK, well not all of this time is time lost. There are things we cannot do during this pandemic, but there are things we can do,” and we were able to direct our attention towards the things we were able to do. 

We were also able to really reflect more about how much time we spend with our families, and other areas of our lives. Artists were able to generate new music, new opportunities, and Seitrack was actually able to sign six new artists during the pandemic. Some people thought we were crazy because this is a period of economic contraction, and we are doing the opposite, expanding. We continue signing artists to make music, to find these new opportunities for them. 

And now we can see a light in the U.S., some very important artists are going to tour the U.S. in the coming months. We are starting to see signs there will be some sense of normality, but we are thinking about what a new normal will look like, because it will not be a magic switch that we flip to go back to 2019. We are never going to go back to exactly the way things were before, we have to incorporate new technology and approaches for everything we do in the future.

Nothing is certain right now. In Mexico, things are going much slower than the U.S. 

We see in the U.S. how Biden is promising all of these goals related to vaccinations and economic recovery. 

In Mexico, we are simply not there yet. So right now, we need to still be focusing on the intermediary period. 

The first thing to come back in Mexico were drive-in concerts. Some of those worked and some of them didn’t, but we learned from the experience. 

After that, in Mexico City, we tried doing shows in open spaces with limited capacity and distancing guidelines. This type of show is much more complex than drive-ins because you just have a fixed number of cars you can let in, but you can fit a lot more people, even into a limited capacity show. 

So right now we are talking about doing drive-thru concerts in April, limited-capacity shows in July, August and September, and, hopefully, limited capacity arena shows in November and December. 

Well, when we were going through the piracy crisis, when we started adopting the 360 model, it was out of necessity. We were losing a lot of money, and we did that because we knew we had to do something to distinguish ourselves from our competitors …

Similarly, during the pandemic, we were encouraging all of our artists to keep producing music. Some would ask, “Why are you making so much music? You aren’t going to be able to go on tour.” But in 2020 music consumption went up, we saw lots of growth. Peoples’ habits are changing, and as they are consuming more and their consumption is increasing, the demand is increasing. Especially young people, fans in the youngest demographic, they really are demanding new music from their artists about every four or five weeks. This new generation is creating a whole new rhythm of consumption, and we have to identify that and respond accordingly. 

It was a very natural transition. Working as a lawyer in mergers and acquisitions, especially in business, has been super useful. 

There is a phrase: “You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.” Mergers and acquisitions is very boring, but one day you might be working with a hotel, another you might be doing a tuna cannery, or a radio station. So I was well trained to understand business relations from many different industries and perspectives. 

Well I’m not an executive in the promoter arm of OCESA, so I honestly am not aware of the details related to this. I do know that Alejandro Soberón and Michael Rapino have an incredible relationship. This deal was being constructed for years, and all the obstacles that had held it up had finally been worked out, basically right before the pandemic struck. As a lawyer, I understand perfectly how the pandemic may have messed that up. This situation will now require everyone to go back and look at things again, since these are anything but normal conditions, and everyone will need some time to see how things shake out. 

It is very logical how things turned out, but I really think OCESA and Live Nation are two incredible companies with a lot of capacity.