Frank Riley and Jack Randall: NITO’s Founding And Incoming Presidents Look To The Future

NITO – the National Independent Talent Organization – has elected a new president, officers and added board members for the coming year. High Road Touring founder Frank Riley will pass the president’s gavel to Jack Randall, president and agent at The Kurland Agency, and exit the board after co-founding and leading the indie agents and managers advocacy and trade group that emerged during the COVID crisis in 2020.

Pollstar had a lengthy conversation with both Riley and Randall, talking about goals going forward, the pandemic that brought the independent sector of the concert industry to the halls of government to protect those vulnerable businesses, and why it is important for NITO – and its sister indie trade organization, the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) – to continue the momentum forged from desperate times.

Pollstar: Congratulations to both of you: Jack, for being elected president, and Frank, for completing your term as NITO’s first president.
Frank Riley: The remarkable thing about NITO was the 14 original members all became part of their board of directors. And for two and a half years, every one of us worked in a cooperative way.

We had disagreements here and there, but we never had a fight, not a single one. And you know what? We’re all independent. We all have our ways of doing things. The reason we’re not part of some big corporation is because we’re individuals, and individuals tend to have fights. But we didn’t. We just threw it all in and said, “all for one, one for all,” and went for it.
And out of that cooperative venture, we achieved a lot. And I nominally had my name on it as the president, but I was one of 14 people who worked their asses off to get this done.

Jack Randall: I feel both overwhelmed and honored, all at the same time. It’s really nice to be nominated by and voted on by those same people that Frank spoke of; many of the originals are still on the board.

I’m also super thankful that I don’t have all the things that Frank had to deal with at the start. There’s not a pandemic. We’re not fighting but lobbying for the economic lives of our business and careers.

Now that we’ve banded together, we certainly have a lot of common interests.

Now that the existential crisis of the COVID pandemic has passed, NITO has moved its focus toward ticketing, which seems to have become another kind of crisis.

FR: About a year ago, I was pretty burned out. I have two jobs. I run High Road Touring and I was running NITO. But we didn’t have a clear focus on what would be an appropriate way forward for NITO to stay together and to find common ground. And this whole ticketing thing started to drive me crazy, and it’s why I stayed for another year.

I really wanted to push the NITO membership into this (ticketing) world. And then my best friend, Bruce Springsteen, and my other best friend, Taylor Swift, showed up and said, “You know, ticketing sucks.” That just underlined the point of what the next item on the agenda was.

And I think we all have issues with what’s going on with ticketing and from every different perspective: I’m sure Ticketmaster, Live Nation, AEG, The Kurland Agency, High Road Touring, NITO, NIVA, all have insights and perspectives on this.

I don’t think there’s one magic bullet solution. It’s a process that we all have to come to. But, in the end, NITO stands for protecting and holding dear the rights of artists to control their shows, their tickets, their performances, their content. All of it is owned by them. And it’s our job as their representatives to protect them in that pursuit.

JR: When I talk about this with people who aren’t in the industry, one of the things I’ll do is try to explain because, in many cases, they’re consumers. They buy tickets to events.
I ask people, as an example, to imagine this: “I did a little research and I found out when winter break was for all the schools around Boston. And I had a lot of money and I bought all the nonstop plane tickets to Orlando from Boston for those two weekends. And on top of it, I still have some money left. I’m going to buy all the hotel rooms at Disney World and Universal Studios, and then I’m going to take those tickets and I’ll take those hotel rooms. Then I’ll go online, and I’m going to sell them for as much as I can get. And no one can do anything about it.”

That sounds like a heck of a VIP package.
JR: Right. And I can’t do that. And you can’t do that. None of us can do that. And I would argue that neither should anyone else be able to do that. That’s really the bottom line.

You were all able to bring your concerns to Capitol Hill, again, which I’m sure nobody would have believed just a few years ago.
JR: When we all went to the NIVA conference in July, about 125 of us met with the staffs of congresspeople and senators on Capitol Hill. I live in New Hampshire, and I actually ended up meeting directly with my own congressmen.

If you would’ve told me in February of 2020 that I would have played watchdog in Washington, lobbying for something that became law in this country, or met with my congresswoman to get her support on a pending piece of legislation, I would have looked at you like you had two heads on your shoulders.

Yet many other major industries have organized to advocate for their interests on the Hill. Is it kind of mind-boggling that the concert industry hadn’t until NITO and NIVA did it?
JR: Yeah, it is. In that regard, it’s also even more mind-boggling that we actually got a $16.5 billion carve-out (including the Shuttered Venue Operator Grant), led by two organizations that only existed for seven months prior to getting that.

It’s been a remarkable collaboration between NITO and NIVA, and it was really on display, I think, during that NIVA conference this summer and the visit to the Capitol that you refer to.

FR: We were aligned with NIVA almost before NIVA actually had a name, and I always describe NIVA as our sister organization. Dayna [Frank, owner of First Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota] and I worked really closely through the entire process, and the NIVA and NITO boards were aligned really closely.

JR: I’m already talking to NIVA about the conference next year. I think you’ll see even a stronger NITO presence.

One thing I’m happy about is I had a really nice, initial 45-minute conversation a couple of weeks ago with NIVA’s new executive director [Stephen Parker], and we go back quite a way, as I do with NIVA’s new president, Andre Perry.

After coming out on the other side of COVID, and deciding to continue the work, both organizations are heading into a new phase.

FR: Dayna said to me as I came out of a conference panel, “You know, Frank, the sign of a strong and healthy organization is when you can hand the leadership off to somebody new.” That was the validation I needed to know that I could say, “It’s time for me to give this up.” And that was that. That’s how close Dayna and I are about how we think and how much I respect her and her leadership and where she took all of us on this long road.

Frank, you’ll leave this role and go back to focusing on High Road. And Jack, it’s your turn in the hot seat. What are your goals for NITO going forward?
JR: Definitely, ticketing reform is probably first and foremost. There’s certainly other issues as well. One is the expectation from buyers, and from a lot of summer concert series and festivals, for the acts to have their own indemnity insurance.

Acts at a certain level have that. But I have a lot of clients that aren’t at that level, and that’s becoming challenging and problematic for them. Part of me thinks, “Isn’t that part of producing? Why does that obligation need to be on the artist?”

It’s not an issue I have on a daily basis, but it’s happening more frequently and definitely something that I’m running into.

I would like to see us form even stronger alliances with some of the other independent live music organizations that are out there. I think that’s all in our best interests.

I try to walk my talk where I do an enormous percentage of my business with independent promoters.

I think the independent live music community, the ecosystem, with venues and with management companies, labels and agents – we all need to support each other. More than ever. So anything that I can do to try to build stronger alliances with those other entities, I want to do my best to do.

How did you make those alliances?
FR: We need each other. We have to be respectful of each other and we have to understand each other. It’s really crucial, because we all need each other and we all have to live together. So it’s an interesting concept in terms of process.

JR: Three or four things happened in a very quick order. One is, I think we all found those elements to be therapeutic. We all discovered we actually like each other and we all discovered that we needed to do something to save our own asses. And we figured out that we needed to have our own [alliances]. But we needed to do this.

Given your shared interests, then, why didn’t NITO and NIVA consolidate?
FR: I went to Dayna and said, “Can I bring this group of people under your umbrella?” And she said, “I’m sure we can sort out a way for that, but why don’t you talk to our lobbyist and see what she has to say? Whether you should have your own voice and your own lobbyist, or if you should join NIVA?” Their lobbyist from Akin Gump advised that we should have our own voice and that we could work together in a coordinated way. But if we were subsumed into the NIVA, we’d get lost within their larger group.

JR: For sure. And we hired our own lobbyist, someone that we didn’t have to explain what it was we did. That was important, too. And I will give us credit.

That might have been the most critical thing, at the end of the day, figuring that shit out at the very beginning. I’ll pat ourselves collectively on the back for that.

So with your own changing of the guard in the president’s seat, NITO has also elected new board members, brought back others and I see some new names on that roster. What does that mean to you?

JR: With the new folks, there’s definitely people already volunteering, wanting to do stuff for chairs, specific committees and that kind of thing.

It’s been nice. There’s new blood and they’re energized and they have different things that they feel passionate about.

We’re all part of the same community and, in all likelihood, something that’s important to them and meaningful to them is very likely meaningful to me and my clients as well.
That feels good to have some new people in there that are ready to roll up their sleeves and work.