Pollstar Live! 2024 Panel Preview: Music, Basketball & The Intuit Dome Featuring Steve Ballmer With Jeff Ament

February 8, 10:15-11 AM, LA Ballroom P2

Keynote speakers:
Steve Ballmer, Intuit Dome
Jeff Ament, Pearl Jam

Intuit Dome, a soon-to-be-opened arena with a reported price tag hovering around $2 billion, wasn’t only designed as the new home of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Los Angeles Clippers. The team’s owner, Steve Ballmer, had a vision of creating the ultimate venue for music and basketball fans alike.

Those two worlds of live entertainment will intersect at Pollstar Live! in the form of a panel discussion featuring Ballmer, among the wealthiest individuals in the world, and Jeff Ament, bassist of influential Seattle rock band Pearl Jam, as key speakers. The highly anticipated conversation titled “Music, Basketball & the Intuit Dome” will surely give insight into the Clippers owner’s vision of the live experience at the state-of-the-art venue near L.A. in Inglewood, California, as well as Ament’s love for the sport and music.

The Intuit Dome hasn’t opened its doors yet — the arena is slated to open in August — yet already is making history. At a noisy Jan. 16 press conference during which sawing could be heard in the background, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver announced that the site will host the All-Star Game in 2026 and confirmed Ballmer’s claim that the league had never been awarded to a building still being constructed.

“Not only are there five courts, [but] there is technology that is unmatched in any facility I’ve ever seen,” Silver told reporters at the Intuit Dome construction site. “I think no doubt Steve [Ballmer] and [Clippers President of Business Operations] Gillian [Zucker] have been meticulous about looking at every single detail.”

And the details are remarkable. Intuit Dome will boast advanced tech including grab-and-go concessions and purchases as well as seats implanted with chips that inform venue operators how often people are seated, standing or away from their chair. It even measures how loud they are cheering.

“I want this to be the penultimate basketball experience on the planet, as good as it gets, the pinnacle and the peak,” Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, said on Jan. 16. “Now of course, some year somebody will bypass us, but man, we put everything into getting ahead of that into this building.”

Ament can certainly appreciate such amenities at a venue — not only as the bassist for one of the most successful global acts of the 21st century but as an avid basketball fan and former athlete. Prior to signing a record deal, Pearl Jam was originally called Mookie Blaylock, named after the then-New Jersey Nets point guard, and the band’s debut album, Ten, was a nod to Blaylock’s jersey number. Ament, a former jock and fan of the Seattle Supersonics (a franchise that relocated to Oklahoma City in 2008 and renamed the Thunder), not only wears his fandom on his sleeve but displayed it on his bass guitar with the names of NBA stars written on the instrument.

“I wanted to be inspired 100% of the time I was playing music,” Ament told ESPN’s Kenny Mayne in 2013. “And by putting the names of my most inspirational pro basketball players on the bass, at any given time if I felt like the mojo was slipping, I would look down at the bass and see Nate Archibald’s name and get fired up.”

With Ament’s fandom and Ballmer’s passion, there’s no doubt Pollstar Live! attendees will be just as fired up to hear about music and sports at the ultimate venue that will be Intuit Dome.