Executive Profile: CAA Co-Head Of Global Touring Darryl Eaton On His Journey From The Skate Park To The Mailroom To The Top Of The Business

From the swamps of Slidell, Louisiana, to the skateparks of Southern California; from CAA’s mailroom to its corner office, Creative Artists Agency Co-Head of Global Touring Darryl Eaton has had the kind of rise that inspires ambitious young people to seek their futures in live entertainment.
His work ethic is apparent from his early days. Starting in CAA’s training program in 1991, Eaton would work all hours and developed a preternatural instinct for navigating Los Angeles’s hairy freeways. But he also caught some breaks. When he moved out of the mailroom — a move he partially credits to another kind of break (the kind that happens to leg bones) — he started in film, but a music agent recognized the spark that songs and shows lit within Eaton. He ended up on the legendary Carole Kinzel’s desk. In 1995, he joined with Kevin Lyman to create the Warped Tour, the touring, punky funfest that launched a thousand bands in its wake.
In his more than three decades at CAA, Eaton’s been critical in the music department’s expansion, leading its efforts to launch and grow its Electronic, Latin and Hip-Hop/R&B divisions.
Eaton was exposed to hip-hop during a college internship at Columbia Records and found the genre had the same anti-establishment sneer as the skate punk he loved. While Co-Head of Contemporary Music for North America, he oversaw daily operations for more than 100 agents and 280 staff.
He has an enviable client list including The Weeknd, Red Hot Chili Peppers, blink-182, Kelly Clarkson, A$AP Rocky, Enrique Iglesias, Arcade Fire, Miguel, Glass Animals and more; the first three acts were all in stadiums in 2023 and 2024.
In June, he took on his current role. Eaton, Rick Roskin and Emma Banks form a triumvirate at the top of CAA’s bustling music division, with Rob Light being elevated to CAA Managing Director.
Pollstar spoke to Eaton about his roots, his new role, where the industry’s going and what cleaning fingerprints off drinking glasses can teach future agents.
Pollstar: Do you remember when you fell in love with music? Was there an artist or a song or a moment in your early life?
Darryl Eaton: I don’t know if there’s a particular moment. I moved to California from Louisiana when I was about 8 or 9 years old and it was Orange County, California, which was kind of the bastion of surf-skate culture. I quickly adopted that whole kind of lifestyle and then what quickly followed was the punk rock music scene. I remember just setting up an oversized boom box on my driveway and skateboarding all day, back and forth listening to the likes of Social Distortion, so that turned me on to that kind of stuff. Music became more than something you listened to when you’re at home or in your car. It was kind of like an entire lifestyle, and that was the start and it just developed from there.
When I was in college, I helped a buddy who managed a couple of bands; he had a management company that I joined. I did an internship at Columbia Records. I was going to school in San Diego and on Fridays I would drive at five in the morning to L.A. and work at Columbia.
It was so eye-opening, because it was at that time when the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill had just come out. We were working on N.W.A, LL Cool J, Public Enemy. It was interesting for me to see all these hip-hop artists that were coming along.
I saw that as a transition of the whole punk rock scene, right? The political, anti-establishment lifestyle of the punk rock scene was evolving into that early hip-hop stuff. So I was still doing the punk rock thing, but that transition into that music opened my eyes to different genres, different worlds that had a similar ethos.
What was that like coming from Louisiana, where I don’t imagine there was much skate punk culture, to Orange County, which was the epicenter?
I lived in a place called Slidell, Louisiana, and it was a great place to be a kid. There were swamps and snakes and bugs and that whole free-range childhood thing where as long as you’re home by dark at age 6, you were cool, so I love that place and the culture of it. I do remember my parents taking me to town to go to Mardi Gras when I was a toddler. Just being able to stand in these crowds and collect candy and beads, it was a unique early childhood. And then I went straight into suburban Irvine, which was the perfect planned community, with a certain amount of green space per capita and a certain amount of community pools for population bases. It was very controlled, organized. It was a bit of culture shock.
That whole skate culture was my form of the swamps and reptiles that I was missing in Louisiana.
You started in the mailroom at CAA, which is a classic story. What was the mailroom like in those days?
My transition to the mailroom was an interesting one. I was living in New York at the time. I had gotten out of school and thought I had to do a business job and worked at an import-export company selling industrial pumps to Southeast Asia or some shit. It was tough and I remember I read in M magazine, which was an offshoot of W magazine, and the cover story was “If you’re young and hungry, Hollywood is the new Wall Street.” And I said, “That sounds interesting, I’m gonna move to L.A.” So I slept on my friend’s couch and started making the rounds, sending out resumes, looking for any job. I met somebody at a barbecue who was in the mailroom training and talked about the training program at CAA. I thought that sounded kind of cool, like it was the epicenter of everything that was going on. And at that point, I didn’t know if my future was in music or film or TV or whatever, I was just open for wherever there was an opportunity.
So I got an interview and had to travel back and forth. It was a tough gig to get in the ‘90s. It was a very, very, very, very hard gig to get into, but I made it into the mailroom. I still remember: I made $4.35 an hour and we worked 14- and 16-hour days, hustled packages, stocked refrigerators, cleaned glasses and moved chairs around.
It was interesting training in that it really taught you extreme attention to detail in everything you did, top to bottom. They instilled in you to get it done, no matter the cost. No one wants to hear an excuse; everyone wants to hear a success.
It really instilled this thing where you have to accomplish whatever goal no matter how mundane, you had to complete that goal. They’d have you clean the glasses before a meeting. You’d be standing on the outskirts and (CAA co-founder Michael) Ovitz would pick up a glass and look at it and see if there was a print on it. So there’s this hyper sense that everything you do must be measured and perfect.
It sounds stupid, but it’s something that carries through to the job today – doing paperwork and deals with the nuances and minuscule bits of everything.
At what point in your career did you realize, “That’s why Ovitz had me clean the fingerprints off the glasses, because it would pay off in these other ways”?
You get it as you go along, I think, if you’re smart enough to get it. You’re driving around, delivering packages and you learn how to do it all around Los Angeles; it taught you all of L.A. It taught you who was in what office and where their office was located and it made me really efficient. I could get from Century City to Burbank faster than anybody on the planet.
It was like a weird university and at the time maybe it seemed trivial and mundane and hard, but it all went to a purpose down the road.
When did you ascend that ladder out of the mailroom?
Interestingly, I kind of got lucky. I got in a car accident and blew out my leg; that helped me ascend to my assistant path quicker because I was kind of useless to them in the mailroom at that point. I started my career in the film world working for an agent named Paula Wagner, who was probably one of the greatest talent agents of all time. She was just a beast and had one of the greatest client rosters in film – she was amazing and driven and taught me a lot about how to be an agent.
She eventually went off with Tom Cruise to start Cruise/Wagner Productions and offered me the opportunity to go with them. I felt at that time that I had put so much energy and effort into CAA and, with that CAA culture, that I wanted to see that through.
I was always into music. Going to shows, and music was still a passion. One of the agents in music — Kevin Gasser — said “Dude, you’re a music guy. What are you doing up there? You [should] come work with us.” And so I came down and I started my career in this department working with Carole Kinzel as her assistant and she is still with us today. She’s a tremendous agent who’s taught me a ton. She’s also one of the queens of attention to detail with a great talent roster. She always has and still does.

Do you remember the first show or tour where Carole gave you a little bit of a leash to do it on your own?
She was working on a lot of artists at the time. It was Tina Turner, Janet Jackson, we were doing a bunch of those tours. But the first one I was able to get close to managing, where she had me helping her more directly, was Depeche Mode.
She let me go on the road with them for a couple of days and see what that was like. That was exciting and eye-opening, getting that first look at what working with a big touring artist was like.
And the promotion to agent came…
After years of toiling and struggling. I used to help a lot of the other agents around the department with their stuff and stay late at night and work a little more. Tom Ross, who ran the department, would always know that I would be there late and so he would call me to say, “Oh hey, I didn’t do this today. I didn’t do that. Can you send this to so-and-so? Can you do this here?” So I think that helped me get some attention to eventually get promoted.
That era seems so different from now. You weren’t booking 75-show tours with one promoter. You’re making 75 deals with 75 promoters and it’s all pen and paper and over the phone. Do you have any nostalgia for that era?
For sending faxes? No. I like the way things have evolved. With technology, you can do more, you can accomplish more, you can go more places. We were very linear. It was like, “OK, we’re gonna do this, then we’re gonna do that.” A good agent and a good agency now has to look at the world holistically. You’ve gotta think about how this artist is not just gonna get from point A to point B and make money. It’s now, “How are you gonna expand and develop their overall brand?” and then use the tour strategy to help them conquer the world.
In those days, when I started, there wasn’t email. One of the very first tours I did, and how I really got started, was when I met up with Kevin Lyman and we hatched this idea for the Warped Tour. We were the first tour I could find that had a website. I met with this artist in Venice (California) and he designed this monster truck theme. And we had this monster truck meets punk rock odd thing.
We got him to do the artwork and put up the bands — and one of the band’s names was spelled wrong — and we hosted that online. There were no links or anything, just “Here it is and here’s where we’re going.”
But we didn’t really have any technology. It was word of mouth and traditional media, though not a lot of radio stations were talking about the Swingin’ Utters in 1995.
You start with the Warped Tour and, in the last year and a half, you’ve had three acts — including blink-182 who was there from the jump with Warped — doing big stadiums. That has to be a bit of a challenge.
Yeah, blink was on Warped from the very beginning. The cool thing about the Warped Tour that I learned a lot from, and I learned a lot from Kevin, was how to treat fans and how to do the right thing by the audience, how to do the right thing by the artists, and the hard work that it takes to be out on the road. In the beginning years, I would go out on the road for quite a bit of the tours and do a lot of the manual physical labor that goes into launching a tour. I think it gives you a tremendous respect for the people and the bands who are out there on the road now, and what they have to go through being on the road.
If it’s the Chili Peppers or The Weeknd, I’m still thinking about the artist and what they have to do out there on the road but also everybody that’s involved in it, too. You look at everything as a complete community and how you take care of the people in your community while also expanding the artist’s career and taking them to the places where they need to go.
Stadium tours feel like a big change from 30 years ago. There’s so much stadium business now. Is that what we have to expect from now until the end of time, that everybody is going to try to be in a stadium?
There’s always been stadium tours throughout time. One of the first shows I ever went to was The Who at L.A. Memorial Coliseum and The Clash was the opening act, so I’ve been going to stadiums since I was 14.
It’s not new but there has been this whole proliferation of stadium tours in the last few years. The stadiums have become easier to work with. Traditionally, they were sports venues and, as time has gone on, the stadiums have been more and more acclimated to working with the needs of artists and artists’ production and crews.
The economics have actually gotten a little better even though touring expenses have gone through the roof. We’ve figured out how to do economies of scale by having more people in the stadiums sharing stages and all that.
There’s an allure to being outdoors. People like going to amphitheaters but those don’t exist everywhere and it’s creating that one great communal atmosphere under the skies in these buildings. It’s cool.
The stadium experience historically wasn’t that great because they weren’t built for music fans and bands, but over time it’s gotten more seamless. People are more used to going to stadium shows and also it’s a bit of a rite of passage for an artist to play a stadium.
The blink guys this year walked into the first stadium of the tour in San Diego and they were so awestruck and nervous, kind of freaking out, like they didn’t want to talk. With any of us, there are certain goals that “Hey, one day I’d like to try doing X” and if you’re a musician, I think it’s pretty damn cool to be able to say “I sold out SoFi Stadium” and to give you a bucket list, goal post moment of triumph.
What’s your big goal post now? Is it a show on Mars?
The big goal post for me now is doing it with other people here, developing the other agents in the agency and getting them to experience the stuff that I’ve gotten the privilege of experiencing throughout time. Almost every client I work on, I have one or two other agents involved with me on the project so that they have the opportunity to learn and achieve and do bigger things.
Look at Rüfüs Du Sol. This is an artist signed by Alex Becket, a young agent in our department. I’ve just been the chaperone on the team to help it along so that as things get bigger and bigger, I can impart some of the stuff that I’ve learned over time.
I like to say I fuck something up every week but you never fuck up twice. Getting to work with these other people, they get to benefit from all the mistakes and learning experiences I’ve made through time so that maybe they’re not making them and they can ascend faster to do bigger things and work with bigger clients.

What are festivals going through now? We hear about struggles with the big multi-genre festivals but it seems like the niche festivals are really successful. What’s your sense of where the festival business is going?
We all hear about and jump on the news of a festival that’s not working right or that falls apart or something, but for every one that doesn’t quite tick the boxes and do well, there’s two or three others that are popping up that seem to be figuring it out.
Look at Gov Ball, which was kind of faltering for a number of years and came on super strong this last year – it looks like they’re going to have a great year next year. I feel like the festival space is strong and continues to grow and I think the niche festivals continue to grab new audiences. Music is just so ubiquitous and now there’s so many different genres but people aren’t necessarily attached to just one genre. By having these festivals, you create a place for certain small segments to go and feel special but they still might be going to the big fests with all the artists. There’s so much vitality and strength going on there, it’s hard to poke any holes.
These last couple years of touring post-pandemic and looking at what we got going on next year, it’s just been gangbusters; ’24 comes up and smashes ’23 and then ’25 looks like it’s crazy.
It’s been really strong and there’s something to be said that the stay-at-home isolation created this need for people to get outside of that box and experience life in a communal fashion. Music provides them with that outlet that people might be finding it harder to achieve in other areas.
You said ’25 looks like it’s going to be another big one. Are there headwinds or tailwinds? Can it grow forever?
I feel like we can continue. This is going to continue to grow as people more and more look for that avenue to get out to be communal with their fellow humans in a social way.
International for us, too, is growing at such a clip where markets are opening up all over the place. These markets that we wouldn’t have touched in years past seemed to be getting more and more up to speed and more and more contemporary and more in line with the touring that we experienced in North America and Europe for so many years. There’s just so many different growth opportunities.
What are some international markets we should be looking to? Is it China? India? The Middle East?
It’s all of the above. China has its own challenges, but I’ve got different promoters offering artists to do a tour of China. My colleague here, Mac Clark, just went there with The Chainsmokers, and they were doing 50,000 or 60,000 people per show. That was just monumental, kicking the doors open on a market that previously was not that attainable.
It feels like India is kind of ripe to open. Lollapalooza just started doing a festival there.
A lot of places in Asia and Southeast Asia and the Middle East, they’ve got some venues that are opening up there and we’re doing more and more business there. It just seems endless.
We face challenges all the time. South America has great touring markets, some of the greatest audiences in the world, but you got a market like Argentina. The currency is really challenging; it’s hard to get money out of it. You play your show in Argentina and then the money has to stay there for 90 days. The Middle East is in really tough shape right now. Eastern Europe might be challenging in some places. There’s conflicts. You’ve gotta be on your toes and monitor those situations but, for the most part, it’s a massive growth opportunity for us.
Speaking of tickets, which everybody wants to talk about but nobody wants to talk about, are you getting a sense that there’s real fan pushback on pricing yet?
It’s tough. You have to strike a balance. The automated scalping, the bots, is such a challenge for us. Constantly trying to figure out a way to not fleece the fans, to not have the revenue leave the artist’s side.
It’s incredible, the improbability of being a successful touring artist is so massive. You go through learning your trade, writing music, publishing, producing, growing as a touring artist, and then you finally get to the place where you do an arena tour and some secondary market company with an automated bot service can come in and buy all your tickets and sell them for quadruple to your fans without investing any of that time.
Artists are very protective of their public profile and want to be extremely sensitive to their fans and so there’s some tools out there that we’re constantly working on and it seems like the landscape keeps changing so you’ve got to be ahead of the next automated attack on artists. It’s something that you constantly work on and try to figure out the best solution to get people you want into the show … and at the price that the artist agreed to charge.
So you sit down with the band, with their management, and say this is where that price point needs to be, right? It’s not a black box. It’s still people sitting around talking about it?
We work with Mumford & Sons, for example. The amount of thought and energy and brain power going into how to perfect getting the right ticket at the right price to the fans that are supposed to be in the room. For them, it’s so paramount to their existence that there’s a lot of thought. You can say the same thing with what Rüfüs is going through right now with this onsale, just trying to make sure that everything is good. With blink, it was a consideration when we put their tour up and it’s a constantly moving target and it takes a lot of work to figure it out.
Is it more art than science? You don’t have a bunch of Caltech scientists sitting back there trying to drill down to the dollar and cents what a price should be?
It’s more like experience, though interestingly we do use a lot of tech now trying to kind of nail the right ticket prices. There’s a lot of thought and energy going into getting it right.
Let’s talk about your new role. That change was made in June. How long had that been coming down the pike?
Rick (Roskin) and I have been kind of running the music department as partners here for a long time, along with Mitch Rose, so that’s not a lot of change. It’s just adding Emma (Banks) into what we’re doing in the day-to-day conversations about running the music group. We’ve got offices here in L.A., and Nashville, Toronto, New York, London and Miami.
To the point I made earlier, we’ve got to look at the world holistically in a global nature. It felt like we didn’t want to have London and our international group operating differently than North America, so it just made logical sense to bring it all into one cohesive mindset and we feel like it’s strategically much better for us to take that global perspective and make sure all of our people and everything are growing and developing and thinking about their artists growing and developing in a global fashion.
Your predecessor, Rob Light: what did you learn from him?
It’s funny to say “predecessor,” he’s just down the hall. I’ve been in his office twice today.
Rob loves music, loves the show, loves the artists. He comes from a place of passion which I did, too, and you have to let that lead the conversation, always. This job can be really hard and it’s really challenging and there’s a lot of personalities and a lot of challenges from economics and the business and the personality phase, stuff like that, but you gotta love the music and you got to love the people associated with the music to really excel here and I think that’s one thing that Rob always exhibited from the get-go.

What’s special about CAA?
We genuinely really like each other and like working with each other, and it creates that atmosphere of collaboration and a familial aspect to the department and the company as a whole. It helps us take that attitude towards the people we work with outside the department, too, from managers and our artists and the promoters and executives who are all in this together. Our love of each other and love of the place we work and love of what we do helps us spread that around. We can be badasses and we work really, really hard but we try to be badasses and work really, really hard with a passion and love for what we do.
Is that a culture that’s been present since you were down in the mailroom?
Yeah, and I’ll always treasure that, but when it’s one in the morning and someone’s telling you that you have to deliver a script to Sherman Oaks, maybe not. But, seriously, absolutely I think it’s a culture that permeates from the partners that built this company and took it over and it lives here today.
So what’s the next big thing?
There’s a ton of artists that are coming out this year with new music and new tours that I’m very excited about working with. I’m excited about the growth of our group and where it’s headed. We’ve got this huge, vibrant New York office that’s gonna be a force of nature, so it’s fun to see that.
I’m excited about this new joining of our international group and where that’s going to take our growth, and I got a bunch of tours I’m excited about that we’re in the process of launching. We just had a couple of new people come over to the company that are just fitting in great and doing great things.
There’s just so much to be excited about.
