Pollstar Live! Power Panelist: AEG’s Rich Schaefer’s Journey From Hair Metal & Phish To Management & Top Global Promoter

Rich Schaefer, President of Global Touring for AEG Presents, is one of the most well-regarded executives in the live business. On his way up the ladder, he found mentors in two esteemed managers, Randy Hoffman and Gary Gersh, while helping manage a slew of top artists, including John Mellencamp, Jessica Simpson, Lenny Kravitz, The Counting Crows, John Legend, Soundgarden, Animal Collective, Gaslight Anthem and Lord Huron, among others. Schaefer, who still manages Chromeo, has long had a penchant for live. In advance of his Pollstar Live! Power Players panel (with Wasserman Music’s Lee Anderson, Full Stop Management’s Jeffrey Azoff, CAA’s Mac Clark and Live Nation’s Lesley Olenik), Pollstar spoke with Schaefer to find out more about his hair metal and jam band roots, what makes a good promoter and manager, his take on today’s market and the band he still listens to on most days.

Pollstar: You started out as a jam band fan, right
Rich Schaefer: My first music was hair metal. The first show I saw was Poison, Britny Fox and Lita Ford in 1987 at the Westchester County Center. I started listening to Nirvana in the early-90s and that led to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. In 1994, a friend was like you should check out this band. It was Dave Matthews Band. I got into Dave, The Dead and jumped into Phish. I saw 101 Phish shows between 1994 and 2000.

The jam band scene, especially The Grateful Dead, helped form the underpinnings of the live business, did it inform your understanding of live?  
100%. Fun fact: I still listen to Grateful Dead pretty much every day. When I was in college, I somehow convinced my advisor to let me write my thesis on the influence of the Grateful Dead in American culture. In the ‘90s, I was one of those kids that sent in mail orders. What they did, how they built the culture, touring culture, merch, their imaging — some of the most successful bands in the world today, whether they know it or not, subscribe to that theory. Now, when I hear about venues and cities and drive times, I’m like, “Yeah I did that in the 90s. I drove everywhere.” It’s a different understanding when you get out on the road.

Your steady climb up the music business ladder from label to management to promoter is really impressive and you seem to have a holistic understanding of the ecosystem.
I’ll be honest, I worked at a label for a grand total of maybe less than a year. But obviously in 17 or 18 years of managing artists, I worked with quite a few labels. I got to meet and work with incredible people. It’s changed so much since I started working at record labels when we were tracking SoundScan to where we are today.

Two of your mentors are managers, Randy Hoffman and Gary Gersh, what did you learn from them?
I met Randy in 2001. The guy I interned for worked for him and introduced us. We met a handful of times and he said, “Hey do you want to do day-to-day managing for John Mellencamp and Jessica Simpson.” I was like yeah, but I didn’t really know what that meant. At the label I worked with this girl group called Eden’s Crush from WB’s “Popstars.” I was hands-on, booking travel and dealing with appearances, which helped transition into day-to-day management. Working with John, I was thrust into the world of Randy, who operated at the highest levels, he’s a legend.

Also, a guy named Harry Sandler, who was John’s tour manager, took me under his wing and taught me so much about the road from a place I didn’t know. He had a different experience and perspective on the road. I went on the road as a fan, he was on the road as a worker and tour manager and was well-respected. I learned a lot from him.

John’s production manager Rocky Holman was also super helpful and really interesting. I started at Hoffman Entertainment mid-2000-2001 and so the next couple months, we’re probably the craziest months of my life from starting a new job to 9-11 and what that did to the live business. I learned that first hand which kind of felt like what we lived through again 19 years later when the industry shut down again.

Randy was operating at the highest levels of Columbia Records. We managed Thalia who is married who is married to Tommy Matola and Tommy was running Sony when we managed John and Jessica Simpson, who were signed to Columbia. That was the real record company days with Tommy, Donny Einner, Charlie Walk, Will Botwin.

A lot of screaming? So you were thrown into a label cauldron.
I just got thrown in. I was 22 years old, and I learned so much. John Mellencamp is obviously one of the icons of the business and he operates his way. I learned a lot from that and learned how to work with artists that come from different backgrounds. Some are harder to work with than others, it prepared me for management.

 How did you meet Gary Gersh?
We were introduced by a mutual friend. We met in L.A. at Nate N’  Al’s. I went there like, “If I can just hear some Nirvana stories, it’ll all be worth it.” He was like, “Look, we’re about to sign this big artist and I really want you to be a day-to-day manager on it.” The artist was John Legend. So we were managing Counting Crows, Matisyahu and signed Lenny Kravitz. We did a tour of Europe with Lenny and his opening act was Chris Cornell. Gary was there and had lunch with Chris and Vicky. He expressed that he was looking for a change and we signed Chris. Part of our plan with Chris was doing these solo acoustic tours and started talking about Chris the songwriter and his catalog. We thought Chris was an incredible songwriter with Audio Slave, Temple of the Dog, obviously Soundgarden and his solo career.

He also had one of the greatest voices ever.
Go listen to “Seasons” on Singles soundtrack. You hear it, there’s a story to tell. Gary got in the room with the other guys in Soundgarden and they worked through their issues and said, “Okay, we’re gonna do one show.” We did a show at The Showbox in Seattle in April 2010 and if everything went great, we had an offer to headline Lollapalooza. The show was amazing, one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. After that, we did a bunch of shows and I ran Soundgarden’s touring on the management side. I was on the road with them probably 85% of the shows they played around the world. I worked with them up until 2017 when Chris tragically passed away.

God, I’m sorry.  
When that happened, I was feeling burnt out on management and feeling all kinds of ways about it. Gary went to AEG, I went to Mick Management. From there, I opened my own company with my friend Rich Cohen called LoyalT Management. We had a great business, we were having fun and I wasn’t looking to get out of managing, but Gary had spent a few years at AEG and wanted to build AEG’s global touring presence. He asked me and Michael Harrison, who was at Australia’s Frontier Touring, to come help run it. I flew to L.A., met with him, Jay (Marciano), because I wanted to hear the whole vision, Paul (Tollett), Rick Mueller and some of the team and joined in 2018.

Gary deserves all the credit for building global touring into what it is and bringing together the people that helped build it. He’s probably the only person who could’ve done it. He’s such a great mentor and friend. At the end of 2023 he decided to step away and Jay called and asked if I would take over and I jumped at it.

What was your take on promoters when you were a manager?
There are some I really liked and some I didn’t. I was lucky to work closely with Ryan McElrath for many years when he was at Live Nation. I’ve always loved working with Gregg Perloff and the Another Planet team, Alan Scott and Bryan Duquette are some of my best friends. The Bowery Presents guys who I worked closely with are lifelong friends. I loved working with promoters who had vision and bigger ideas than just selling tickets.

Now that you’re on the other side, how do you look at management? 
Our best tours are when we are in sync and work super closely with managers and agents. The tours where we get treated as a bank or a means to sell tickets are the ones that typically end up struggling. We’re in it to build careers, not just for one tour or a flash-in-the-pan moment. I say this to Louis (Messina) all the time that the model he’s built is the dream. To be George Strait’s promoter for 30 years or Eric’s (Church) or Ed’s (Sheeran) for almost their entire careers, we want to be with artist from the beginning of their career to the end.

That’s a good way to segue into your Pollstar Live! Power Panel. Coming out of the post-pandemic “Golden Age,” the market seems a little flat, what are you seeing?
For all the people worried the sky is falling, you still look at on-sales every week and there’s arenas and stadiums blowing out. The best tours are the ones pricing themselves correctly, choosing the right venues, they’re not trying to overreach because another artist they consider a peer is playing in that size room. It’s about smart decisions and smart choices.

I’ve heard rumblings that we’re at a breaking point with ticket pricing and costs and everyone may need to make compromises.
Costs are higher, venues, insurance, everything. I don’t want to speak generally about artist fees, but ticket prices are related to fees. Some artists understand this and agree to take a lesser fee and some don’t—everybody’s got to make their decision to run their businesses the way they want to run their businesses. 

Do you see tours that don’t pencil out where you’re like, “No thank you, good luck, take care?”  
Yes absolutely. We’re not in a volume business. We’re built to work on tours we believe we can contribute to and affect change in the artist’s career on the live side and outside the live side however we can and whatever is needed of us. Every artist, every manager, every agent has different needs. We absolutely pass on things. We pass when we feel the deal’s gotten out of control. We pass on things when I don’t have someone on my team that’s a believer and wants to get in the weeds and do what it takes to be successful. Sure, we’ve had some misses, but we’ve had others we passed on that we were lucky we passed on.

I heard you on Promoter 101 talking about the Hugh Jackman tour, which was fascinating and sounded incredibly successful.
Hugh Jackman, it’s unfair to the rest of us in the world how talented, nice, generous and handsome a guy he is. He’s got it all. It’s unbelievable and unfair, but he’s amazing. There’s no one like Hugh Jackman.

What acts are you promoting these days?
Too many to list but we’ve had a lot of success with a bunch of tours over the past couple of years into 2025—Luke Combs, Sabrina Carpenter, Carin Leon, ATEEZ, Tyler, The Creator, Kelsea Ballerini, Kacey Musgraves, Sturgill Simpson, Sleep Token, Wu-Tang Clan, Zayn Malik, Zach Bryan, Journey, Enhypen and Stevie Wonder.

What new music are you loving these days? 
I can’t say because then I’m just going to get yelled at by somebody. I listen to the Grateful Dead, they’re what keeps me sane every day.