2025 Pollstar Live Hall Of Fame Inductee: Louis Messina

Louis Messina’s Hall of Fame career began inauspiciously, to say the least.

“It was a disaster,” he told Pollstar in a November 2022 cover story commemorating his 50th anniversary in the concert business. To be fair that Nov. 3, 1972, double bill of Curtis Mayfield and B.B. King at New Orleans’ Loyola Field House was sold out.

“It was a sold-out disaster,” Messina said, to clarify.

None of this was Messina’s fault or even Mayfield’s or King’s. The tour had been flying to the Crescent City from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and bad weather had grounded the flight. A very reasonable excuse that the New Orleans crowd didn’t want to hear. The show devolved into chaos, the New Orleans police riot squad had to clear the building, and after a few days of feeling sorry for himself, Messina bucked up.

“Here I am a kid and then I’m faced with this. I was just married and I was devastated for three or four days. I locked myself into the apartment and the phone was ringing off the hook and so finally after a few days of self-pity, I just said ‘Fuck it,’” he says. “You have to pay your dues and I just took out a lifetime subscription. What else could go wrong?”

The less-than-ideal (to put it mildly) start launched one of the most legendary and enviable promoting careers in music history. After helping Allen Becker book the first rock show at the Superdome, Messina partnered with him at PACE Concerts in Houston. The company’s amphitheaters form the foundation of what is now Live Nation’s amp business. He launched the now-legendary Texxas Jam festival. 

Like many other regional promoters, PACE sold to Robert Sillerman’s SFX in 1997, which then sold to Clear Channel in 2000. 

Messina had a frosty and rocky relationship with Clear Channel and “lost my desire,” so he stepped out on his own, partnered with AEG Presents, taking five artists with him: George Strait, The Dixie Chicks, Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. With those relationships, the Messina Touring Group built more. Including one with a teenager who’d moved from Pennsylvania to the Nashville suburbs to try her hand at country music. 

King George has played some of the biggest concerts of all time. Chesney does multiples at NFL stadiums every year. Other artists on MTG’s roster — Ed Sheeran, The Lumineers, Eric Church, Blake Shelton among them — are all major touring acts. 

But, well, that teenager he met on the George Strait tour was Taylor Swift and now, 18 years later, just wrapped the biggest tour of all-time, a record that will likely last until the next time she goes out and tops “Eras.”

It’s hard to conceptualize how big “Eras” was, but consider this: in 2022, Pollstar calculated that in his five decades, Messina’s shows had grossed $4.5 billion. When “Eras” wrapped, Pollstar estimated it grossed $2.2 billion on its own.

It’s been a helluva run for the self-described “street kid from New Orleans” who got off to a rough start (and some rough patches in between; ask him to tell you the Led Zeppelin story sometime) but Messina’s artist-first approach, savvy sense of the music business and willingness to bet on himself paid off.