‘It’s A Great Time To Be In The Live Music Industry’: Q’s With TEG Europe MD, Toby Leighton-Pope

Australian live entertainment powerhouse TEG launched its European presence in 2022, and appointed one of the UK live industry’s most experienced and well-respected promoters to lead the new business: Toby Leighton-Pope.

Leighton-Pope began at Live Nation UK, when it was still SFX, and worked his way up to SVP Music over a 16-year period, and helmed AEG Presents in the UK as co-CEO between 2016 and 2021. He knows how to build a successful promotion business from scratch, and is motivated to do it once again at TEG.

And the new business has hit the ground running promoting some of the biggest arena tours in the UK in each year. The Busted 20th anniversary arena tour in 2023, for instance, visited 27 arenas, and sold 150,000 tickets.

Last year, Leighton-Pope and his team promoted the famous UK girl group Girls Aloud reformation tour, selling some 300,000 tickets across 29 arena shows. This year saw the Busted vs McFly onsale move 300,000 tickets already, and it doesn’t start till October. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

But, Leighton-Pope tells us, the business portfolio of TEG Europe is way bigger than arena tours.

Pollstar: What makes TEG different compared to other promoters?
Toby Leighton-Pope: The wider TEG is very diverse. Our touring division is doing great. There’s some younger promoters here, bringing the cooler stuff. We’re doing a lot of podcasts, comedy, alternative.

We’ve also built an outdoor portfolio, and launched a brand-new festival this year in Newcastle called Come Together festival with Robbie Williams, and Kings of Leon, which is doing really well. It’s an amazing site, and it can grow up to 70,000 people, so I’m hoping to really grow that business into a full pledged three, four day multi-genre festival.

See: TEG Europe Launches New Festival In Newcastle, UK

We’ve gone to business with a company called Rock N Roll Circus, who do these really cool, immersive, big top tent circus rock and roll shows. It’s run by Ali O’Reily, who’s fantastic. We’re in two sites with them this summer, in Sheffield and in Norwich, with four or five shows a site, at around 7,000, 8,000 capacity. Courteeners are playing it, Queens of the Stone Age are playing it, Olly Murs, McFly – it’s doing really well.

We’ve also got a business partnership with Raymond Gubbay and Warwick Castle, a 14,000 capacity outdoor event. Texas, and Pet Shop Boys are playing this year. Noel Gallagher played it last year, it’s a really good site. And our outdoor portfolio is growing all the time.

Sports wise, we promoted Man United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Wrexham across America last year. We’ve put on rugby games in the UK with South Africa and Wales, and South Africa and New Zealand. We promoted the USA Basketball team last year for the Olympic warm up games at the O2 arena, which was amazing. So, sport is a really big piece for us as well, and we’ll continue to grow that business globally.

And then, with Ticketek, we have now partnered with Nottingham Arena, Plymouth Pavilions, Raymond Gubby Live. The numbers are growing year on year, it’s just a great ticking business. It’s such a beast in Australia, and having the ability to fully deploy and operate everything they have in Australia in the UK is amazing for us.

So, we’ve grown very quickly in the first almost three years. It’s still a long way to go, but it’s been a really good start to the journey.

Can you talk about the site for Come Together?
A friend pointed it out to me, who just said, ‘Have you ever checked this site out?’ It’s in the middle of Newcastle, it’s the biggest inner city park in Europe. It’s bigger than Central Park in New York, you could do a million people on site and still have space. It’s a five minute walk from the center of town, surrounded by two universities, four metro stations. It’s just amazing. The slither of it they’ve given to me is probably 4% of it, and I could put 70,000 people on it. It’s huge. I just like the ambition of what we did at Hyde Park, of trying to build something big. I don’t even want to start at 8,000, 9,000 and try and build it. I went straight for some big-level signs what with Kings of Leon and Robbie Williams, to go and make our declaration that we want to build something very special. That model of multi genre, multi day events works really well. I’m not doing any camping. It means you can do whatever you want to be. You can do Robbie Williams one year, and ACDC the next year, or Sabrina Carpenter, or Bob Dylan, or Olivia Rodrigo – you can do whatever you want.

What made you want to join TEG?
They are very ambitious to grow the business. I’m a big fan of Geoff Jones, who hired me, and who is a really good human being. I’ve known Tim McGregor and Paul Dainty for a long time. They’re both guys I want to be in business with. So, I just felt it was time for me to try to build something from scratch, and see how far we can take the journey. I was at Live Nation from day one, when it was SFX, and it was a lot of fun taking that business from 70 shows a year to 3,000 shows when I left. It was a fun ride. I just feel like it was a good time to try again and go for it through TEG. We’ve got good backing from private equity. Silver Lake own us. We’re not messing about, we really want to be a major level player. It’s an exciting place to be.

Why are you excited about Ticketek?
It’s a great technology platform. We built a lot of it ourselves. I think we can sell tickets faster and better than anything else out there. It’s a really slick platform to work with.
Is it a completely different animal to take a sports team around the world and put it in front of fans?
It’s similar. It’s about selling tickets, and that’s never one dimensional. Each artist is different as well. The more you work hand in hand with a club, just like with the artist, it becomes a great partnership. We have and amazing team who head up sports.

Other examples from your diverse event portfolio?
In terms of family entertainment, we have the Brickman Lego exhibition we tour around the world, we have Pixar Putt, we work with Paw Patrol. It’s quite fun working across all those industries.
You celebrated your 100th show at The O2 last year with Girls Aloud. That must make you the youngest promoter to reach the 100-show milestone at the iconic building. It speaks to the relationships you’ve built.

I’ve been doing it for over 25 years now. I’ve been busy since I was probably 14, 15, when my dad was managing bands. It’s probably close to 30 years, and I’ve always been trying to do good, trying to build good relationships with people, trying to just be a fair, good partner.

Are you working beyond the UK?
We toured Snoop Dogg across Europe. With my existing relationships with all the European promoters, I’m confident about delivering European tours. Sport is definitely global, we’re touring sports everywhere.

What’s the most important question you have to ask yourself as a promoter in 2025?
As I get older, you still have to just keep evolving with your marketing skills. I’m really just a marketeer. That’s what I do. When I started promoting 25 years ago, there was no Facebook, there was no social media. The biggest paper in London was the Evening Standard with a reach of 6 million people. It now doesn’t exist. So you have to keep evolving and learning how to reach your target audience. For me, that’s what our job is: how to sell tickets and market to people. If you stop learning, that’s where you’re going to fall down, because you have to continue to evolve and and figure out how to reach your target audience.

How big is the TEG Europe team around you?
Including Ticketek, we’re close to 100 people now.

Do you have a business philosophy?
Life is better live.

You mentioned the big financial backers earlier. Is it only possible to start a promotion business in 2025, if you have that kind of clout?
If you want to promote at the level I want to promote at you have to do it with a company behind you. You just can’t physically afford it, the risk is so high, the numbers are so tough, that, yeah, you do need backing from someone to really compete on a major level, for sure.

What’s your advice to young people seeking a career in this business?
Start promoting independently, and then look to join a bigger company, for sure. There’s still an underground scene, there’s still people playing clubs and bars and all that kind of stuff. You can get into a scene, and start meeting young bands, and then promoting them to a certain level, then find a way to move into into a bigger company with the acts you’re working with.

What challenges remain?
The overall cost of touring, so many big acts taking so much money out the markets, does it leave any room for medium acts. But medium acts is where we used to make our money from, theater and arena acts where you kind of work all the time. If you got one stadium acts every five years, it was great. Now, everybody’s doing so many dates, taking so many tickets out of the market. Yeah, it’s watching how much we’re charging, what we should be charging, and and trying to continue to develop new acts.

What opportunities do you see?
I think there’s tons of opportunity. There’s so many great new acts coming through, so many great female acts at the moment, which are amazing superstars. Technology is getting better and better. Live shows are getting better and better. The level of production that people are now supplying – it’s a great time to be in the live music industry.

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