The Great Awakening: Indie Promoter Awakening Events Keeps The Faith (VenuesNow Market Focus)

Like all successful independent event promoters, Awakening Events has found its niche, developed strong relationships and delivered at a high level for years. The company, with offices in Conway, Arkansas, and Nashville, produces full tours for artists including TobyMac’s annual “Hits Deep” tour, comedy tours including Chonda Pierce and Tim Hawkins, festivals like K-Love Live at Red Rocks (Lauren Daigle, Elevation Worship, CeCe Winans, Tauren Wells) and promotes other events as well.

With beginnings in Conway, about a 30-minute drive from Little Rock, Awakening also occasionally books concerts (of all types) at the 8,375-capacity First Security Amphitheater in Little Rock, with upcoming shows by Ian Munsick and Alison Krauss & Union Station.

“When I first started doing shows there, it was just a green space on the side of the Arkansas River, just a stage and not even any dressing rooms,” says Dan Fife, who started Awakening Events about 20 years ago and now has more than 30 full-time staff. “We’ve learned to build everything, and I think that’s helped me to this day, being able to adapt and look at things differently.”

Pollstar: While still of modest size, Arkansas as a whole and Little Rock specifically continue to grow as music markets.
Dan Fife: It’s growing. The Walmart Amphitheater up in Northwest Arkansas now has roughly 30 concerts happening up there a year that weren’t happening over a decade ago. There’s more concerts going into Little Rock today than there were 15 years ago. I do think you reach a saturation point, and that’s something you need to watch. The entire state’s got 3.5 million people, and if you’ve got a show in Little Rock on a weekday, it really is a Little Rock show for the most part, because on the weekends you’ll have people able to drive two or three hours because they live in a rural part of the state. However, a Koe Wetzel or Whiskey Myers show on a Thursday night in Little Rock can still sell out because the demand is greater than the capacity, but you have to be careful.

A limited market relates to niche genres as well.
As it relates to being in a faith-based genre, it’s a much smaller group of people buying concert tickets than, say, country pop or rock or pop. It’s just a smaller genre. The 400 to 500 shows a year that we do, we have to layer those carefully because otherwise, you’re cannibalizing each other.

But the mechanics of (faith-based music touring) are the same as any other. With TobyMac, the “Hits Deep Tour” we do every February, March, April, there’s 13 buses and seven trucks, and those are double stacked. We’re playing the same arenas with Toby and the same theaters and arenas with Zach Williams that all the mainstream artists are, and we’re using the same production companies and vendors and sometimes the crew.

It’s never easy to make it as an indie promoter. Any advice to those starting out today?
There are a lot of us independents that still exist, maybe not as many as there used to be, and some have been bought out or rolled up, but there is plenty of room for everybody, you know? One of the worst things an independent promoter could do is start to operate just out of fear. That’s when they find themselves making bad decisions, they start focusing more on what others are doing instead of focusing on what they have in front of them. We’ve continued to grow year after year. I’ll say this, though. If I were 26 years old, and I was thinking, man, I want to be a promoter, and you look at entering the space today, I might try to go to work for a company.

Look, our costs to produce a tour have gone up about 38% since 2022. Busing costs, I think, are 61% higher than they were before the pandemic, and some of that’s because of consolidation in the busing industry. But there’s always cycles, and I think you can look at history and avoid some of the mistakes that those did before by paying attention to the data that you have in front of you.

You’ve said you try to give back on each tour date and have donated more than $1 million to the Salvation Army from tour revenue.
Arkansas really is a giving state, and I grew up being taught the need to help others. It always goes back to TobyMac, but we were sitting with his team in Nashville looking for ways to give back and help out, so for almost every show, the Salvation Army leaders come in and we do a check presentation. What’s amazing is they can take that check and turn it into 10 times that amount through all they do in their local communities.

The music world has always done a really good job of joining together to help toward big natural disasters and public crises, but on a local zip-code level, just day-to-day, there’s so much food insecurity and challenges that we have a responsibility to be part of that solution. That’s not political, it’s just love your neighbor. You know what I mean?