Pollstar 2025 Impact 50 Introduction

Welcome to Pollstar’s 2025 Impact 50, our annual list recognizing the top executives in the live industry. These best-in-class leaders are selected by our editorial team based on Pollstar Boxoffice data combined with an examination of their extraordinary accomplishments and demonstrated excellence over the last year in this business.

Nadine Eliya, 2025’s Impact 50 cover honoree and Shakira’s manager, personifies this. She helped engineer the Colombian superstar’s wildly successful comeback after being off the road for seven years and facing myriad challenges. One would never know this looking at the runaway success of the She Wolf’s aptly named “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour” (“Women No Longer Cry”), which is the second highest grossing tour on 2025’s Mid-Year Top 100 Worldwide Tours.

“Shakira really wanted to go for it and make it the biggest thing she had ever done in her career,” Eliya told Pollstar. “We needed to try to make this a record-breaking tour, to make a statement, because if we’re going to put in this amount of work, it had to not just be successful, it had to mean something, to shift paradigms.”

This year’s honorees are shifting paradigms in other ways. 2025’s honorees are thankfully our most diverse class yet with nearly half of Pollstar’s 50 honorees either people of color, women and/or LGTBQ. While we understand this industry is still a long way from parity, we also recognize it’s come a long way. When we started this list diversity was challenging to find in this industry; today, we are grateful this more inclusive slate of honorees happened organically with this business’ best-in-class executives having more varied hues than ever before.

There are other changes to this year’s list. For the first time, Irving Azoff, Chairman & CEO, The Azoff Company, along with Jeffrey Azoff, COO, The Azoff Company and CEO, Full Stop Management, and Oak View Group Chairman and CEO Tim Leiweke, elected not to partake in this year’s Impact 50. “We are appreciative of Pollstar honoring us for the Impact 50,” they said in a joint statement. “However, given our ownership interest of the publication, we don’t feel it’s appropriate to accept & respectfully allow other honorees to take our places.”

While we appreciate their candor and desire to avoid appearances of impropriety, the truth is they deserve to be honored here based solely on the work they do and nothing less.

As do all of 2025’s Impact honorees, whose commitment to excellence has taken this business to unprecedented heights while exerting a positive influence on our society at large. The events these executives and their teams helm do nothing less than bring people together and create peak life experiences, which is something today’s world desperately needs. For that, we are ever grateful. Congrats to all!

Return To The 2025 Impact 50 Here