Executive Profile: How Dennis & Jarred Arfa Built IAG Into A Top Independent Agency

This Executive Profile originally appeared in Pollstar’s new 2025
Booking Agency Directory, oder your copy here. (Photo :@MyrnaSuarezPhoto)

The story of Dennis Arfa, Chairman, Independent Artist Group, and Jarred Arfa, EVP, Head of Global Music (IAG), is one of great success. The father and son duo together took their independent agency to the stratosphere with strategic investments, global partnerships and integrations building one of the most impressive music agencies in the live entertainment business — independent or otherwise.

For proof, look no further than IAG’s stellar roster, which includes such major headliners as: Billy Joel, Metallica, Neil Young, Def Leppard, Rod Stewart, Mary J. Blige, 50 Cent, Sleep Token, Disturbed, Ghost, Mötley Crüe, The Strokes, Iggy Pop, Cage the Elephant, The Smashing Pumpkins, Elvis Costello, Ne-Yo, Pantera, Limp Bizkit, Falling In Reverse, Five Finger Death Punch, Gojira and rising hip-hop sensation BigXthaPlug, among others.

None of this is likely to have happened without Dennis, more than 50 years earlier, going into The Eye, a Long Island venue where he happened upon The Hassles, a band fronted by a young genius named Billy Joel. Arfa would become Joel’s agent and guide his career to the highest echelons of the live business with a record-setting Madison Square Garden residency, stadium tours and more. At First he did this while at William Morris and then later his own agencies: QBQ Ent. (Quality Before Quantity) and AGI.

Both Arfas would work for Bob Sillerman, of SFX fame, which formed the substrate of what is now Live Nation. Further investments from Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies and, two years ago, a partnership with APA, led to the formation of IAG, where the Arfas’ agency has found its greatest success. Here, Pollstar spoke with the Arfas to find out more about IAG, their careers, what it’s like to grow up in Long Island when your father reps Billy Joel and far more.

Pollstar: What are you guys up to?
Dennis Arfa: We’re working on all kinds of tours – Disturbed, Metallica, Falling In Reverse, Pantera, Sleep Token, Limp Bizkit, Rod Stewart and Def Leppard amongst others.

Is this the most successful point in your careers?
Dennis: I would say so judging by the amount of headliners we have, meaning artists who fill arenas, amphitheaters and stadiums everywhere.
Jarred Arfa: It’s a bigger roster. We had two artists in the top five of Global Spotify Songs a couple weeks ago with Sleep Token and BigXthaPlug. We had four of the five Top Active Rock Songs last week.

A lot of this is because of the APA merger, right?
Jarred: Yes. We absorbed more agents with the APA merger and we’re also in more genres than ever from hip-hop and R&B to Latin and dance.

How big is IAG now?
Jarred: About 100 agents, a quarter in music. We’re still boutique compared to others who have 100-plus in their music department, but we like to say we have the most hits per bat.

After working at William Morris, Dennis started Quality Before Quantity, a mantra of sorts, is that changing with IAG?
Jarred: No, we never believed in a territorial model and that model across the bigger company. It’s a pod system where agents grow and there’s more support for them. It’s the same model.

Mergers can be hard to integrate and find efficiencies, how’s that process been?
Jarred: It’s been pretty seamless, we don’t have bureaucratic layers that take time to integrate. Over time, you learn about people in other departments, their strengths and weaknesses, who makes sense for which projects. Ultimately, we become better quarterbacks
for our artists because we know who in the other areas make sense for different opportunities.

What are the opportunities with this larger agency?
Jarred: We see more crossover opportunities in the content space, whether it’s scripted documentaries or non-scripted opportunities. A lot of our clientele want to act, so we’re seeing more in that space than ever. But it’s not for every artist and has to make sense, but we can pull it off and be very successful for the artist where it’s applicable.

BigXthaPlug is getting a ton of buzz. He’s straight up hip-hop and not your usual bailiwick. How’s it been getting into that space?
Jarred: Josh Rittenhouse and Kyle Carter identified BigX very early and did a great job of rallying the team around him. They haven’t skipped steps and are very strategic and smart in how they’ve done it. They came over with the merger and have taken to the culture and are strategic. It’s been a good fit and they’ve elevated a number of artists in hip-hop and R&B.

Where are your offices now?
Jarred: Our main office is in L.A. We have New York, a small office in Nashville, Toronto and hopefully abroad coming soon. Music is divided between mostly New York and L.A., but 80% of the other areas are in L.A. I’m there about a week a month.

As father and son, how does that help or maybe hinder your approach to business?
Dennis: Jarred and I have two different skill sets. I’m more client oriented and Jarred is more management and operations oriented. We’re in constant contact; I inform Jarred on client development and he keeps me informed of operations.

When you come to loggerheads, what’s the decision-making process like?
Jarred: We’re 90-plus percent aligned. When it comes to something artist driven, I may have an opinion, but ultimately it’s his call; when it comes to operations he gives his opinion, but ultimately I’ll make the call. It’s very rare there’s major disagreements.
Dennis: Jarred and I have a very similar aptitude, which is in your DNA. Our aptitude and how we see the world have a lot of similarities. You can’t teach aptitude about this game, you either have it or you don’t.
Jarred: There’s a personal side, but it’s just part of our daily conversation. We could be talking about my son and then work and then back to family. It’s not like this is work time and this is personal time, it’s all interwoven.
Dennis: Probably, if Jarred and I didn’t work together, we wouldn’t be speaking as often as we do.

How’s it been for your team having a father and son to deal with?
Dennis: Our team understands our capabilities and are able to separate us. They come to me or go to Jarred for different things. On a daily level, people don’t relate to us like, “Jarred is Dennis’ son” or “he’s his father.” In general, they see us as two individuals. We’re respected for our independent and different skill sets.
Jarred: I’m surprised by how many people come to me to deliver messages to him. I don’t know if it’s a fear thing or they feel like it’s beneath him, but I get that more and more where people use me to give him information or manage something. I don’t know why, but it’s an interesting phenomenon.

Transparency must be pivotal.
Dennis: Everybody believes in our common goal of doing what’s best for the team and for the artist. Even though we come from different lanes people respect that that’s where we’re coming from and we’re good at it. No one is respecting us because we have a title. They’re respecting us because we make a lot of sense in our approach and how we see the world.
Jarred: And there’s no limit to the amount of support we’ll give the agents and other members of our team. There’s no handouts, just legitimately what helps the artist and the department win. That’s really what the agenda is.

Let’s go backwards a bit. Jarred is born …
Jarred: I don’t remember that.

Can you talk about the evolution of being family and then working together in this pretty intense and demanding business?
Dennis: Jarred has always been very grounded, very smart. His ego and insecurities were never out there. And that goes back to when Jarred was 3 years old in Australia sitting in Billy Joel’s dressing room. He was so even keeled, he wasn’t this runaround, wild kid. We could have conversations and Jarred could be there. He was an old soul in a young body very early on, similar to my grandson. There was a maturity in his DNA. His temperament was something that in most cases kids don’t have. Not that he couldn’t be a kid, but he wasn’t an immature kid. He was always a good student, good socially and a good athlete. When he was 6, I remember Billy sitting down with me at a lunch going “Your kid is special.”

Jarred, what do you recall?
Jarred: What Dennis is referring to is a certain social aptitude and emotional intelligence either you have or you don’t. In this bus-
iness that leans so much on personal relationships, those traits are invaluable. There were times, especially earlier on, where I knew when to shut my mouth. I wasn’t the big shot in the room and that’s OK. You’re not always that guy. To this day, when I’m sitting with a manager or whoever, you have to read the room and know, “OK, this is the star in the room, the person who wants to hear themselves talk.” And that’s OK. It’s whatever the situation calls for. I can turn it on and be charming and charismatic, but you don’t always have to be that person to be successful.

Dennis: When Jarred first started working with me, he was listening to some of my calls. One of the first calls he heard was a key executive at a promotion company. We got off the phone and Jarred says to me, “I can’t believe how emotionally immature this guy is.” It was astute, it was true, it put it in perspective. Just because people are in high positions, doesn’t mean they have emotional maturity or intelligence.

When did you realize what your father did and that you admired it?
Jarred: Very, very early. When you grow up on Long Island and your father represents Billy Joel that’s kind of like being in Italy with the Pope. I understood it was very special. As a kid, I was around Rodney Dangerfield, Joan Jett, Dice Clay, Billy, all these major celebrities. I was aware pretty young that this wasn’t normal, but I lived it. At 6 years old, I could tell you the name of every Billy Joel album and what year it came out. It wasn’t like I knew it was special, I didn’t know anything else. This was just our lives.

I was struck by the genius of how Dennis framed Billy Joel’s MSG plays as a residency, it was creative, smart and strategically framed in a way no one had done before. Did that blow your mind?
Jarred: I recognize he has a very creative skillset and I’ve become used to how great and smart he is at what he does. You’re living it, so it’s hard to be blown away. I was reading the other day about players working with Stephen Curry, and it’s like, “This is just what he does.” That’s kind of how I feel. It’s great and it’s amazing, but sometimes it becomes expected when someone’s at the top of their craft and their regarded that way, these kinds of things don’t surprise you.

I was struck by the genius of how Dennis framed Billy Joel’s MSG plays as a residency, it was creative, smart and strategically framed in a way no one had done before. Did that blow your mind?
Jarred: I recognize he has a very creative skillset and I’ve become used to how great and smart he is at what he does. You’re living it, so it’s hard to be blown away. I was reading the other day about players working with Stephen Curry, and it’s like, “This is just what he does.” That’s kind of how I feel. It’s great and it’s amazing, but sometimes it becomes expected when someone’s at the top of their craft and their regarded that way, these kinds of things don’t surprise you.

Dennis, by the same token, when you were looking at Jarred when did you see his aptitude manifest itself in business and was additive to your decision-making process and you thought it would be great to work with your son?
Dennis: There was an evolution. In the early years of AGI, Jarred was more involved with the artists we were working with. When we made this merger with APA we couldn’t duplicate anymore because there was a much bigger job at hand and he had the aptitude and the skillset to do it. This merger gave Jarred a platform to very much distinguish himself from me and from everybody else. He’s one of the top management executives in his demographic running a business and overseeing it and an ambassador to this business.

How did you end up at AGI, Jarred?
Jarred: When I came in, it wasn’t to be an agent. I was working for Bob Sillerman at the time at CKX, which was falling apart. I was working for Mitch Slater and overseeing different brands, like Elvis Presley and Muhammed Ali estates. At the time, I was seeing different investments in the music space and was focused on M&A. I remember we were talking and I was like, “Hey, you can get a check and grow a business.” Dennis was on his own running a great independent agency and I thought you can scale this with the right partners. When I came in, the main focus was on finding a financial partner to scale the business.

What year did you come in?
Early 2011.

AGI has been through a number of acquisitions going independent and back-and-forth, right?
Dennis: I was the only agency that Bob Sillerman owned. I was with Bob for two-and-a-half years before he sold to Clear Channel and gave me my business back.

Was that when Jarred joined?
Dennis: No, Bob formed CKX and Jarred went to work there. It wasn’t until CKX fell apart and Jarred said to me, “I don’t see this working out” and I said, “Well, are you interested in joining me?” And he said, “Yeah, but I’m interested in building something.” And his line was, “If we’re gonna build something, we need to go into the fight with a gun not a knife,” which meant we needed an investor. We had bankers coming in and finally we understood we needed somebody who understood our space to be a financial partner and Jarred identified Ron Burkle.

Jarred: It was right after Ron lost the bid to buy Warner Music to Len Blavatnik. Instead of just targeting any banker who’s clueless about entertainment, we went for people who were either in the space or showing interest in the space. Ron already had a few entities that were involved in entertainment. We managed to get to him through our attorney.

That’s like a home run in the first inning, Dennis, did you think Jarred had the capability to do something like that?
Dennis: I never questioned it. We just did it.
Jarred: I was pretty young, but I didn’t perceive myself that way. I had worked with big players on Bob Silleman’s team and the companies they worked with and I didn’t feel that anything was above me. It was like “Hey, I’m playing Major League Baseball with these guys at 22-years-old flying with Muhammad Ali.” So it wasn’t like, “Oh man, this is above me. I can’t do this.” I never felt that way.

So you both worked with and for Sillerman, whose legacy of rolling up the promoters and forming the bones of Live Nation, is something this industry has debated the value of ever since and is still playing out. Can you talk a bit about what he was like and what you learned from him?
Dennis: He was the greatest promoter of them all. He took most of the major promoters and rolled them up. What he put together was an amazing thing to be part of. He was brilliant, had a brilliant team and was an amazing buyer. He had an amazing amount of confidence and was extremely intelligent. He had a lot of tools in his box that were very admirable. In life, there’s a line, “Take the best and leave the rest.” Well, he had a lot of best for us to take from. He was a great example. And for me, watching Sillerman build and then sell this dynasty and being a part of that dynasty, which is now Live Nation, and this is who Jarred ended up getting his apprenticeship with – pretty amazing.

Jarred what’s your take?
Jarred: He was always the smartest guy in any room and that could be with a lot of smart people. He had his quirky eccentricities, and probably did things he could get away with then that wouldn’t be considered OK today in terms of appropriateness; but as a businessman, someone would go into a meeting and it just felt like he was always three, four steps ahead. That was eye-opening. He knew how to translate. It’s a very rare skill set to take entertainment, entertainment properties and intellectual properties but how does that translate to public markets? He knew how to work both games, which is a very rare skill set. He knew how to play the stock world and Wall Street, but also knew how to play the entertainment game. And he was a great marketer and hype person.
Dennis: He took the promoting game from a millionaire’s game to a billionaire’s game.

Did Sillerman’s boldness inspire you to make big moves like with Ron Burkle, Billy’s residency and partnering with APA, or was that your business ethos before you met him?
Dennis: I had that before I met Bob, but what Bob showed me was that not only could I sell my company once, but because of how good of an experience it was, I could do it again. He was an owner that let his players play. He respected my skill set, which was different than his. And that was the case with a lot of the people he bought. When they wanted to expand globally, I was able to help them build their business, show them what to do and who to go to. He trusted me and he believed in what I was doing. His brilliance was something I admired working alongside of him. And he was very good at taking care of his people.

Jarred, you never worked for an agency but what did you get from working for Sillerman?
Jarred: They were managing intellectual property and I got a legal and financial background learning about mergers and acquisitions that I would never have gotten at a mailroom at a major agency.

During the pandemic, AGI picked up K2 and X-Ray, which apparently didn’t work out.
Dennis: We did certain things, some worked out, some didn’t. What we did learn is that when you get into business with somebody, it can’t be cosmetically. It has to be real ownership. It can look good on paper, but unless you have some controlling interest in one’s business it may not be a great partnership.
Jarred: The best way to put it is if you’re not financially integrated, you’re not going to end up being operationally integrated.
Dennis: Also, with X-Ray, it was when we lost the great Steve Strange, who was our partner. That was a contributing factor for X-Ray not working out.

Do you think Yucaipa, which has you guys and Danny Wimmer Presents, might scale into something else or get flipped?
Jarred: They’re investors, not operators. Ron’s mantra has always been let entrepreneurs be entrepreneurs. He’s not going to force anyone on anyone’s business, which is commendable. I was actually introduced Ron to Wimmer because I thought he had built a great business that had a lot of upsides. But ultimately, there’s no forced integration amongst Yucaipa Companies.

We’ve been on kind of shaky economic ground the last few months. We’re not sure how the business is going to do. The upper echelon always seems to do well, lower, mid-tier tours may be having a tougher time – what’s your take on the business looking ahead?
Dennis: There’s a malaise in this country, not necessarily worldwide. There are tours doing extremely well outside of America that aren’t doing as well in America, and you kind of go, “Really?” So there’s a malaise and it’s concerning. And the A-listers are the A-listers, and everything below that is getting harder to be out there every year trying to get the same people when you know people are like, “Well, maybe we’ll skip this year because I’m more concerned about having enough money for gas in my car,” or whatever it might be. There’s concern about the economic climate out there in this country. But when people want to see something, there is no concern.

We’ve recently seen a fair amount of movement in the agency world – Caroline Yim and Zach Iser went to UTA, Kevin Shivers went to Wasserman, Cheryl Paglierani to CAA. Are you looking at trying to acquire more agents?
Jarred: Absolutely. Definitely a priority.
Dennis: Quality before quantity.

So you’ve just had a major partnership and change of brand. What lays ahead for this company?
Dennis: We want to buy the NFL. If Ari can have IMG and the rodeo, we’re going to go after the NFL.