2025 Impact 50 Honoree: Kevin Shivers

KEVIN SHIVERS
EVP & Managing Executive
Wasserman Music

LIVE CHANGING CONCERT: “I went to college in Austin, so I went to a lot of ACL festivals during that time and those really opened my eyes and helped me realize this is what I wanted to do with my life.”

Kevin Shivers made headlines in January when it was announced he’d left WME for Wasserman Music, bringing along clients including Tyler, The Creator; Vince Staples; Leon Thomas; Kid Cudi and more. He was already well established as one of the top agents in the business, after coming up through the agency mailroom — and long removed from a previous life serving, bartending and washing dishes for a catering company — and, while maybe still be too soon to say, he just may be the biggest agent poach of the year.

“To keep moving forward in this business, and life in general, you need to be able to embrace change and have the courage to take a leap of faith into the unknown when your gut tells you the time is right,” Shivers says. “I couldn’t be happier about the way things have turned out for me since I made the leap. As for clients, I am in constant awe of Tyler, The Creator, and everything he’s done to become the one-in-a-million artist he is today.

He is up on stage every single night – every tour date, every festival performance – as a one-man show and has this ability to just mesmerize audiences like nobody else.”

Shivers says price sensitivity is crucial in keeping the attention and interest of ticket buyers.

“With so much uncertainty, people are understandably very mindful about how they spend on discretionary things like music and entertainment, so it’s more important than ever to be hyper-focused on ticket pricing and having strategies for the long-term that meet consumers where they are now – like going out with lower prices and recapturing that value down the road through growth,” he says.

It’s up to the industry to provide value, Shivers says.

“Maintaining a healthy but realistic level of optimism about things is key,” he says. “Ultimately, the burden is on us to create value propositions for consumers that work for them in any economic climate, or we’ll all be out of a job.”