Agency Intel: Ethan Berlin On ATC & Arrival Merger Forming ROAM, Booking Goose, Khruangbin & More

Arrival Artists co-founder Ethan Berlin caught up with Pollstar to chat about how the independent North American agency merged with UK-based ATC Live earlier this month to form ROAM, becoming one of the biggest independent agencies.  

ROAM’s roster features some of the most acclaimed indie artists including Sufjan Stevens, The Lumineers, Khruangbin, Goose,  Mt. Joy, Japanese Breakfast, Andrew Bird, Big Thief, Black Pumas, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, Royel Otis, Car Seat Headrest, Cory Wong, Faye Webster, Fontaines D.C., Amyl & The Sniffers, Jungle, Glen Hansard, Mac DeMarco, BADBADNOTGOOD and more.

Altogether ROAM represents over 800 artists with a team of more than 80 staff. The global company has offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, and Glasgow.  

ROAM’s leadership team includes Arrival co-founders Ali Hedrick, Erik Selz, John Bongiorno, Karl Morse, Ethan Berlin, and Matt Yasecko, as well as ATC Live founder Alex Bruford, and partners Clemence Renaut, Colin Keenan, Ed Thompson, Olivia-jane Ransley, Sarah Joy, Skully Sullivan Kaplan, and Will Church. 

Upcoming performances for Berlin’s clients include Khruangbin’s Sept. 20 appearance at Iron Blossom Music Festival in Richmond, Virginia, and Goose’s Sept. 20 show at Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island in Chicago. Plus, Cory Wong is set to play Monterey Jazz Festival in Monterey, California, Sept. 27 and has a run of November dates booked at Blue Note New York.

Pollstar: What first inspired you to be an agent? 

Ethan Berlin: My heart was in live music and seeing shows in central New Jersey growing up. … When I went to college at the University of Wisconsin, I found a student programming committee that booked shows on campus. And it was an amazing situation because this committee wasn’t just booking one big blowout end-of-year show. They actually had an on-campus venue that needed to be programmed every Friday and Saturday night. And then in the summer, there was an outdoor venue on the lake in Wisconsin that needed to be programmed as well, two or three nights a week. We had a nice-sized budget to book small bands that were developing and on the up. This is like 2006 to 2010, in the height of indie blog buzz bands and Pitchfork and all that. We were able to get in touch with all these bands that we were just finding out about in real time and hit up their agents to try to convince them to come play on campus for a few hundred bucks, a thousand dollars, whatever it was.

[We] booked so many great shows doing that, like early shows for Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend and Dawes and some of the jam bands like Tea Leaf Green and Grace Potter, when they were very, very new. [I] got to meet agents for the first time and got obsessed with the idea of being able to become an agent one day after meeting them. 

I met some folks at South by Southwest, and they helped me get some internships early on. When I learned that this was a real career where you could work alongside artists and be part of that story, I became super focused and that’s all I wanted to do.

What was your first job in the industry?

My first job in an agency was in 2010, a few months after I graduated from college. I moved from New Jersey to Chicago to work for a company called Red Rider Entertainment. And it was me and two agents, including the owner of that company, Erik Selz, who’s now one of my partners at Arrival and now at ROAM. … I learned a lot working alongside him in Chicago in that office. He became my mentor.

He folded the company into The Windish Agency in 2014 … I had started picking up some bands beforehand while I was still an assistant working with Erik, but became a full-time agent while I was working at Windish. Tom Windish sold Windish to Paradigm in 2016, and then became an agent at Paradigm.

And then came the pandemic and layoffs in the industry, which led to you and some of your former colleagues forming Arrival Artists. 

The options were to wait around and knock on someone else’s door and see if there was a job I could get somewhere else, or the ultimate risky one, which was to form a team and somehow have the confidence that we could build a brand-new agency and convince our clients to come along with us. And that’s what we did. It took a little while to get that off the ground for various different reasons, but by the fall of 2020, we had built Arrival, which was me and my five partners who are now six of the partners at ROAM. Arrival launched in the fall of 2020 with us and two employees. Prior to the name change, Arrival was 45 people with offices across the country [who] built just an amazing home for our artists and for the people who work for us.

I was looking over that initial announcement that Pollstar ran when Arrival Artists was first announced and it mentioned a partnership with ATC Live in Europe. How has that partnership grown over the years and why was now the right time to officially launch ROAM?

A few of us had a relationship with Alex Bruford, who led ATC Live in the UK, out in London. ATC had launched in 2011 and he built it into a very formidable company. He had been looking for an American counterpart to make it an even stronger company and a stronger proposition in the marketplace while being able to maintain his independence. We had a relationship with him for years; some of my partners had gotten to know Alex from going out to The Great Escape every year and different events in the UK. And so as part of our launch, we launched [Arrival] with this strategic partnership with ATC Live, with some goals in mind … but not exactly knowing what it would look like, because we were going into the unknown a little bit with Arrival in its own right. 

… Coming from this huge company like Paradigm to starting an indie, we wanted to do everything we could to make sure that we were doing the best job that we could for our clients and our employees. And this was just such a cool opportunity that came our way.

How that developed early on and over the last few years was primarily an A&R relationship. We have weekly meetings talking about things [like] new clients … sharing what’s going on in music, and then going after things together for a global push when we were able to or it made sense … sharing insights and promoter information and advice and everything on the non-primary market territories that we were each representing for our clients …

We each invested into a branding and sponsorship department for our clients called Company X. … And then [there’s the benefit of] surrounding ourselves with more great people in the business, which has lots of great implications. 

As that partnership was working … it was largely in the shadow because it was just two different companies with a behind-the-scenes partnership. And it just became obvious that we had a huge opportunity in front of us to become one and separate ourselves from the pack. 

I believe we’re more or less the only, certainly of this size, globally represented independent agency. So it allows us to continue working for ourselves, which has been very important for the core partner team at Arrival. It’s really wonderful to be the ones who are in control of setting a company culture and [making] all the decisions at the company that you work for, all the things that are so great for working for yourself. Now we’re able to continue to do that, but just in a bigger way. We’re all had some of the most successful years of our careers and there’s no doubt that we can build acts to, , arena and amphitheater level. This just allows us to keep going down that road and seeing where we could take this thing.  

Is the name of the company a reflection of the global nature of the agency?

It’s tough to name a company. We’ve now learned this twice in the last five years. The first time we had six people participating. Now we had six plus the folks at ATC. So we had a lot of ideas that came up and this …. definitely speaks to the global nature of the company itself and the global nature of artists’ careers. We gravitated to the meaning of traveling with curiosity and purpose. It spoke to how we want to work with our artists: helping to create the roadmap, exploring opportunities, and making the journey together as partners.

With the launch of ROAM, will that affect your role at the company at all?

I’ll [still] be one of the partners. We just now have more partners for certain decisions that need to be made for the brand at large and anything that affects both sides of the geographic equation. We’ll still have our North American operations, on a day-to-day basis, led by the formerly Arrival partnership team. 

What are some recent career highlights for your clients?

These last two years I’ve had artists that have grown to new levels … I’ve seen the most success in my booking, working alongside amazing clients like Khruangbin and Goose.

Khruangbin, we’ve been building alongside them since 2016, almost 10 years, just taking every step along the way. They have grown into a true powerhouse touring band, globally. On this record that came out last April, they did two sellout nights at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York, two sellout nights at the Hollywood Bowl in LA, three sold-out shows at the Greek in Berkeley, which I believe was like 27,000 tickets, two sold-out Red Rocks … just amazing, next steps in their headlining career. 

On the first year [supporting] the album, they had very meaningful direct-to-headliner festival slots at Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits, Coachella, and Boston Calling. This past year, they started to headline some festivals … Seeing them turn into this festival headliner as they become more of a household name and just build this amazing fanbase … it’s just been  amazing. That’s what you get into it for, right? To build big careers like this that have ultra impact.

And working with Goose, that story has also been just so incredible. Karl Morse and I signed them in August of 2019. They had a previous agent and they were touring in small clubs. …. And then we had this whole sold-out spring tour for the spring of 2020 tour in 500-1,000 cap rooms. Got them on a bunch of festivals, which obviously none of that happened because of the pandemic.  … Having people at home while falling in love with this band for the first time oddly worked out for them in this amazing way. They did all these live streams in the beginning of the pandemic … [and] as social distance shows and drive-in things started to come together … they were able to take advantage of this moment and go play some of those shows, which were in some cases much bigger. … They were living inside this amazing hyped moment of interest with new fans [and] it was a major part of their growth playing these shows

Fast forward to touring started up again [post-pandemic] in the fall of 2021 and in the last four years, they’ve grown into arena and amphitheater headliners. They sold out their debut show at Madison Square Garden. That was the first client that I’ve ever had play MSG. That was back in June. It sold out on the onsale. We’re playing a bunch of the Live Nation and AEG amps last summer and this summer, throughout the country. Also festival headliners. 

I grew up as a fan, in the jam band scene and so to be working with a band who’s been able to achieve these heights is just everything I [could have] hoped.

[I’m also] working with Cory Wong. He’s a cross-genre chameleon … able to play cross-genre festivals, jam band festivals, the jazz festival circuit, while building his own solo career.

Carl and I work with a new act called LA LOM that we signed two years ago. They’re from Los Angeles and they’ve had an awesome rise. … And then Arrival as a whole … Ali Hedrick has been working with Mt. Joy for many years, and every year is just growing and growing and growing. They are properly playing arenas and amphitheaters as well. They have a debut show coming up at the TD Garden in Boston and the United Center in Chicago. And they sold out MSG Square Garden last year. They just had their biggest headline show to date at Fiddler’s Green outside of Denver [16823 capacity] in addition to playing Red Rocks the night before. 

We have a new act that Maxx Lesnick here is working with. Her name is Madilyn Mei. She’s in small clubs right now, but everything is selling out super far in advance.

I spoke to you back in 2019 before the pandemic when we did a cover story with Khruangbin. So, it’s just been cool seeing how their career’s grown since then.

Every band is certainly unique in their own right and the most exciting thing about working with bands and now doing this for almost 15 years is that there’s [not] a blueprint. …  Everyone’s path is just so different …

And Khruangbin is definitely one of those bands – they do things the Khruangbin way. Every decision they make is based on what feels good for them and never about, “how do we become the biggest thing” or anything like that. You look in the 10-year rearview mirror and all those decisions have just worked. [It’s] just incredible that a nearly all instrumental act that our friends tell you they know because they’re, they heard it in their coffee shop or a yoga studio or this, that, and the other has turned into a gigantic touring band that puts on one of the most compelling live shows you can see. Rooting them on all the time. You just want them to win.
 

Editor’s Note: Khruangbin announced Sept. 19 that its appearance at Iron Blossom had been called off because bassist/vocalist Laura Lee had injured her back.