Agency Intel: Ground Control Touring’s Eric Dimenstein Celebrates 25 Years, Agency Roster Includes Waxahatchee, Japanese Breakfast, Belle & Sebastian, Deafheaven

Much has changed in the concert business in 25 years, with the most obvious and impactful being the proliferation of online commerce, leading to technological advances like QR codes, mobile ticketing, email marketing and streaming services changing the industry forever. 

That’s not to mention the period also seeing a global pandemic shutting down all live events nearly worldwide for the better part of two years, an unthinkable situation testing the mettle of anyone involved in live events.

Some things never change, though, such as a passion for music and dedication to your clients, which Ground Control Touring has been known for since its formation in 2000, all while growing financially and sonically while remaining a true boutique music agency.

Formed by agents Jim Romeo and Eric Dimenstein, Ground Control Touring represents critically acclaimed touring artists including Ani DiFranco, Belle & Sebastian, Boy Harsher, Bright Eyes, Crumb, Deafheaven, Dry Cleaning, Empress Of, Ginger Root, Gregory Alan Isakov, Japanese Breakfast, Joyce Manor, Kim Gordon, Manchester Orchestra, Men I Trust, MIKE, The Moldy Peaches, Pattie Gonia, Shannon & The Clams, Sonic Youth, Surf Curse, Turnover, Waxahatchee and many others. 

Led by Dimenstein, senior vice president John Chavez and managing director Peter Truby, Ground Control Touring has, since 2023, nearly doubled its staff count and added more than 100 clients to its roster of more than 600. 

On the ground floor making the action happen and servicing those hundreds of clients are agents including Timmy Hefner, Susie Giang, Andrew Ellis, Merrick Jarmulowicz, Natasha Parish, Joe Price, Josh Stern, Alisa Preisler, Geoff McGovern and more crucial team members, some with the agency more than 10 years or more recently joining from other notable agencies. 

“I think we’re in a good place,” says Dimenstein, noting the growth of the agency following the pandemic, with more than 40 full time employees, 12 being full-time agents and seven agent associates, with offices in New York and Los Angeles. “The fact that there are more boutiques out there validates the model, that there’s enough artists out there looking for that more specialized boutique approach and there’s more options for them.”

Ahead of the company’s end-of-the-year holiday party at Brooklyn roller rink / concert venue Xanadu and a new website launch, Dimenstein shared more with Pollstar about the last 25 years of Ground Control, and what’s next for the agency.

Pollstar: It’s not easy to grow while maintaining a hands-on approach with your artist clients, not to mention running the actual business yourself. 

Eric Dimenstein: I was wearing all those hats back in the day, but To match the growth and scale, we’ve hired operations and HR people.  Not having to do the finance and operations frees me up some time. 

Just in this year, and not just agents, we’ve probably hired around 10 people in different roles. That’s been a few more marketing people and more at the support level to meet the scale and size of the company, the number and size of shows we’re doing. It’s been a lot of work,  but exciting.

I have my longtime clients, artists I’ve worked with and continue to work with, but more and more my work is supporting and growing our agents in whatever way needed, if that means working side by side with them on a band or providing business structure and support.  There’s not a job description. It’s anything and everything to get the job done. My job more and more is running the company and putting things together and supporting these agents to carry it on. We have 12 full-time agents and seven junior agents coming up behind them, which I’m excited and proud about. Knock on wood, but we’ve continued to grow each year by year. Obviously there was a pandemic, which threw things off, but it just seems that right now we’ve been growing in an accelerated way, spending a lot of time and investment in building the support and infrastructure to support these artists. 

What are artists looking for these days from their agent?
Different artists are looking for different things. I think ultimately they want someone who they feel gets the music and is passionate and will help them with their creative vision. A lot of our agents here are more than just bookers or agents, more like creative partners. We tend to have a lot of artists that we full-on service, and we’re willing to find a unique venue that doesn’t do shows every day of the week. It’s more hands-on, a little more strategic. A lot of the artists we work for are looking for more unique sort of situations.

I guess it’s not only dollars and cents.

I mean, money’s good, too. You need relationships and you’ll need to take the gig that will allow you to do other things that are more cool and fun but don’t pay off as much.

All good agents advocate and believe in their artists, but Ground Control really seems to be about the music first.

That’s a quality we have. When I worked at other agencies, I worked with some artists that I liked, and I had to work with some that I didn’t really care about. I kind of made the decision when I went the direction I went to only work with artists I like. It’s a hard job and you want to like what you’re selling and what you’re working with, both as people and in music. The agents here truly love and believe in [the music] in a real way and weren’t just handed an act to book it. They work that much harder and care that much more and think that much more creatively. That’s what makes a great agent.

Let’s talk about some of that music. What are you particularly immediately excited about?

We just announced three special album shows for the artist Bright Eyes, who I’ve been working with for 25 years, since we started the company, at the Hollywood Bowl, Red Rocks and Forest Hills Stadium, so that’s exciting to be celebrating together after all these years. [Conor Oberst] is playing the best shows I’ve seen in 20 years, it’s really great and we’re really excited about that. Gregory Alan Isakov is phenomenal, doing multiple Red Rocks, blew out multiple Radio Cities. Waxahatchee and her side project Snocaps that she has with her sister Allison (Crutchfield), will be in town [at the Bowery Ballroom] on Monday. She’s going out later this year with MJ Lenderman, and we’re really excited about that. Men I Trust have been doing some of their biggest shows. They’ve done Prospect Park here in New York, and just got back from some shows supporting Billie Eilish.

Japanese Breakfast did four nights at the Brooklyn Paramount, so about 10,000 people, two nights at the Salt Shed in Chicago, Two nights at the Met Philly, not to mention festival plays at Coachella, ACL, two nights with Chappell Roan at Forest Hills, lots of good stuff. Kim Gordon has a new album coming out, with an amazing first single and video on Wednesday. She played to about 2,000 people at the Knockdown Center. She’s really pushing the envelope as a solo artist.

What can you say about the state of – and the need for – the boutique talent agency? There have been waxing and waning periods of consolidation and then the formation of new ones over the course of a couple decades. 

There was a lot of consolidation and roll-up with Paradigm (now Wasserman Music) at the time. When I started, there had been a lot of what we’re calling boutique agencies, there were a lot more and then, they kept getting consolidated and bought up, until the pandemic. There’s been a lot more that formed since, which is closer to the olden days when there were so many others. There’s more boutiques now, and I’m kind of happy about that. It’s a validation of the model, a different model than the full scale. For a certain artist and agent, it’s a space that I think is needed and that they’re looking for. There’s artists that aren’t looking for a movie department or whatever else it might be. We will continue to be that space, that alternative, not that one’s better than the other, just an alternative.

I look to continue to grow, with the same ethics and values, and grow our footprint and our scale and the services to do more in more territories, and genres. We’re putting things forward to take steps in those regards. There’s just a whole bunch of design things as we go into our 26th year that I’m excited about.

A lot can change in 25 years. Any big takeaways on the new normals since you started Ground Control, not to mention your previous time with agencies including ICM?

It’s a different landscape for one; there’s just more bands on the road. More bands, more agents, people booking further and further out. There were some tours, 25 years ago, where we could book a tour three or six months out. Now, we’re booking over a year out, and it’s not just the big theater shows, either. You’re finding holds crazy deep over a year out at the club level. There were fewer festivals.  Now some have multiple weekends and there’s just so many more festivals, which has changed the landscape as well. There’s all the tour deals, there’s things that we need to do now that labels would be more involved with back in the day, like tour marketing. You really need marketing people working with the promoters. Bands now seem to be more open to sponsorship and branding, and brands are more open to it too.

You were one of the founding members of the National Independent Talent Organization that formed during the pandemic. Is that collaboration and dialog continuing today? 

That was a silver lining of the pandemic – while we were doing our weekly NITO Zooms, or even before it was called NITO, being on calls with people who I’ve known and respected for a lot of years, but for one reason or another never really worked together with, like Stormy Shepherd at Leave Home Booking, or Scott Sokol at Pinnacle or Jack Randall at the Kurland Agency. We don’t do a lot of business in the day to day, but we were all on the same boat and had to work together and got to know each other. Many of those people, where I wouldn’t be able to before the pandemic, I can pick up the phone and call right now and get information or share advice. So that’s been great, and I’m trying to keep that going.

What’s next for Ground Control? Another 25 years we hope.

We have some things coming into the year continuing to expand our footprint. There’s some service stuff in the works. We’re building on some existing and new, departmental things to service the scale and the agents and the artists. We’re just continuing to grow in an organic way. There is a growth plan.