Pollstar Live! 2026: Marketing To Today’s Live Music Fans

Marketing to Today’s Live Music Fans – Sponsored by Ticketmaster

Moderator:
Sarah Madalinski – NS2

Speakers:
Sam Alpert – The•Team
Brittany Herndon – Legends Global
Fabi Kulick – Live Nation
Allison McGregor – CAA
Sara Williams – WME

Dirty data and phallic veggies were among the hot topics during “Marketing to Today’s Live Music Fans” panel sponsored by Ticketmaster during the opening day of Pollstar Live! 2026 in Los Angeles.

Moderated by Sarah Madalinksi of NS2, the panel offered marketing insights from a variety of stakeholders including international, venues, agents and promoters and the strategies for reaching fans and selling tickets when the process is multi-layered and the target is often elusive. These speakers are some of the industry’s top marketers and are all nominees for Pollstar’s Marketing Executive of the Year Award.

While the mission is clear, tactics vary significantly from artist to artist, venue to venue and even across territories. CAA tour marketing veteran Allison McGregor of CAA broke it down – how you market to fans of a legacy act is vastly different from engaging with followers of a burgeoning star.

Whatever the approach, communication and integration across departments and business interests is necessary for any plan to succeed. A little luck doesn’t hurt.

Fabi Kulick who has oversight of Latin tour marketing for Live Nation, shared the difficulty of executing Bad Bunny’s vision of placing two, nostalgic white chairs from the cover of his album DeBí TiRaR MáS FOToS at stadiums around the world to create buzz for his tour.

One of the chairs was no longer in production. In some places the chairs were held up in customs. They had to be fabricated from scratch in Brazil. At one point, Kulick considered putting an intern on a plane with the chairs as checked baggage to get them to Europe on time.

Challenges aside, the simple now iconic image of the chairs in front of the venue before the announcement was “official” resonated with Gen Z fans and took off in the media and on socials with 50+ packed stadiums around the globe.  

Brittany Herndon of Legends Global used a different prop to create awareness for the 2022 Broadway musical “Shucked” – a 24-foot inflatable corn cob perched on the theater marquee. It worked butter than expected with impressive first week sales.

Big ideas aside, the panel also addressed how to market without a budget. Sara Williams of WME said her go-to for a show with zero marketing dollars is to “find a kid with wearing the band T-shirt” and give him two free tickets to hang up fliers and reach likeminded fans where they congregate in the market.

The idea of “boots on the ground” was a common thread, which provided an old-school juxtaposition for modern data collection techniques and the influence of bots on dirty data. Everyone on the panel agreed that they have access to more information than ever but need to be discerning and balance the numbers with experience and advice from people in the individual markets that understand their fan base.

Sam Alpert of The•Team told the story of getting an artists’ tour name and artwork eight hours before the announcement and hearing from the Australian promoter that the “Down Under Tour” was not going to fly on the contentment.

“It’s rough out there, but that’s why we’re in these jobs – to find solutions,” he said adding “And put the artist in the best position to succeed.”