Fifteen Years After Indiana, Live Music Still Has A Leadership Problem (Op-ed By Jim Digby, Event Safety Alliance)

The following is an op-ed by Jim Digby, President of Show Makers and Co-Founder and Past President of the Event Safety Alliance. He is Tour Director for Linkin Park and a certified Project Management Professional.

The Event Safety Alliance was formed in response to deadly and tragic accidents at major concerts in 2011 including the deadly stage collapse at the Indiana State Fair leading to the publication of the Event Safety Guide in 2013. Here, Digby calls for additional accountability from industry leaders and industrywide guidelines to ensure safety at live events across the world.

Live entertainment and music touring have never been bigger, faster, or more exposed. Arena tours now roll twenty or more trucks. Stadium tours run two to four times that. A single world tour can coordinate hundreds of people and carry financial exposure in the tens of millions.

Yet the person responsible for leading the project, creating the plan, setting the pace, coordinating the staff, delivering the artist’s vision, and carrying the legal duty of care, faces no agreed competency requirement to hold the job. No industry standard. No shared learning pathway or certification. In an industry built on precision, the person steering the entire operation can still get the job without a requirement to demonstrate proof of readiness.

This is not a criticism of the people who currently lead. Most of us rose into the work the only way available to us: by doing it. On-the-job training built extraordinary delivery-capable leaders and helped create the modern live events business. It is the reason we are here.

But the industry’s old way of training leaders can’t keep up with the speed, scale, and stakes of touring today. Demand has outpaced the supply of experienced leaders, and every year the legal, insurance, safety, and regulatory demands grow more complex: multi-jurisdictional compliance, labor and immigration, structural sign-off, drone airspace, pyro permits, crowd management, severe weather planning, and crisis response. When something goes wrong, scrutiny now moves instantly from the performance site to the global news cycle. We are running larger, more visible, more complex projects while still relying too often on instinct, reputation, and whoever happens to be available.

Credentials already exist for many of the trades and disciplines around us: ETCP for riggers and electricians, OSHA 30 for jobsite safety, the Certified Safety Professional for safety leadership, incident command training, mental health first aid, and other role-specific education. Those who pursue education often do so with little clarity on what’s the best path, on their own time and their own dime, because they are not satisfied with the status quo.

It’s Time to Professionalize the Pipeline

The solution is already in reach: give live event leaders access to the kind of structured training other high-stakes industries already expect. The work these professionals are doing is project management, whether the industry calls it that or not. To professionalize this, they need access to the standards, language and leadership pathway to match the scale of the work.

We don’t need to invent this from scratch. The framework already exists. For decades, the Project Management Institute has advanced a global language and discipline for leading complex work across industries where failure is expensive, visible, and consequential: construction, aerospace, government energy, healthcare and technology. Project management standards and training programs are built around the same realities live entertainment leaders manage every day: scope, schedule, budget, risk, stakeholders, quality, resources, governance, and value delivery. The difference is that our projects compress those pressures into live timelines, moving cities, temporary infrastructure, and a door time that cannot move.

That is why providing access to project management training is critical. It gives live entertainment something it has never had at scale: a recognized, transferable, defensible standard for the people asked to lead its most complex work. It doesn’t replace industry experience; it gives that experience structure. 

• It does not make a production manager less creative or a tour manager less practical; it gives them a shared operating system for planning, decision-making, risk management, communication, and accountability.

• For hirers, insurers, regulators, venues, municipalities, artists and investors, it creates a clearer way to recognize real leadership competence.
• For the next generation, it creates a route into leadership that does not depend only on luck, proximity or who decides to take them under their wing.

The point is not to make live entertainment look like every other industry. It is to give the people running the show the professional backbone that the high-risk work demands, and make it fit the world we actually work in.

My own path reflects this shift. I pursued the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification before COVID, but the pandemic made the need more urgent: when live touring shut down, the credential gave me a recognized way to translate decades of global tour leadership into project management competency beyond entertainment. It also changed how I see the industry itself, confirming that live events can be successfully and more efficiently delivered with project management discipline, even if the sector has not always used that language.

A New Standard for the Next Generation

To those who hire, the artist managers, labels, agencies, promoters, festival owners, and venue operators, demand more of the people you choose to lead. The question cannot simply be who is available or who is familiar. It must be who is prepared for the responsibility: how can they manage memorable experiences, while also managing risks, teams and protecting people?   

Consistency matters for an industry this size. The people who make tours work bring more than timelines and budgets. They read the room, communicate under pressure, and own the outcome. They lead with judgment and care for the people doing the work. And the best of them see around corners, they manage the risk that hasn’t happened yet. That is what the training is meant to protect and sharpen, not replace.

Attracting and equipping the next generation of live event leadership talent requires an honest reflection. While our history brought us here, it’s important to recognize that our future asks more of us. Live entertainment already demands discipline, complexity, rigor, and leadership equal to any high-risk industry. Now we need the courage to evolve, and the commitment to build the pathway for the future.