‘Pride In Being Very Neutral:’ Belly Up Presents’ Chris Goldsmith Talks San Diego Club Scene

The Solana Beach institution known as Belly Up continues to build on its 50-year history as a San Diego mainstay, recently opening a 1,900-capacity, two-level The Sound venue in nearby Del Mar and offering nearly nightly shows ranging from Foghat to Madison Cunningham to ERNEST (on back-to-back nights, even).

(This article is part of Pollstar’s monthly Market Focus feature, which includes additional editorial features, charts and data. )

Belly Up Entertainment president Chris Goldsmith got his start at the venue barely out of college in the ‘80s before becoming a key operator in the early 2000s, with a 10-year stint as an agent at Rosebud Agency in San Francisco in between.

Now, he, alongside talent buyers Chad Waldorf, Pete McDevitt and general manager Jeff Keeping keep the sound coming on the beach, as well as promoting at other local venues.

Pollstar: You’ve helped keep the lights on but also the music blaring most nights of the week at the Belly Up (600-cap).
Chris Goldsmith: At the Belly Up, we try to be open 28 days a month as a general rule, and we’ve been able to keep that going. We have a lot of artists that really make it a point to play the Belly Up when they’re around the area, but we’ve also developed a pretty robust quiver of options to use when we are going to be slower than others for touring talent.

Club tours seemed to slow down a bit after COVID, but you guys got a lot coming through.
Last year we found that some of the stuff that was touring had maybe been through a couple times already since the pandemic and the audience was getting a little fatigued. We definitely saw some drop-off last year, both in amount of content and also the return rate of people coming to see the same bands. I feel like that’s balanced back out to where we were in 2018, 2019, which was a pretty good place. That’s where I kind of hope we stay.

San Diego is one of the biggest cities in the country but it is still somewhat in the shadow of Los Angeles and other California cities.
It’s the second or third largest market in California, but it’s never been a place that people go to or move to for the music scene or broad cultural reasons in general. They tend to move here because they’re interested in the outdoor lifestyle and the weather. So it’s always been a little tough. San Diego’s lucky right now in that there’s just some really high-quality venues that are doing a good job curating and putting forward quality shows, but there’s not that many of them for a market this size.

There are some other venues your size in town, though.
We operate in the same world as the Music Box, and the good news is we’re not really in competition so much because we work cooperatively, and that’s true with the larger corporate promoters in town, too. We’ve all worked hard to achieve that, as a community here, where we try to respect each other’s business and communicate a lot. Belly Up in particular prides itself on being very neutral, so we work with everyone, and we promote shows at the Observatory with Live Nation, we co-promote at the Magnolia occasionally. We do some shows at Humphrey’s with AEG, Goldenvoice sometimes promotes shows at The Sound, occasionally Live Nation.

Belly Up opened the $17 million, 1,900-capacity The Sound in Del Mar in 2023. How’s that going?
This was built to be a rock ‘n’ roll venue, and it’s got a really nice PA in there, good lighting, very compatible with any touring production that needs to come in — ease of load-in and nice big stage and great sight lines. We get a lot of compliments from the audience about how great the room sounds. Our lead talent buyer for everything we do is Pete McDevitt. He came from the Blue Note in Columbia 12 years ago and he’s grown to be a real force in the San Diego community. It’s just been great. We did over 70 shows at The Sound last year, and we’re going to do more this year.

It’s a good size for San Diego because there wasn’t really another venue like it when it got built. It’s not like the third one of these in the market.