‘The Business Is Mad, And I Guess I Am Too’: A Chat With Nick Hobbs, Owner Of Charmenko

Working as an independent promoter in 2019 is tough enough. Working as an independent promoter in Eastern Europe and the Balkans seems like an even more difficult task. But Nick Hobbs isn’t complaining. 

The owner of talent-buying and promoting agency Charmenko is the go-to person when the biggest tours visit the region. The most recent promotions and co-promotions of Charm Music, the concert division of Charmenko, include Ed Sheeran, Dead Can Dance, The Chainsmokers, Green Day, Die Antwoord,Franz Ferdinand, Sean Paul, HVOB, David August, Lost Frequencies, Steve Hogarth and Mogwai.

Hobbs told Pollstar that, generally speaking, festivals, established events and major tours were doing well in Turkey, Serbia, Croatia, Czechia and Poland, where Charmenko has presences. “And that’s roughly in line with the state of economies, which are in slow growth, definitely not in recession. Even a slow growth in economy translates into a certain amount of optimism, which is good news for concert and festival promoters,” he said, adding that Turkey was a bit of an exception, given the political turmoil the country is experiencing at the moment.

Hobbs likes to do business the old-school way: growing alongside the artist, taking the risk of booking the right rooms in the early days, losing money a lot of the time, but benefitting from guaranteed ticket sales once the breakthrough comes. In the absence of contracts guaranteeing a certain amount of tours to one promoter he is to some extent dependent on loyal artists and loyal artist teams.

“It’s one of the things I always found really weird with my business, compared to the record business. At least in the old model of the record business, you would have a contract that would last for several albums. It would give an incentive to the record company to invest in the long-term career of an artist.  

“But with promoting, you could invest all you wanted into the first tour, and if it lost money, you’d have no guarantee to get the second tour. It would depend entirely on whether the agent or the artist or the manager were decent people and respected the fact that you’ve lost money despite doing a lot of work,” he explained, adding, “nowadays it works even less well. As a young, independent promoter, you might be investing in the younger artist knowing that if the artist is successful, the artist is probably going to go to one of the global or European touring operations, and all your investment will not pay off.”

Ed Sheeran comes to mind as an example for an artist that has stayed loyal to the key players instrumental in his success. “That’s a choice,” said Hobbs, “a choice that comes from the artist, the manager, the agent, together going: ‘we want to be respectful of the people that invested in the artist’s career, have taken a risk, etc.’ That’s kind of the old-school way. It’s not perfect, but it works, and it maintains a certain kind of business, in which independent promoters have a fighting chance of growing with the artist, which is the ideal.”

Today’s live music industry, for the most part, is operating on an offer-based model, where everything comes down to money: “I would say that the better promoter is the one that judges the market better, not the one that gets the artist because they offer more money. They might be getting the market wrong. And they might be driven simply by gambling, by wanting to show that they’re the biggest promoter in town, whatever,” said Hobbs.

The extreme version of that, “is the 100-date stadium tour, where only one or two companies in the world have that financial clout to offer that kind of cheque. And then they’re forced to go and sell those shows on, or promote them themselves, irrespective of whether that’s the right thing to do in that particular market.”

Which raises the questions what keeps an independent promoter motivated to grind away, in times when it seems that the world around is being swallowed up by the corporate machine. Hobbs has an answer: “Bloody-minded doggedness. I’m stubborn. To run your own business you need to be stubborn. And to ride a roller-coaster of risk, better to hold on than be thrown off.

“And simply, this is what I do. Too late to do something else now and I’m sort of at the top of my game, whatever that is. And I still enjoy it…The business is mad, and I guess I’m partly mad too. Selling out is tricky. I’m not driven by money, I’m driven by a desire to constantly handle new challenges and caring about the money is a slightly tacky necessity. I would be uncomfortable in a context where money came first. But neither do I have the answer to surviving in the longer-term without becoming part of a bigger group. Definitely maybe.”