Video Interview With Harvey Goldsmith: ‘Losing $5m On A Tour Now Doesn’t Mean Anything’

For our first video interview in 2019, Pollstar sat down with British producer and promoter legend Harvey Goldsmith at his London office. The aim was to talk about his newest business endeavor nvinsible, the state of business in general, and to get some fun questions in there, too. 

The entire transcript can be found below:

It’s a mess. The state of the world is a mess. We have governmental problems in the UK, where we’re dealing with this whole issue of Brexit, which is a mess, and where members of parliament don’t agree with what the public want, and it’s awful.

We have financial problems in Europe, we have problems with America, where the government’s currently shut down. That’s not a good start of the year, and we have problems with America and China, and America and Russia…we are in a very messy state globally at the moment.

But nevertheless, entertainment continues and is as strong as ever.

– Live Aid on July 13, 1985
George Michael passes Harvey Goldsmith the mic – right next to Bono, Paul McCartney

Maybe. I think we are living in a very difficult global geopolitical and environmental mess, which is a shame.

It’s all about money, has been for some time, which I do not like at all. But everything’s about money, bulk, volume, and less about caring and creativity, I’m sorry to say. But it’s still very successful.

Entertainment has survived and thrived because of the creative juices of the talent, of the artist. And as much as that’s still there to some respect, and because the slat has now shifted to 70-80 percent of an artist’s earnings out of live, the money becomes even more important. I understand.

What it means is that the conglomerate promoting companies, all of whom are like the civil service, where there is no emotional tie to it. There are dozens and dozens of employees of a promoting company, and if it doesn’t work, it’s not their problem, they move on to the next. 

90 percent of the promoters today have never met their artist, they never talk to them. They don’t know who they are, they just know it’s a list.

So, I’m sorry that we created a civil service, I understand why, I don’t deny what’s happened, I don’t object to the conglomerate businesses, but my point is that I came into this business because of the emotional and creative side of it, and the passion for presenting great talent. And even though that still happens, the passion is different.

I had an example last year, I was at a venue in America, where I wanted to speak to the person in charge of the venue for a concert evening, and I was told that that person goes home at 5.30. 

Well, I’ve never heard of that in my life. That just shows you we’re dealing with civil servants, and that’s not good.

There are, some in England, and they’re starting to grow, some independent, really passionate people, who want to try and do things differently, who want to be part of the creative process, and come up with different ideas, where it isn’t about being screwed by an agent.

The agents have become that focal point for just demanding more and more. Their argument is, if they don’t demand more and more, the artist will go to another agency.

My argument: let them go, because there has to be more to this business than how much you want to lose, or how little do you want to earn, which is what the business is about: ‘Yes, you can promote Beyonce, how little do you want to earn out of it?

Not my game. Not interested.

If the cycle works. The cycle turns all the time, where things then go back to reality and what’s right. Maybe we’ve seen the end of reality. Maybe the live business forever has changed, and it’s just about shoving it through. 

[Take] situations where artists are getting screwed on the secondary market, and there isn’t enough strength in the business to stop it. Part of the reason why it doesn’t stop, is because the promoters are being screwed by the agents and the artists, so they make their money in a different way.

That’s not acceptable. It’s never been acceptable, but that’s the way it is.

That we’re not fair to our fans, and that fans are starting to feel it.

I think that we’re not creating enough longevity in up and coming artists, so that their hurdles aren’t too great to jump over. So they can grow naturally. We don’t allow that anymore. We push them out hard and fast.

One record, and they’re already playing arenas. Okay, great, but what’s the point? We need to really nurture and allow acts to develop naturally, and to create new ideas naturally.

Personally, I don’t think we’re doing enough of it. We’re doing some of it, but not enough.

The barrier to entry is so much harder today. And often they’re too short-lived, because they can’t make their finances work, and the demands on them are too heavy to allow them to develop naturally.

And because promoters are being screwed at the top end, they don’t have the finances, the money, to invest, to maybe lose on a couple of tours, until they see talent they think will really grow.

One argument is that we’ve always underpriced our tickets, and the price of a ticket should go to how much people want to pay. That’s what the secondary market tells you.

The truth is that if you want fans, our audience, who we live off, who we rely on, to try something new, if you’re charging them £250 to go see Beyonce – and I keep talking about Beyonce, because that’s the classic example – you aren’t going to spend 25, 30 quid to see a brand new act playing, because you don’t know what it is.

We want to balance the top and the bottom out, and it’s no different from what’s going on in the world. There’s a small percentile of people that are earning more money than Croesus, and then underneath that, there’s a swadge of people that are surviving, and there’s a growing number of people, who just cannot survive, who are having huge difficulties in a sophisticated society.

And the ticket prices reflect that.

My view is that if a promoter is doing their job properly, they should be investing in new acts and trying them out, but they have to have the funds available to do it, and not being screwed at the top end for every penny they got, where they’re doing 95/5 deals, or 90/10 deals with 100 percent guarantee, or in some cases, a 103 percent guarantee, which means the money’s coming from some other source. 

We need to balance it out a bit, because there will never be a shortage of talent. There’s great talent out there, they just get lost in the mire.

I think it was a Ray Charles concert at the Hammersmith.

One of the reasons I wanted to start promoting properly was because I felt shortchanged. I bought a ticket to see Ray Charles and The Raelettes and the Orchestra, but I wanted to see Ray Charles, and my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, was a huge fan of Ray Charles, and out of a two-hour concert he was on stage for about 40 minutes.

I felt really cheated out of it, that’s the way it was, and I remember going up to the manager of the venue saying, ‘we paid to see Ray Charles, where is he?’, and they say, ‘if you don’t like it, do something about it, and I said, ‘okay, I will’, that kind of thing.

It was in the back of my mind that you’ve got to try and give value. You’ve got to give creative value, and you’ve got to give qualitative value, and then you’ve got fans forever.

No, we don’t want government regulations in our business, that’s the last thing we need. It’d be nice to have government regulations to deal with touts, because they’re screwing the public, that we would like. But other regulations, no thanks. We definitely don’t need that, we don’t want it. We have to regulate ourselves.

I just think we need to look at ourselves and decide. Everybody’s making a lot of money, everybody’s working really hard. But when they go down, they go down [hard].

For a big promoting company to lose three, four, five million pounds or dollars on a tour now doesn’t mean anything, because they’ll make it up somewhere else. And if they can’t make it up on a show, they make it up out of all the ancillaries that go with it.

It is a different model, it’s a different business, and maybe that’s what it is for the future. But for me, I think I’ve seen the best of it, and: no thanks.

We were so lucky, because every week there was a new act coming up, and a new style, and a new idea. To me, to some extent, as a promoter, I was playing catch up. I was lucky that I was fortunate enough that I had an eye to be able to pick the best of the best that I’ve wanted to work with. But there were lots of genres that I didn’t work with that were equally successful. 

For me, my best success was working with the artist and helping them to create their path through their life. Today you’re just a stopover as a promoter, unless you’re buying a whole tour. 

I produced Hans Zimmer’s last tour, we did 100 concerts around the world, we produced it, we developed it, we nurtured it, and I was involved in every bit of the process of it. That happens very rarely.

Today, [with] most artists that come into the UK, you’re just a stop off, so you’ve got to take the circumstances that are offered. And there’s always somebody who’ll take it. 

I used to go around the world, giving a talk called ‘Promoting and the art of saying no’. And I still believe in that. Very heavily.

When promoters say, they must have it, because if they don’t get it, someone else will, that’s when mistakes get made, and that’s when you end up joining the greed club, [asking] ‘how can I get my last penny out of this?’.

It’s okay. It’s a pathway forward, it works, it’s fine, but I think there’s a better partway.

The calculator. Very good at it.

No, I don’t play an instrument. I thought of myself once as a drummer, but then never really pursued it.

Stones.

Both valid. Indoor for music, outdoor for experience.

Coffee.

Neither. I hate VIP Areas with a passion. And mosh pits have kind of gone out the window, haven’t they?

My view is: the front of the stage, artists want to see fans, they don’t want to see people who are looking at their bloody phones or talking to each other or are bored. They want to see fans they want to engage with.

VIP Areas in front of the stage to me is an anathema, I hate it. And I try everything I can not to have it.

I’ve been involved in experiential businesses for some time. I started off, where I was the European president of an experiential agency called TVA, I then went into partnership with the guy that created the term experiential, who was based in Atlanta, and we formed a company called Ignition.

And out of Ignition cam Ignite, which was a very, very successful experiential and event agency, which I then sold in 2013. And I keep being asked to create events, we have a fantastic group of production people here, so it made sense to put together again a group, where we could go publicly, and form a new agency.

And the reason why it’s called Nvisible is because to some extent we want to be a white label agency. 

We don’t want to be a media agency, we don’t want to be an experiential agency that competes for business with everybody else, but we have some real experts that have come together, who are the best in field.

We want to supply those services, be it production services, design services, overseeing services, to other people, using the best of the best.

Jim Baggott, for example, who’s been with me for a very long time, he produces every Ultra festival around the world, 19 of them last year. Every single big event we’ve ever done, from World Cup all the way through to Live Aid, whatever, he’s always been involved with it.

Same with Luke [Carr] and Tim [Spears]. Tim works for Festival Republic and line produces Reading and Leeds and some of their other festivals. Luke does a lot of corporate work, he’s been working for Google recently.

Mark [Bustard] does a lot of sports activity and so on. So, on principles, we’ve got a fantastic team that have got real expertise, and underneath that, we’ve got a whole pool of really, really good people that we work with.

In terms of project management, and design, and in terms of literal production, every single person involved in that agency has got a list of credits as long as your arm, of stuff they’ve done and are currently doing. 

[We’re] bringing them all together, so we can go to a big media agency, or the BBC, or a record company, or corporate brand, [who] want specialized services or and event created. We can do all of the line work. That’s the idea of Nvisible, and that’s why it’s called Nvisible.

Well, I’ve never considered myself just to be a promoter, I’m more of a producer than a promoter. I have always done it myself, and that’s why I’ve managed to work with and teach and garner the best production people around, for that very reason.

When I create events, when I produce event, I’m putting the team together. For example, just because it’s the most recent, when I talked to Hans Zimmer about going on the road, he said, ‘I’ve never done a concert before, what do I do?’

So I put everything together, from doing the logistics, booking the hotels, the transport, to the sound, the light, the crew, the production, everything. We put the whole lot together. 

And that’s what we’re really good at. I have access to the best of the best, and I think we can put that to use to other people. 

So we don’t want to compete with existing agencies, or existing bodies, we want to be able to service them, so they get the best of the best.

No, it might slow it down a little, we might have to be more prepared, but we work with carnets now for touring equipment, so I don’t see, why it would be any different. The minute you come out of the EEC, if you’re going into Switzerland, you have to have a carnet, if you go outside the EEC you have to have a carnet, go to America you have to have a carnet.

So we’ve going to have a carnet in Europe, what’s the difference? I think people are making too much of a bloody fuss out of the disaster, and I think life changes, but it ain’t going to change that much.

And in any event, we’re not in Schengen, so whenever we go to Europe, we have to show our passports, and we’re not in the Euro, so we’re already half out, so to me it makes no odds whatsoever, and I’m sick to death of all these scaremongers telling us that all life’s impossible, and it’s going to stand still and we can’t do this. It’s complete bloody nonsense.

Do your research. Very important. I get people every week, saying, ‘I want to be in the music business’, and I go, ‘what?’.

So, first of all, do the research of the music business, because it’s multi-faceted, decide which area interests you the most, and then target that.

And second of all, if you really want to be in the music business, don’t give up. If you want to be a performer, don’t give up, it’s hard work, like anything. 

But it’s not like you get an exam, and once you’ve got your exam, you win. That doesn’t work in our business. It’s about individual talent. 

And whether it’s talent in front of the stage, or talent behind the stage, it’s still talent. So, if you really want to do it, you’ve got to go through the grind until you get there, and you may have a stroke of luck, and be in the right place at the right time, which will accelerate you going up the ladder, but if your really want to be in out business, then you’ve got to focus, and you’ve got to go for it.

That’s a good question. The most interesting? Probably still the UK, because it’s still exciting, and there’s still a lot to do. There’s a lot of work to do. We can never sit on our Laurels. 

I always said ‘the best UN ambassador there’s ever been is music, because there’s no boundaries to music. Anywhere. 

Whether you’re working in China, or you’re working in Africa, or you’re working in India, or you’re working in Germany or France, it’s the same. Music’s music. You either like it or not. You’re either good at presenting your music, or you’re not. 

So, it’s always interesting. There’s no particular territory, I think, that’s standing out amongst every other. There’s still lots of challenges to go in some territories, but it’s universal.

I think to some extent audiences are getting quite canny. I think, going back to the whole thing about ticket pricing, and how audiences are treated, and what they get, I think the old adage of festivals just chucking people into a field and giving them minimal service doesn’t work anymore.

We are desperately short of headliners for the summer activities, we don’t have nearly enough. And if you look at now what’s headlining the big festivals, they’re a bit of a surprise.

I think that venues still have a lot to learn in terms of giving real service to their customers. We’ve always got something to learn, we can always improve, and that’s what we have to aim for.

I do. It’s the hardest venue to work in on the planet, and it’s the best, and that’s the Royal Albert Hall.

Every day I come into the office, and I learn something new, or somebody contacts me with a new idea. I’ve become a kind of go to for ideas, so I get tons of ideas thrown at me. This morning at breakfast, eight o’clock this morning, I had two new ideas thrown at me in music, that’s how it works. That’s what keeps me going.

I love new ideas, I love exploring them, they don’t always work, but I’m always looking at 10, 12 projects at once.

Nothing. I like sport, I play a bit of golf, but I’ve learned over the years that the best thing to recharge your batteries is doing nothing, or go for a walk, or read the papers, I do all the things that I don’t normally do, because most of the week I’m working until it’s time to sleep.

I’m dealing with the West Coast of America until 10, 12 at night, and then I wake up in the morning and got Australia ringing me. It’s just the way it is.