Q’s With Paradigm’s Taylor Schultz; Taking Jesse McCartney, Playboi Carti, T-Pain To School

– Taylor Schultz
Paradigm

Taylor Schultz oversees one of the busiest talent agencies’ college department, which means connecting hundreds of artists to the dozens of various college programming departments, event boards, fraternity and sorority leaders and more.

“In essence, we’re a middle person in the way the middle buyers are on behalf of the schools, we function as that for all of the artists on Paradigm’s roster. If it’s at a college, the college department handles it.”

“The idea is that one artist passes on an offer, if the regular RA was to receive that, the conversation would stop there,” Schultz said.  “So the college department, like so many other of our service divisions – festivals, fairs, casinos, corporates, etc. – exists to make sure that if we can’t get one artist, we try to get a good crack at getting another artist on the bill.”

Navigating the college market is not always easy, as it requires a bit of hand holding with students and programming boards rather than seasoned concert promoters. Shows are often either a soft ticket or free entry altogether and university budgets frequently are determined or funds awarded at the last minute, forcing things to come together quickly and making it difficult to route shows in multiple markets. 

However, the trouble is clearly worth it, as the major booking agencies continue to invest resources, time and effort into college shows specifically.

Schultz talked to Pollstar about the differences between booking college shows and regular, for-profit shows, Paradigm’s somewhat surprising No. 1 college act, and the changing attitudes of the major agencies that now investing seasoned staff and resources into college booking rather than “churning them out after doing their time in college agent prison,” Schultz said, laughing.

The main difference is that the club business is propelled largely by the artist, where the artist routes out a tour and says, ‘Venues, give up these holds.  In the college market, it’s more that the buyer rules the marketplace – they have a set amount of money, and the kids or the school gets to spend it how they choose.

So it’s a little more of a passive process. We definitely try and have our acts prioritize and keep strong relationships where the schools, kids and middle buyers all trust our expertise and what we’re telling them about our artists, but they’re the ones telling us what they’re willing to spend and buy.

School shows tend to stack up on certain dates. Campus concert dates are very complexly scheduled within the academic calendars and tend to stack up in April or September or October where multiple big shows around the country will be happening on the same day, mostly Friday-Saturday weekend shows. It’s pretty hard. I really shy away from the term ‘college tour’ because you have to get the schools to book shows on Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays in a routed fashion and it just doesn’t happen that way.

It’s largely dependent on when the schools send the offers. We’re at their mercy. We can always say, “Can you try to do this date instead?” But the calendars and the offer’s mere existence are at the school’s mercy, not ours.

My best answer is honestly we’re not really sure. I’ve spent a lot of time both internally and with prominent middle buyers strategizing and trying to track trends and forecast trends within the college space to be in the right place in the right time with the right act. It’s really hard to track or predict the college market. 

Our top three acts are Jesse McCartney, T-Pain and Waka Flocka Flame. These are not acts that are topping the charts anywhere else. It’s been the three of them trading spots in the top three for the last couple years. It’s not a momentary fluke for them but it idoesn’t really match their placement within the top 40 charts, or charts as a whole.

We joke that I’m an honorary member of the team since Jesse does so much at colleges.

Directly below them in show count for this year are We The Kings, Audien, Quinn XCII, Cherub, The Mowgli’s, Jay Som, Party Favor, Playboi Carti –  it runs the gamut for sure.

Part of what we’ve seen is there’s been kind of a throwback resurgence in acts that these kids were listening to when they grew up that they now want to see on campus. I think it’s also a combination of the voting process that’s inherent to student program boards on campus, their voting process for picking acts to come to campus. 

The acts that make it have to have a critical mass of popularity and ubiquitousness where it’s a safe enough bet that the majority of people at school or on their board would know at least a couple of the songs. They have to have some hit songs that people know from radio under their belt. It’s what’s charted consistently over the past 10 years I suppose.

We have strong longstanding prioritized relationships with middle buyers. It’s a great way to get a message out or prioritize a specific client in one fell swoop. We go to that one person, and know that one person. such as (Concert Ideas president) Adam Tobey can push that artist out to all their school clients. It’s just a very effective way of getting information out. It means they’re doing the work on behalf of our client instead of us, which is wonderful, and they often have better contacts that are cued to listen to them because that’s their person, not me directly. 

Katie Reahl / Syracuse University Union – Playboi Carti
BACK TO SCHOOL: Playboi Carti co-headlined the 10,000-capacity Juice Jam Sept. 16 at Syracuse University in New York, whose University Union programming board provides hands-on concert promotion and marketing experience for students.

Schools can be distrustful of agents and agencies, thinking we’re going to hoodwink them, or get them a bad deal or try to upsell them. The middle buyers are often there as a buffer and best-practices catchall for the schools since they know the drill and have done this many, many times over. They’re very important to us. However, it always surprises me when I run the numbers that we do more work and book more shows directly with the schools than we do with middle buyers. We really do more with direct schools like Syracuse and Cornell and UC Santa Barbara, for example than we do with the middle buyers.

My role as a college agent and the middle agent/buyer’s as the middleman, it’s that constant balance of trying to match make perfect compromises where both parties benefit, and both have a client at the end of the day that they answer to and have to have their best interests at heart.

That’s why it’s a relationships business with the middle buyers and why those relationships are so important to me. 

We didn’t have a college department until seven years ago when I started it, but it seems like historically and maybe at other places it was more like an agent training program, where they churn them out after they’ve done their time in college agent prison (laughs). But I actually like my job and I’m not going anywhere. Maybe it’s different at the other shops now.

It’s good to have someone there at least cultivating relationships with the advisers. The kids will change every year but the advisers don’t.