Q’s With UTA’s Ken Fermaglich: Powerhouse Rock Agent Talks Clients, Industry

Image Courtesy of UTA – Ken Fermaglich

Pollstar has been chatting with Ken Fermaglich about his clients for more than 20 years, from a time when acts like Reel Big Fish, Creed, and 3 Doors Down were Hotstars. Over the decades, Fermaglich’s career has seen him move from Artists & Audience, to serving as senior VP for The Agency Group, to his current position at United Talent Agency after UTA acquired TAG in 2015.

Fermaglich took time to talk about his work with clients including Guns N’ Roses, Muse, and Paramore and how he has seen things change over the years.

Pollstar: Can you talk about how you’ve seen the music business evolve through the 2000s into the industry it is today?

Ken Fermaglich: It’s funny a lot of peers that are not in the music industry ask me that question a lot too. … We used to have a tour to promote a record, now we have a record to promote a tour.

There was a major juxtaposition that happened somewhere along the way in the 2000s where the business changed and where touring became so crucial and paramount to an artist’s career and to their revenue generating-ability.

[P]art of why it’s grown, [is] because of what it is. It’s an experience, you buy a ticket, you go to a concert, and you see something that can’t be reproduced in your car, or in your home. It’s a completely different kind of experience.

The boom in live has meant more artists on the road and more shows in general. Can you talk about what it was like to build that infrastructure as the business’s emphasis shifted toward live?

[Around that time] you started to see conglomerations moving in and creating these type of road maps for bands to evolve their career from a 250-capacity venue to a 1,000-capacity venue to a 3,000-capacity venue and then up to, hopefully, an arena, as the band evolved.

That kind of a plan and partnership between a band and a promoter, and of course their audience, became that much more a part of how this all developed, coupled with continuing to release new music through radio for a radio-driven band and video for video-driven bands.

The advent of the internet helped to really fuel that and push music and video to whole other level of eyeballs that was not just about listening to music from a radio station or that form. You had another medium to move the music to people.

[And] certainly there’s a whole other layer to this conversation just discussing festivals. But it all becomes a part of the machine at this point.

But before these big conglomerations brought a very visible face that could be targeted with lawsuits, did you have to deal with a lot of shady characters in the concert business?

There used to be this sentiment about “independent promoters.” We would be a little hesitant to work with independent promoters, we would make them send money up front. A 50 percent deposit was the rule of the day as far as the matter in which you would book a show.

Now, as things have become a little/a lot more legitimized due to corporations coming into the space, the independent promoter has become something that has died off, to a certain extent. Independents have just been acquired by promoter-conglomerates to make a bigger promoter-conglomerate.

Those independents now are still working with the same people, and that’s the interesting thing. A lot of these people I’ve been working with for 20-plus years.

When I started working with them, they might have not have been working for the big conglomerate, they might have been independent, they might have been working for the local business that ended up getting bought by the conglomerate, but I still have relationships with those people.

There’s a lot of people who I’ve come up with over however many years I’ve been doing this, who you just have a relationship with them because you’ve been selling them shows and been relying on them to be your partner for years.

Tell us about what it’s been like to work with the Guns N’ Roses tour.

It’s continuing this year; there’s shows in Europe and more in Asia later in the year. It’s been an amazing ride, clearly. You hope to get yourself in a position where you can handle when something like this happens. At the end of the day, this has been fun and there are really great people I’ve gotten to work with in their camp.

Were you nervous about the project, given the band’s reputation from decades ago?

The experience people are having right now, from a consumer perspective but also from a business perspective, is really good. Whatever happened in the past is past. I asked people early on in this project to suspend their opinions from the past and try to focus on the here and now and the future, because that’s how we’re looking at it.

It’s a whole new day for the band and we believe in their ability to do incredible things and we’re seeing it come to life. Luckily, our business partners have done an amazing job, and I give credit to a lot of them. [Many] lived through problems 20 years ago and took all of that, parked it and said, “OK, show me what you can do today,” and the band has delivered.

Can you talk about what it was like to inherit a band with such a developed global audience?

Back in the day they did do a lot of touring, for better or worse. I wasn’t their agent back then, I can’t really speak to it, but you can look at their tour history and see they went to a lot of places. Certainly they understood the ethic of touring and the need to tour, and, to the point earlier, a lot of [that work] was to promote their album and tour in support of the record. Due to the fact that the band was absent for all of those years and didn’t tour together that absence made the heart grow fonder for the fan and for the consumer to want to see it.

How did Coachella figure into the band’s desire to stay culturally relevant and reach multiple audiences?

That was a very strategic first look, it’s something we thought about and talked about a bunch. We felt very strongly [it] could be an amazing launchpad for the band, and sort of a statement saying “We’re not just what you thought we were in the ’90s, but we can still be very relevant in this decade.” Clearly, it was impactful from that perspective, to be a part of that festival, to headline that festival, to be a part of the culture of Southern California – don’t forget the band is from there.

Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP – Muse
Matt Bellamy performs on day one at Lollapalooza in Grant Park in Chicago.

What is it like to book rock acts with the market being so crowded?

Yes, it’s crowded. There’s definitely a bunch of different rock bands. With the influx of more rock festivals, there are lots of festival opportunities out there for bands. There are certain festival circuits for certain rock bands and then there are other certain festivals that are right for other rock bands.

A band like Muse is an interesting case study because when you look at [their routing] you see they can play festivals like they did last year – Lollapalooza, Osheaga – that are more alternative-leaning, and then this year they are playing Bonnaroo and BottleRock. But they also did Carolina Rebellion in Charlotte, N.C., which is more of a rock/metal festival.

[With] 3 Doors Down this summer, we wanted, very badly, to put a package together because they hadn’t been on a summer tour package in a few years.

We looked long and hard and found our way to Collective Soul, another band that has been around for a slew of years. I like the fact that there’s lots of different bands. Yes, there’s a lot of traffic, but it gives you the ability to have different touring partners.

We saw that same thing with Paramore, who has been doing this 14 years. We found our way into a great summer tour package with Foster The People, really happily.

We were looking for the right partner and Foster was around and wanted to tour.

It’s gonna be one of the best tours that Paramore has ever done, and probably the biggest.

A sold-out show at the Forum in L.A., a sold-out show here in N.Y. at Barclays Center. 

[Yes] we just got back from our third Parahoy!, which is a Paramore-themed cruise. This is something that has become a labor of love for all parts of the team involved with the band and the band themselves.

Its a great way for the Paramore fanatical fan to go away with the band on a cruise and get a nonstop dose of Paramore, bands Paramore likes, plus activities with the band and the other bands that are on the cruise.

Chris Salata / capehartphotography.com – Paramore
SunFest, Downtown West Palm Beach, Fla.

We created it several years ago, we just cooked up this idea, and now we just finished our third cruise and sold it out. It’s been an amazing experience to grow something out of nothing, but more importantly just to be on the boat and to see that fan interact with the band, and really it’s the UBER fan, its the fan that’s so devoted to the fan that they spend a bunch of their hard earned money to go away on a vacation, essentially, on a cruise liner with the band. It’s a pretty cool thing and a rewarding thing to have been involved with and to see through in action.

Do you think these kinds of experience-events are important?

Destination events, as they’re being called, are definitely becoming more and more popular. And going back to the business, we need to continue to develop these kinds of events, because they are experiential. They provide the consumer with an experience that they can’t get in their home or in the case of these kinds of events, they can’t even get it in the concert venue, because these things are a whole other level of [experiential].

Yes, there’s concerts on the boat, but there’s all these different activities and all these things that the band does, or that the supporting bands do, that you would just not see in a normal 3 and-a-half or 4-hour concert window when you go to a concert in a venue. Those destination events and those kinds of experiences are really key and they’re really important for a fan and a band from a connection perspective. Ultimately, that kind of connectivity, when you can get that between an artist and the audience, those are really special. To be a part of it, to watch it and to create it in real time, is pretty awesome.

I understand you knew Jordan Feldstein?

He was a dear friend of mine and a guy I worked with and collaborated with. I loved him as a manager and I felt that he was one of the best managers in the business because he was in the trenches with us agents. I can remember conversations with him, just going through and saying “We want to get this tour with this band. Who is the manager? Who should I call for you Ken?” I always felt like he was a great partner from a team perspective on the representation of an act. Loved that guy dearly and known him a long time and it was just a terrible story around the holidays when he passed and I was really upset about it.

What are some of UTA’s plans for the future? How is business after the acquisition of Circle Talent Agency’s EDM department?

In a general sense we continue to look for opportunities to bring in talent, whether that be agents or clients or other companies/entities.

Certainly with respect to the most recent acquisition, we’re all really, really excited about Circle and having the team here. They are an incredibly vibrant agency, a bunch of guys, women and people who represent talent in a genre/space we didn’t have a lot of artists or attractions in. It allowed us to go 0-60 pretty much overnight into the electronic music space and that was something we felt really strongly that we needed. Luckily, from the perspective of their needs, they needed a company like UTA, so the match is really good. 

The other thing for us, even just after a few weeks of spending time with these people, culturally they are very similar to us. They want to collaborate, they want to work together and share in the wins, help each other be better agents and provide better opportunities for our clients.

They are going to fit in – and they have fit in – really great, even in the early days of the acquisition. We’re really excited about that fact that they are now a part of UTA.

Anything else you want people to know?

One other thing, that’s an interesting development for me, it’s something that I hoped for when the acquisition of The Agency Group happened almost three years ago: We longed for a full-service approach for the way we could represent our artist. By full-service I mean the ability to have other areas of representation besides just music/touring/booking. One of the amazing things here at UTA and what this company is about – certainly it’s about collaboration and working together, and that’s an important part of it – but the full-service aspect is being able to bring in other agents in other fields of expertise to be involved and on teams with different bands, so we can go and do different kinds of things for my bands when they ask “I’d like to be in a movie” or “I’d like to shoot a movie” or “I’d like to figure out funding for a movie,” or “I have an interest in creating a spirit.”

Whatever the case may be, there are so many different facets to UTA. One of the most amazing things, for my clients, about being here, is I’ve got all kinds of different, full-service options at my fingertips. I spent a lot of time cutting my teeth in learning to book a tour properly, and smartly, and to really make great decisions on behalf of a band, to provide lots of opportunities from a touring-side. But now lots of opportunities can come for different bands from all these agents in different areas that the company has.

That’s a real game-changer for me and for my clients and, most importantly, for all of us here in the music division.