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Exec Profile: Darin Lashinsky
Darin Lashinsky, after 20 years in the industry, hung his own shingle in November – and the business name he chose had a familiar ring:
The choice is an homage to his late father, Philip, whose National Shows was a fixture for many years, promoting everything from
But Darin actually represents the third generation of the Lashinsky family to discover the entertainment business flows in their veins.
“My grandfather, Harry Lashinsky, was the first promoter in the family,” Darin Lashinsky told Pollstar. “He was promoting shows before they even began to resemble what we call concerts now, what his sons started doing out of college in the mid-1960s.”
And, at least according to family lore, Harry Lashinsky promoted one mythic concert that never took place.
“The story I was told was the legandary Hank Williams show – the Canton, Ohio, show he died en route to when he died – was my grandfather’s show,” Lashinsky said. “He was promoting Hank Sr. and other acts, not necessarily music acts but a lot of theatrical and other personal appearances.”
Among Phil Lashinsky’s business contemporaries was Marty Klein, formerly of
The legendary agent “gets credit for being a partner with my father, Philip, and uncle, Gary, on shows. They partnered on an Al Hirt show at the Baltimore Arena together,” Lashinsky explained. “My uncle told me they made $300 on that show, and took that money and started National Shows with it.”
Darin would follow in the footsteps of those men, spending the last dozen or so years with
Darin likes to joke that he’s “been at concerts I don’t even remember being at,” going back at least to a Montrose/10cc gig. But it was another show that made the biggest impression on the young Lashinsky. One that should resonate with a generation or two of fans.
“To this day I can see myself standing on the stage watching KISS on the Destroyer tour, which changed my life forever.”
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Congratulations on your first six months of National Shows 2. Was it a long time in coming?
I can say today, and I’ve been saying it for the last six months, that it’s the smartest decision I’ve ever made. It was probably long overdue, based on where I came from as a third-generation concert promoter.
For better or for worse, my family always worked for themselves. Whether they had partners or not, they always had their own companies. That was in the back of my mind for a long time. I got a little bit of a late start. It’s been, I guess, coming close to 20 years in the business for me.
I was also given a great opportunity with Mike Smardak at Outback Concerts and I worked with him for about 12 years. But I don’t regret, by any means, making the move.
Do you have a report card after six months?
I’m bullish about the business. We have those conversations – everyone does – with various folks in the business on a daily basis. “How are your shows looking? How did other shows do?”
I’m looking at what other people are doing, whether it’s through Pollstar’s boxoffice reports or talking to various folks in the industry, and I hear a lot of good. There’s always a lot of bad and I’m not immune to that – we all make bad decisions. But the good has outweighed the bad for quite a while.
I remain very optimistic about the business and I’m happy with what I’ve been able to accomplish in a very short period of time.
How is your partnership with Frank Productions helping you?
I’m thankful to Larry Frank and that relationship, because he and
One thing we’ve talked about doing is that I will probably be running lead on a lot of that business that is in the East. Not the Northeast necessarily, but probably from Pennsylvania south, then over to Georgia and Florida.
That’s the goal, because I’ve operated here for so long. That’s really how we started doing business together. [Larry Frank] opened the door to some of his key clients and managers,
I’ve handled very big business and delivery, and handled it properly, and I think that’s when the light bulb went off in his head: “He does things the way we would do them.” It’s a really good match.
Has rock radio been helpful for a band like Avenged Sevenfold?
My gosh, rock radio is pretty splintered. Whatever the format, whether it’s alternative rock or active rock, rock radio is probably the most difficult format to peg. It’s a moving target.
We have conversations about bands that might be active rock, and we’ll get asked, “Are they black T-shirt active rock? Or are they more alternative rock?” and so on.
Rock radio was much less fragmented then. With media in transition, how do you develop your marketing plan?
People say radio is dead but, when I say terrestrial radio, in the back of my mind – and this is no offense to radio – I’m saying, “Gee, I can’t wait for the day when we’re not so reliant on terrestrial radio.”
I’m not ignorant to the fact that there are tons of artists that are having enormous amounts of success yet are not getting a lot of radio airplay, especially in those sort of not-major markets that I deal with.
But there still tends to be a knee-jerk reaction when you talk about a band in a particular city. People want to know what stations are playing that. Obviously, radio play is a positive. Terrestrial radio is still a key component to marketing the show, especially at a large level.
I feel that if an artist is getting radio play or not, we all know that people are finding out about music in many other ways. They are not necessarily listening to terrestrial radio in the numbers they were 15 or 20 years ago.
Country radio is different. It’s a singular format. Primarily, they play new music and classic music and it’s pretty easy.
But I have country artists I’m looking at working with that are on the verge of being arena headliners. The managers or somebody will say, “Call radio, but don’t be scared off when you find out they’re not playing this artist as much as you would expect.”
What they are saying, if I’m reading correctly between the lines, is, “We’re having success. Don’t be scared off when even a country radio station tells you, ‘Yeah, we’re into this artist but we’re not really playing much of it.’” The fans are still finding out other ways.
Are you increasing or decreasing advertising budgets? What’s most effective?
My two favorite ways to advertise shows, and have been for a while, are Internet and television.
Television is kind of seasonal. I devise in my head a plan for a particular artist in a particular market and talk with my marketing director and artist representatives about how to effectively market. Over the last five or six years, I found I want to increase advertising budgets on shows because during the prime time of the year, with new television programming, you are reaching a huge audience.
We just had that happened recently with the
My next conversation was with marketing, saying, “What’s out there? Let’s not sit here and let this coast. Let’s nail it.” And it turns out the second week of “The Voice,” [with Maroon 5’s Adam Levine], which is getting great reviews, was the next Tuesday. So I’m saying, “I don’t care how much it is, buy it! Move the money from radio, whatever, buy it.” We know we have a captive audience.
I get excited about those things because I conjure up the idea that there is where our audience is. Let’s go get ‘em.
How do you figure out where your audience is in order to target it most effectively?
It’s tough. I have to give credit to the managers and the Ali McGregors and Michelle Bernsteins of the world. Between management and agency, on a lot of artists, they provide some really good information. They’ll tell you where they think the audience is for some of these shows.
You get kind of a cheat sheet that marketing gets to work with and it just adds to the equation. But yeah, we start talking about what television show is a Metallica fan watching. That could be a two-hour debate.
And depending on what market you are talking about, you’d hate to put the money in the wrong place. The tickets are going to sell regardless, but we sort of feel like we have to advertise them anyway.
It’s an alternative to newspaper advertising.
It’s obviously much more expensive. And, of course, there’s the naysayers who say that with DVRs people aren’t necessarily watching shows on the first run and are blasting through the commercials. I do that. I have a lot of stuff I DVR whether its to reference or for pleasure.
There’s probably an advertising agency out there that will tell you ads still get impressions. Even when the viewer skips through ads on the DVR it still makes an impression, even if it’s going five times the broadcast speed.
It’s funny that we’ve veered into this discussion about marketing but there’s a reason for that. It’s a huge part of the business.
I look around every single day and check the ticket counts for every single show we have on sale, and we try to have a marketing meeting three days a week to just sit and do that – brainstorm, find out how each one is tracking, throw ideas out there.
I’ll do it until the day I die, which will be the day I don’t promote shows any more. It’s just in me.
In addition to marketing, there have been other ideas for getting butts in seats, including scaling, all-in ticketing and now, Groupon-based ticket sales.
In any given situation, I don’t like papering, I don’t like after-the-fact discounting.
There’s arena shows that I’m currently doing where going into the deal we’re scaling the house properly so there is a very reasonable ticket for upper level, or a portion of the upper level going on sale. You have maybe a $25 ticket where your top price point is $75.
I try to plan for it in advance, to be able to reach a wide spectrum of consumers and still have multiple price points. I don’t do it after the fact. It’s painfully obvious that you’re in trouble when all of a sudden tickets are 2-for-1, 50 percent off, or buy one get one free.
Years ago, I certainly was involved in situations like that on shows that were slow. But if I believe in the show that I’m buying and promoting, and I believe in the artist, I have a really hard time with that. I think you can ruin that artist’s career in a given market by cutting your losses and saying, “Let’s just put butts in seats; it doesn’t matter whether they’re paying or not.”
Then, I’m basically saying I don’t ever want to bring that artist back to this town. I’ve certainly been involved in shows that have been disasters, but I still believed in the artist and thought, “I don’t want to do this to this artist in this market, because this is a bump in the road. It’s not like every single show on the road that this guy, or this group, has done.” Or I wouldn’t have bought the show in the first place.
In those cases we try to find if there is another way we can do this without basically toasting the artist’s career in a given market. Because you know when you’re giving away more than half of the house, especially once you get into the thousands, you’re in trouble.
A lot of the discounting last year happened at amphitheatres. Aren’t sheds and arenas like apples and oranges?
I’ve had conversations about the amphitheater business and wonder how many artists really sell more than 10,000 tickets in any given market. I do more shows that don’t sell more than 10,000.
And I started to wonder if amphitheatres play a part in making an artist’s value only the number of permanent seats in the venue? Obviously I operate in a lot of the same markets that have amphitheatres. It’s not to say they don’t sell hard tickets on the lawn, but the lawn seats are never full-priced tickets. They’ve always been at drastically reduced prices.
So what is the value? I started to think a lot of artists, if you go across the board, are worth 5,000, 6,000 or 7,000 tickets. I think that most amphitheatres, not referring to the top end of the business but the average tour, become my arena business. The lower bowl of an arena compares to the amphitheatre pavilion, basically.
In some cases I’ve priced the upper bowl of an arena at what would be a lawn price at an amphitheatre because it sort of feels, in some cases, that’s what the public is used to. There’s only 5,000-7,000 people that are going to pay a premium price.
Do you do you have much opportunity to work in amphitheatres?
There are a handful of amphitheatres out there that are open situations. Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to do a few shows at
There are a handful of them out there that are being developed by a city or local community. I’ve looked at doing a lot of shows there in the last couple of years, and those are wide open.
Do you work often with other promoters, or in co-promote situations so far?
I think that independent promoters on the whole are pretty scrappy. They like having successful shows, like everyone does. And I would assume that if I had a particular act, that a promoter who has the right venue couldn’t get, they would work with me. So I’m optimistic. Has that come up recently? Not really. But it certainly goes on.
You’ve promoted in all ranges of venues, and one-offs to national tours. What’s an effective strategy for artist development?
I love working in all of them. I’ve found a lot of traction in secondary markets, like a lot of independent promoters have. And a lot of independent promoters are not sitting in one town and focusing on only promoting in that one town.
There’s really something to be said for developing the active/hard rock bands in the secondary and tertiary markets of the world. It’s smart. It’s like creating a ripple effect from small to big instead of from big to small.
Ken Fermaglich is a great example of someone who does that. A number of his artists have, over the years, had amazing success in secondary markets which have led to success, even more success, in major markets after grinding it out in a lot of non-major markets.
An example, sticking with Avenged Sevenfold, we recently had them at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. Their business doubled – doubled – from the last time that we had them in the market. Obviously, their career is only getting bigger and bigger. But I think it’s a great example of even though we’re playing Dallas and Los Angeles, we’re ready to come into a smaller market.
But what I’m getting at is, it used to be that with newer acts and in some of the true secondary markets, you almost needed to wait for them to be able to go, on the off night, and play a small town. It feels like, since I’ve been in the business and in the rock world, that’s changed. I’m talking about newer acts.
Obviously your father is a huge influence. Did he immerse you in the business at a young age?
As an early teenager, I spent my summers with my father. I was living in California and he was in Charleston, W.Va., where he was based. I spent my summers with him at concerts. That’s what we did because that’s what he did.
My father was doing every major rock act in towns like Charleston, my hometown, from the get-go in the ’70s and ’80s. If he were alive today, there would be a point where we would be in a car together, with Avenged Sevenfold cranked up, and he would have a smile on his face.
I remember clearly things like walking into his office when summer vacation started and he was holding up the Ted Nugent Scream Dream record, saying, “Check it out! A new Ted Nugent record!”
And what did I do? I sat in his office, when we weren’t on the road, with headphones on for a lot of days listening to records and watching him work. That’s how I spent my summers as a kid.
Now, I’m the one driving around with the
I have music going constantly, all day in the office and an in the car. As a kid traveling around the Southeast with my father in the car, listening to the radio, my sister and I were amazed. He listened to every song, he would sing along with the radio, he could tell you who the artist and the name of every song, when we were little kids.
It sounds like osmosis, or professional DNA, at work.
I really do think so. When I started working with him, of course, there was a learning curve. But so much of it came and felt so natural to me that I didn’t even know how it happened. I guess that is osmosis, isn’t it?
Then the light bulb went off. I was at concerts before I can even remember being at concerts. I was told I saw a Jackson 5 concert, but I don’t remember it.
Now that you have had your own company for six months, are you finding the learning curve to be what you expected?
The first thing is, as long as I’ve been promoting shows – whether it was actually my money or my father’s money, or Mike Smardak’s money – I always treated it like it was mine.
I have a partner now, but there’s just something that feels a little different. and I would never have known that until being involved in my own company. If a show was successful or unsuccessful previously, I felt like I was invested, like it was my money. And I certainly treated it that way.
Now, a particular show doesn’t go my way or isn’t particularly successful, there’s something that doesn’t go away as easily and it’s got to be because of that.
When you launched NS2, you told us there would be no difference in the way you work. Do you still feel that way?
I agree with that 110 percent! I’ve been lucky enough to continue to do business with a lot of the same artists. It was, to a certain degree, a natural progression with the agents and mangers I do business with. There was almost no change in how things operated.
Obviously I’m competing, like everybody is, for business. But you can look across the roster of artists I’m working with including John Prine his personal manager, Al Bunetta, who is a personal friend of mine.
I’m still doing business with John Prine, who is someone near and dear to my heart, and Al Bunetta, who worked with my father and obviously has been in the business for a minute or two.
He’s been a mentor and an inspiration. He and John, many years ago, went into business for themselves. They oversee everything: management, booking, label, publishing – there’s your first 360. They do it all. Even at some points, they self-promoted.
He’s a huge inspiration and has been a great mentor and a big-brother-slash-father-figure over the years. There’s a personal connection and there’s business there. I never expected that would change. And it didn’t. That’s just one example.
There’s so much of the business out there that goes my way because of the one-off concert business, which is a lot of the way that I make my living, but not the singular way. It’s in my blood too. Chasing, chasing, chasing for business and hopefully making smart decisions more than not.
I haven’t seen much change. The competition hasn’t changed; it’s still there. I am taking things to the next level internally. If I find out I’m not getting a show I was counting on, it feels a little different now. I’m thinking about how we’ve put this thing together and how I’ve got three people that are looking to me saying, “We’re here with you. We’re right behind you.”