Executive Profile: UTA Agent Curt Motley Breaks The Mold (& The Acts)

There are probably very few consequential basketball games in country music history, but UTA agent Curt Motley was the winner in one of them.

Though his mother was a long-time WSM radio employee, who was involved in all manner of country music enterprises, Motley couldn’t even get hired at Opryland Hotel in the 1980s. While working as a maintenance man, he was challenged to a game of one-on-one by TK Kimbrell. The stakes? If Motley won, he’d get a gig as a receptionist at Kimbrell’s TKO Artist Management.

“I was determined that day,” Motley says. He won, and took his seat behind the receptionist’s desk in 1990.

He got his agency break when a down-on-their-luck band needed a new direction. Sawyer Brown took a chance on the kid and went on to become a top draw at a time when country music was exploding.

After operating As The World Tours in-house at TKO, he moved first to Monterey Artists in 1995 and then followed as that agency was acquired by Paradigm in 2005.

He left Paradigm for UTA in 2016. 

In addition to Sawyer Brown, Motley reps Toby Keith, Mac McAnally, Megan Moroney, Jamey Johnson and a host of other country favorites.

His latest signing was a coup: Oliver Anthony, the out-of-nowhere viral sensation who exploded onto the scene with “Rich Men North of Richmond.”

Motley talked to Pollstar about the past, present and future of the genre, live’s unstoppable climb and going to Mexico with Toby Keith.

Pollstar: Where did you grow up?

Curt Motley: I grew up right here in Nashville over off White Bridge Road.

So obviously music was a part of your life growing up because I think when you’re a Nashville guy, it’s inevitable. So what were you into?

My mom worked for WSM Radio, so that was my experience with it. But musically, I was into just about anything other than country at that time. My dad was into Merle Haggard and Tom T. Hall and that was really about it.

 What did your mom do for WSM?

She did a little bit of everything. She actually wrote ad copy and all that back in the day and then she ran a department called traffic and then she went and worked on TNN when it first started. She and her boss were the very first two people. I mean, she’s been in everything. She was talent coordinator for the CMA awards at one point. I got to go to her job, I was just always exposed to it. I really never thought anything about it, to be honest with you. 

We always ask ‘How did you know that you could or that you wanted to be working in music?’ but I think in your case, it was pretty obvious early on that you knew that that was a job.

I applied for a job out at Opryland Hotel and they didn’t hire me and then I was a maintenance guy, doing swimming pools and other maintenance for probably six years. And so I didn’t really think about going into the music industry until I played a basketball game with my assistant manager’s husband, who was a tour manager, and said he was starting a management company. That was TK Kimbrell and he said I’ll play you in a game of basketball for my receptionist job (at TKO Artist Management). I knew it was time to do something. So I beat him one-on-one and six months later I showed up at his office to be his receptionist not really knowing what that meant.

What did you learn on the management side? 

It was invaluable just because TK was starting a brand new management company and we were lean, we didn’t have a lot of employees and you just learned that you were wearing a lot of different hats and you can never say the words “It’s not my job” because everything is your job. There’s only four people or whatever. Everything is your job. He instilled in me that you try to make it to where an artist feels like their career is dependent upon you. Whatever it is that you do, whether that’s going to get dry cleaning and picking up relatives at the airport and washing cars, whatever you had to do at that time.

You got any strange requests that you remember from that era? 

Yeah, we probably can’t talk about that, but yeah, I’ve got notes.

How long were you there? 

I started in July of ’90 and I was there till the end of ’95. It was awesome because things were really interesting at the time in country music. That’s when country sort of transitioned from what was going on in the ’80s into this new time period which was really pivotal. When you look at who came in the early ’90s, it was an awesome time period. It was exploding.

I don’t know that there’s ever really been a comparison until maybe now with virality, but viral wasn’t a thing in 1990. 

It felt so much bigger at the time. We have some giant artists now, but what was happening then was just incredible. 

I was pretty young but you could feel that cultural moment. Country wasn’t just on TNN. Now it’s on ABC and NBC, everywhere. So what was it like to be in the middle of that and especially in your first job?

I was aware of it, with Ricky Skaggs and Randy Travis with what they were doing and it sort of just reset everything with the neo-traditionalist movement and then you had Garth and Clint Black and Alan Jackson and Travis Tritt. They were sort of the next batch. It was an incredible time. 

I don’t think enough people give enough credit to people like Ricky Skaggs. 

The guy’s special. He was the head of that neo-traditionalist movement. He was Entertainer of the Year. That’s a big deal and doing it playing bluegrass and playing bluegrass as well as anyone in the history of the world’s ever played it. 

When did you move into the agency side? 

I actually did it inside the management company, inside TKO. We had a need with Sawyer Brown. I don’t know if they were reinventing their career, but they were changing and so we started an in-house company and I ran a little company called As The World Tours within the company. So I was still doing all my management stuff, but then booking them in-house.

Was that your first big artist? 

Absolutely, that’s the first artist that I worked with. Sawyer Brown and then Mac McAnally, who TK brought with him. That was my introduction into the music world, picking up Sawyer Brown where they were, their career was down suddenly, and then Mac was just doing Mac things.

I don’t remember Sawyer Brown disappearing and coming back. What was that?

So they broke out off of “Star Search” in ’84. That was the original iteration of “American Idol” and all that with Ed McMahon who was a really big high-profile person from Johnny Carson. They came out of that, they hit it and toured with Kenny Rogers and then had a hit on radio but radio didn’t get it, man. Those guys were flamboyant, wearing makeup, jumping around. It just didn’t fit in a box where everyone wanted them to fit at that time.

So they had a little flat spot there and then really came back in the first part of the ’90s through the mid-90s and they’re actually celebrating their 40th year next year with a documentary and a book and a new album.

They were the top ticket sellers in country music for several years right there.

So you got Sawyer Brown and then you were like “I can be an agent”?

I really had to be. I didn’t really have a choice. It was an opportunity that was given to me that, I mean, honestly you couldn’t say no to it. I never wanted to be an agent. I never thought about it. I just wanted to be in management and probably didn’t fully understand what any of that meant. I was a publicist in the middle. 

You’ve been everything.

That I have. Everything but publishing. I don’t know how I missed publishing. I need to get into that some time.

 After Sawyer Brown, I know you got Toby Keith. Was that in that era? 

That would have been a little bit later. We’d actually signed so many artists to the management company right after Sawyer Brown. We picked up Chris LeDoux. He had a really big hit there with Garth. A true artist and incredible human being. I don’t like to work with assholes. We picked up Toby for management and then in ’96, Toby and I went to Mexico just to get to know each other more on a personal level. We came back and he told TK that he needed me to be in his life. And that’s when we made a transition over to booking.  

Chris LeDoux, that’s a guy people always say he’s your favorite singer’s favorite singer. 

He’s incredible and it was just recently that honestly, in the last three or four years, where I could speak about him without getting emotional. I didn’t realize you could have an artist die and you know when that happened, it was numbing. He was such an influential person who touched a lot of people’s lives. He carved him out a niche and just killed it. God, ask Garth Brooks, you know! He’s very influential in Garth’s career. 

It’s easy to what-might-have-been it, but he could have been as big as Garth. 

 I thought about that the other day because I represent his son Ned LeDoux. I was just thinking about how badly we need Chris LeDoux right now. He would be doing great. There’s no doubt about it, especially with everything with “Yellowstone.” That was Chris. He’s Kaycee, Wyoming. He would be riding a big wave right now.

I like that Western is coming back in country all of a sudden. That’s not something I expected.

Ian Munsick, who we represent, is carrying that torch for Chris, and Cody Johnson. They really respect Chris. They mention him just about every show and perform some of the songs from time to time. 

Speaking of the new wave you made some headlines because you guys got Oliver Anthony. What was that approach like for a viral artist? We talked about how there was no virality in 1992. This is a guy who sort of did it without any record company contracts or any of that. He did it on his own, as much as any of us do anything on our own. What was that process like for you guys? 

This thing was warp speed. He really came out of nowhere. I mean, we’re talking about August when he really burst onto the scene till today and it was madness. Everyone was talking about Oliver Anthony, all the coasts and in Nashville. Everyone was crawling over their kids to try to get to him and get a conversation to get an offer in front of him and we took a little bit different approach about it and it ended up working out for us.

Early days, it was almost like how do you even find this guy? Are you DMing him on Instagram or do you have to go track this dude down? Because it really was like no one knew where he was. 

He wasn’t really connected to a lot of people that we’re all connected to, but if you sort of follow the music there, we made some connections, as everyone did eventually, and finally were able to at least find the group of people around him and then that’s when we put our strategy together.

You’ve been in Nashville long enough and grew up in it. It’s easy to get caught in that bubble, where there’s this process, right?  You come to town and you go to Music Row and you write songs with four people and then you do all this and when somebody comes from outside of that universe, do you have to reframe your thinking to a different way than you’re used to?

I think that’s how you should think and that’s how we did. You know, most of the time, you got to move to Nashville, get a publishing deal or really, you work in a restaurant, then get a publishing deal, then get lucky and play some gigs, get a deal with the manager, get a record deal, get your teeth capped and then get a song released, so this is really different.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It can be different. There’s just a lot more ways for people in the discovery process than there’s ever been. Like I said, August to where we’re at is incredible.

As long as you’ve been in the business, I want you to think back to the early ’90s, did it ever occur to you that we would have so many country artists in stadiums. Could you even imagine that in 1992?

I was actually thinking about this the other day, just how many artists play stadiums, and when I was a kid, first off, I wasn’t even looking at that. I think Merle played Anaheim or something like that [for his live album released in 1981]. So, there’s a stadium, but I really didn’t think about stadiums being used in a way that they’re used today. I bet we’ve got 12 or so probably that can play stadiums in some form somewhere and never ever did I think of that. Not George Strait, not anyone back in the day.

Back in the day, it was like The Beatles at Shea. It was special or a one-off thing.

You’re right about that. It was such an outlier that if someone did do it, you know, the whole country knew about it, right? It’s nothing like what we’re looking at today.

You look at it, and you think surely they satisfied the demand. Surely Kenny Chesney has satisfied the demand for stadiums but he’s going out for another 30 days next year.

Kenny has Megan Moroney on his tour, so we’re thankful that he is going out. There’s so many of them and it’s still a big deal to play a stadium. It’s still a big risk anytime you’re trying to sell 40,000 or 50,000 tickets or more in some places. That’s just not to be taken lightly. That’s a really difficult thing. Credit to everyone that’s doing that and doing it very successfully, but something sort of changed from when we were coming out of ’19 then going into COVID. People just really want to go see live shows.

 Is there a trickle down? Obviously we know the people who can do 65,000 seats, but what’s it like for people below that? Is there downward pressure or people saying “No, we’re not gonna go see a shed act because we’re gonna save our money to go see a stadium act?” 

We’re seeing it sort of top to bottom and if you take out the artists that are playing stadiums and that are the current top flavor, there’s a lot of artists who have been around a long time that are actually out there playing — weekend warriors — and doing very well and it seems like all demographics so far still want to go see live music and maybe more so than, say, five years ago and prior to that.

Has country touring changed substantially other than the venue size obviously, but, is it still Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sundays? Is it still three openers and a headliner?

It depends on who the artist is. There’s still a lot of Thursday through Sunday because you think people can’t get off work and some of that mentality still exists. It may be true with certain artists or certain fan bases. It’s somewhat true, but now we’re playing every day of the week and there’s a lot more youth involved coming to see the shows, so they’re a little bit more nimble, seem to have a lot of money to spend still and a lot of time to go see shows.

Crystal ball me for 18 months. Is the market still going to be crazy? Are we doing records every week from now on until 2030. Is this just the new reality?

I hope so. Well, of course, I hope so. I don’t really see any indicator out there saying that we’re gonna get some kind of a reset or there’s some kind of big paradigm shift in what people are listening to. Instead of contracting when something new happens. I think we’re just expanding and we’re just getting bigger and broader, maybe a little bit less defined than what it was 10 years ago, but I don’t see any signs of any kind of particular downturn. Not in ticket prices. 

From an economic standpoint, how much are people willing to keep going? It seems like demand isn’t going anywhere.

I don’t think we know where that edge is yet. I mean, you’re seeing P1 tickets on country shows for $450, and $100 used to be a barrier. There’s no way you would ever charge that. It’d be $99. If you had to get close you would, but you’d never charge $100, but now that’s very common. Even in smaller settings you have at least a portion of tickets around that price and I’m not seeing any resistance.

I guess we’re still just animals. Coming out of the pandemic, we said we wanted to be around people and it just hasn’t abated at all.

I think it took a lot of time away from everyone. That’s time you don’t get back and whether it was listening to music or visiting family or even in your job. I don’t know if “prioritized” is the right word, but the things that make us happy, we did stick them a little bit farther up the list than we had them previously in our lives.

Who are some artists you’re excited about that you have bubbling up?

I’m really excited to be doing three shows with Toby Keith after fighting that cancer, just to get that straight out of the way.

Oliver Anthony and what’s about to transpire with him is gonna be just awesome and accelerated and completely different. It’s going to have the viral turbo boosters to it.

Megan Moroney. I don’t know that Megan can do any wrong out there in the marketplace right now. Every date that we have put up from her inception is sold out. Her music is streaming like crazy. So we’re just getting started with her too. 

Tyler Hubbard, if you look at what he’s doing. It’s really difficult in a country space to take a duo or a group and pull out of that to have a successful career and he’s had two number ones and working on his third. His dates are doing great, and we couldn’t be more excited.

If you look at Jamey Johnson who is in a little bit of, I wouldn’t say hiatus, but he is wood-shedding right now and when he’s back on the scene, it’s going to take him to a completely new level.

Dylan Gossett is another guy that we discovered three or four months ago and he’s at three and a half, almost four million monthly listeners right now with just viral music and every record label in the world’s chasing all these bands right now. Graham Barham same kind of deal, Fancy Hagood who we’ve signed, I used to work with at Paradigm. I think there’s an opportunity for a completely new approach to his music and his tour and strategy.

You think country is a little bit behind some of the other genres in dealing with these sort of viral folks like Oliver and some of those other guys you mentioned? SoundCloud rappers were a thing, you know, 10 years ago. And people singing pop on TikTok. Is it just a mental adjustment that country needs to make?

I don’t know if I’d say we’re behind. Country hasn’t necessarily tried to follow other genres. It’s always been influenced by a lot of different forms of music, but we’ve always sort of done things our own way. I do think there’s some things that we’re picking up and learning from some other formats.

But with streaming, we’re probably the last ones to have really embraced that and you can really tell if you look at the different streaming platforms, which ones most of our fan base listen to as opposed to other genres.

But  our people still buy CDs and listen to the radio.

Radio is still important in country in a way that it isn’t in other genres. 

Radio is important. I think it’s probably the most important marker as to what you’re doing in a career, but I think radio needs to embrace some of the things happening as well and we’d all be better off for it.

Heard that before, we’ve been hearing that forever. 

Yeah, country radio has got to catch up to what country music is doing. Well. All right, we had that conversation in 1989. So yeah, it’s the  exact same thing.

All right, so you want to get some shouts to folks who helped you on the way and members of your team.

Number one: TK Kimbrell at TKO Artist Management took a chance on a maintenance guy in the ’80s. He let me lie to him about having a college degree and all that and still didn’t care. I had to compete to get the job even once I got there, but he’s been my mentor in every sense from the beginning and we still work closely every day. We’ve got lunch here in about an hour.

Steve Dahl who’s no longer with us, but he ran Monterey Peninsula here in Nashville, and when I left from being in-house, he immediately raised his hand. We met with all the agencies and he immediately raised his hand and just his passion. What I learned from him about passion for music has always stuck with me. I miss him dearly.

Ben Farrell was one of my mentors on the concert side, just an incredible, quirky human being. Brian O’Connell at Live Nation, also.

Sawyer Brown, who took a chance on me too. And I wasn’t their pick. They had a guy that they had and so he and I had to compete as well. Obviously Toby, you know all the way to Oliver right now who picked me and Jeffrey (Hasson) because he really liked our presentation. We did a little project for him in Knoxville and it all worked out. It’s everyone.  My assistant Jenn DeLamar, I couldn’t function without her.

We don’t hear that enough. The story is always that if you’re an artist, you’ve got to find an agent and the agent’s gonna pick you but it also works the other way. Sawyer Brown took a chance on you.

Honestly, when I started I didn’t even have clothes. I had work boots and this brown shirt with my name on it. They did (take a chance) and I was definitely unrefined, which I am largely to this day. That was a big gamble for them, putting their team together because I really believe teams are so important in an artist’s career. Nobody does this by themselves, they took a big chance and I still work with them to this day and it’s been awesome. I’ve got no complaints.

One other thing and I really think I need to say it. You know, I’d been at my previous company (Paradigm) for like 23 years and an opportunity arose at UTA and I didn’t pay attention to it and about six months later, it sort of came back over my radar and I paid a little attention to it and really, it opened up my eyes to quit being complacent. I needed to re-energize and really get back in the game if I’m being honest and not just be comfortable doing what I’m doing day in and day out, and I took a chance on them. I’m almost eight years in March and we’re making great strides in a city that’s never really been open to much competition.

Did you play basketball for your new job too?

I’m trying to think. It was probably over Jack Daniel’s or something when I made my decision, but I just grabbed my assistant Jenn and a banker’s box and we walked across the bridge.