2024 Impact 50 Honoree: Coran Capshaw

FOUNDER & CEO
Red Light Management

So far, 2024 is shaping up to be a memorable year amidst a remarkable career for Red Light Management founder Coran Capshaw, as two of his personal clients in Phish and Dave Matthews Band continue to notch their own career milestones. DMB, Capshaw’s original client, will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year and Phish, another longtime RLM act, is fresh off an epic run at Sphere in Las Vegas that charted new territory for the legendary band.

While Capshaw’s business and philanthropic endeavors cast a wide net, he remains at his core an artist manager. Now with some 80 managers and more than 400 (generally hard-touring) artists, RLM continues to develop and sustain careers, with offices in Nashville, London, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Atlanta, and Capshaw’s home base of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Overall, RLM-managed acts typically generate well over $500 million in ticket sales annually, and the roster runs from baby acts to established arena/amphitheater/stadium headliners, and every position on the career arc in between. Among them: Phish (selling more than 8 million tickets since Capshaw began managing them 15 years ago); Dave Matthews Band (one of the most consistent touring acts in history at more than $1 billion in box office); Chris Stapleton, Lainey Wilson, Luke Bryan, Lionel Richie, Brandi Carlile, ODESZA, Enrique Iglesias, Brittany Howard, Il Divo, The Strokes, Greensky Bluegrass, Smashing Pumpkins, The Black Crowes, Sabrina Carpenter and recent Pollstar cover artists Drive-By Truckers and Interpol. Regarding the latter, Capshaw is particularly enthusiastic about the growth of RLM’s London office, both in terms of artists and writer/producer clients.

RLM is dominant in Nashville, and Wilson is perhaps country music’s biggest artist development success story in 2024. Other Music City clients include (in addition to previously mentioned artists) Bobby Bones, Lady A, Maren Morris, Lee Brice, Dierks Bentley, Sam Hunt, Martina McBride, Elle King, Jon Pardi, Riley Green, Gabby Barrett, Dustin Lynch, Jordan Davis, Kip Moore, and Parker McCollum. Stapleton remains one of the genre’s most respected and commercially successful artists, playing stadiums both as a headliner and with George Strait in ’24, and launching his new Traveller Whiskey brand with Buffalo Trace this year.

Phish’s critically acclaimed April run at Sphere, which involved creating experiential content for 68 songs and no repeats, was a “natural extension of their long history with Madison Square Garden Entertainment,” Capshaw told Pollstar. “Leadership [at MSGE] began sharing the concept early on with Phish, who took on the Sphere with the same strong creative force they’ve displayed throughout their career.”

Phish at Sphere “made sense from both a creative and a business perspective,” Capshaw said, calling the run, “a great beginning to a year that will include a new album (Evolve, July 12), touring a mix of arenas and amphitheaters, and their first festival in years (Mondegreen, Aug. 15-18), culminating with a four-show run at Dick’s Park in Denver.”
DMB’s induction into the Rock Hall is a milestone, even for an artist that doesn’t seek acclaim, Capshaw noted. “It’s nice when someone who’s not looking for it gets the recognition they truly deserve.”

The band first came to Capshaw’s attention when he booked them into his Charlottesville club TRAX in 1991. “I thought, ‘175 people here for a local band, that’s good.’ The second time I paid more attention, and said, ‘That’s a really good band.’ So, I put them in the Charlottesville club every Tuesday and the Richmond club every Wednesday.”

Word quickly spread. “We sat in the middle of all these colleges, and because we were associated with them, they started calling TRAX asking, ‘how do we book this band?’”
Book them they did, as DMB went on to be named the second-biggest ticket seller of the Pollstar Era, behind only U2.