Arthur Fogel: ‘We haven’t hit peak touring by any measure’
Arthur Fogel, Live Nation’s chairman of global music and president of global touring, has spoken to IQ’s Global Promoters Report 2024 about the evolution of the business.
Known for building the planet-spanning industry we see today, Fogel’s regular clients include Beyoncé, Sting, Madonna, Peter Gabriel, and Lady Gaga.
Having started his promoting career at a Toronto club called The Edge, he joined Michael Cohl’s Concert Productions International (CPI) in 1981. Just a few short years later, he was behind The Rolling Stones’ 1989 Steel Wheels Tour, which spanned 20 countries, grossed $170m, and became the biggest tour of all time (at the time).
Since then, he’s organised top-grossing tours such as Madonna’s 2008-2009 Sticky & Sweet Tour, U2’s 360° Tour from 2009-2011 and Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour in 2023. He was even involved with one of the game-changing shows of recent years – U2’s residency at The Sphere in Las Vegas.
Fogel shared his perspective on the future of global touring in an extensive interview with GPR editor James Drury.
“I think next year is going to be another banner year”
“We’re just on our way,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve hit a peak by any means. There are still other parts of the world to open up. There’s no end to the accessibility that people have to artists and music, and so I think that it will continue to develop and will get stronger than it currently is.
“If you look broadly over the period of coming out of Covid, I think what we’ve all seen is the development of multiple new genres and a new generation of fans, and it’s all led to a perfect storm of a very healthy business that shows no signs of slowing down. That’s great for all of us. Can it get a bit crowded at times in certain places? Yes. There’s certainly a very high volume of activity, but at the end of the day, I think that certainly the top end of the business has hit a level that I don’t think any of us could have imagined. It’s really quite astounding. It’s a testament to how our world has embraced live shows and the ease of which that can be accessed around the world.
“Last year, the stadium-level activity was unprecedented. This year, there’s been a bit of a decrease in terms of stadium volume, but the arena-level volume is extremely, extremely high. Looking to 2025, I think it will shift back to unprecedented levels of stadium business globally. But at the same time, I don’t really see the arena business falling back particularly, so I think next year is going to be another banner year.”
Fogel also shared his perspective on dynamic pricing, new touring territories and the top end of the business.
Read the full interview in the Global Promoters Report 2024, available in print, digitally, and on this dedicated year-round mini site. A preview version is below.
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Global Promoters Report 2024 out now
The Global Promoters Report (GPR) 2024, the latest indispensable guide to the industry’s leading promoters and touring territories, is out now.
The third edition of the indispensable guide is significantly expanded, featuring analysis of 71 markets across six continents.
The GPR 2024 includes key summaries of the major players working with international artists, unique interviews and insight into each of the world’s top live music markets and dedicated editorial on key trends and developments across the global live music business.
This edition also includes an exclusive interview with Arthur Fogel, CEO of the Global Touring division of Live Nation, who shares his perspective on a blockbuster few years.
“As Arthur Fogel, the man who arguably invented world touring as we know it, says in our interview on page 6, the number of markets open to touring artists is expanding at an unprecedented rate,” says GPR editor James Drury.
“The number of markets open to touring artists is expanding at an unprecedented rate”
“Reflecting this, we’ve expanded the third edition of the Global Promoters Report to include analysis of touring conditions in 71 countries and on every continent. In [this edition], you’ll discover fascinating insights into the challenges and exciting opportunities in each of these territories. Featuring thoughtful interviews with some of the key promoters working with international acts, it’s a global perspective on the innovative and creative industry we work in.
“Looking across all these markets, it’s clear that everyone is dealing with the difficulties of rapidly rising costs. Yet, live music remains a fundamentally important part of people’s social and cultural lives, and the ingenuity of everyone in the business in bringing this joy to fans is heartening. With examples of how promoters are solving challenges, it’s clear that by coming together and learning from each other, the industry gets stronger.
“Featuring the most comprehensive analysis of the world’s top promoters in international touring, the Global Promoters Report 2024 spans all levels of entertainment – from huge stadium tours to emerging acts seeking to break into new markets. Offering candid insights from around 200 promoters, it highlights local conditions, challenges, opportunities, and firsthand advice from those who know their markets inside out.”
This year’s GPR is available in print, digitally, and on this dedicated year-round mini site. To purchase a print copy of the report, get in touch with [email protected].
A preview version of the Global Promoters Report 2024 is below.
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Madonna’s Celebration Tour grosses $227.2 million
Madonna’s The Celebration Tour generated a total of $227.2 million at the box office after 1.1 million tickets were sold for the 80-date trek, according to Pollstar data
The Live Nation-produced outing, which ran from October 2023 to May 2024, visited Europe and North America before finishing with the biggest concert of the American pop icon’s career – a free show attended by an estimated 1.6m people on Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 4 May.
That concert, promoted by Bonus Track in partnership with Live Nation, was the Queen of Pop’s first gig in Brazil since 2012 and was the only South American date of the tour.
“It was unbelievable,” Live Nation’s head of global touring Arthur Fogel, Madonna’s promoter since 2001, tells Pollstar. “It was an incredible experience and pretty flawless pulling it off in the end. It wasn’t easy to get there, as you can imagine, there was a lot to deal with.
“Madonna [has been] such a strong musical force in the pop world for so long that it’s just awe-inspiring”
“The navy was even there protecting the beach. Seriously, there were Navy destroyers just a few hundred yards off the beach controlling the boat action and access. It was amazing.”
Madonna, who graces the cover of the fourth annual Pride takeover edition of IQ Magazine, has generated box office takings of $1.61 billion over her 12 tours, selling more than 12.6 million tickets over 650 shows. Six tours took more than $100m.
Pollstar reports that 2008/09’s Sticky & Sweet Tour earned $419m and was the highest-grossing tour by a female artist for more than 15 years, while 2012’s MDNA Tour grossed $301m. Other standouts include 2006’s Confessions Tour ($194m), 2015/16’s Rebel Heart Tour ($169.8m) and 2004’s Re-Invention Tour ($125.3m).
“She’s had to endure a lot as that target because she takes so many risks in her career, is upfront about it and doesn’t shy away from a lot of the things that people react strongly to one way or the other,” adds Fogel. “But on this tour and show you realise her catalogue of hits, apart from everything else, the actual hit after hit after hit, that Madonna is such a strong musical force in the pop world for so long that it’s just awe-inspiring.”
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Arthur Fogel: ‘Business has never been healthier’
Live Nation’s president, global touring and chairman of concerts Arthur Fogel has discussed ticket pricing, fresh headliners and U2’s Sphere residency in a new interview.
Fogel, who tours superstars such as Beyoncé, U2, Madonna and Lady Gaga, defended the price of concert ticket prices, arguing the business has always been “underpriced”.
Speaking to The Globe and Mail, the Canadian promoter said: “There’s no question some tickets are very high, but also some tickets are very cheap and affordable, and as with anything in life, you can make that choice.
“I have always believed we are underpriced as an industry. You want anybody to be able to afford a ticket, but artists deserve to make a living and a profit. These productions are incredibly expensive to mount and operate on a weekly basis. There’s this perception that a high ticket price means outrageous profit margins, and the truth is, it doesn’t.
“The aim of the pricing model is to satisfy the range of buyers. The top-price ticket always gets the headline, right? But that $15 ticket—I can’t imagine what it cost to run that show back then, but probably not very much.”
“There are incredible big-picture advantages to a global deal for artists”
Fogel, who was named International Promoter of the Year at this month’s Pollstar Awards, worked on the Rolling Stones’ groundbreaking 1989 Steel Wheels Tour while at Canada’s CPI with Michael Cohl, and pointed out the globalisation of the music business has evolved “unbelievably” since the early days of his career.
“When we started, there were 15 to 20 countries in play on an itinerary for an artist, and now there’s 70-plus,” he said. “The development that you’ve seen in Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, has really opened up what a global tour is in 2024.
“There are incredible big-picture advantages to a global deal for artists. Everything from the financial stability and the ability for us to make artists more money, but also from a marketing, profile-raising perspective with the great assets that we have. They look to us to provide a consistency and an execution on a global basis, as opposed to having to go to different people a hundred times over the course of a tour.”
He continued: “There’s a younger generation of headline artists that fill arenas and stadiums, different genres – the Latin world, comedy, country, K-pop – that have developed and exploded. The audience has expanded. And if you look at any of these legendary artists, whether it’s the Stones or U2, they have also regenerated their audience. If you go to an AC/DC show, I guarantee you’re going to see a lot of kids there. So the business has never been healthier.”
Referencing U2’s groundbreaking U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere residency in Las Vegas, Fogel suggested the live sector still needed to up its game on green matters.
“As an industry, I think we need to do a better job with sustainability”
“As an industry, I think we need to do a better job with sustainability,” he said. “The mass of a show – more trucks, more planes, more this, more that – is part of what creates the issue. That’s why Sphere in Las Vegas, and the venue concept, is so exciting. Because it’s about the venue and how the venue is constructed technologically, as opposed to bringing tons of shit to create the experience. The U2 show is brilliant. But on that level, it’s exciting because it really changes the dynamic of show presentation in a responsible way.”
Fogel was also quick to defend Live Nation against monopoly accusations.
“I think the facts clearly support that’s not true in the slightest,” he said. “There’s no question we’re a big company, and we’re successful. But we’re really good at what we do. Maybe others need to get better at what they do, to come at us better. It’s not something I spend a lot of time thinking about.
“I think we created a business model that is very attractive to artists and their managers and representatives. We’re really good at maximising ticket sales and artists’ revenue, and catering to their needs and supporting them when they need it.”
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India: State of Hindipendents
If there were an award for the greatest potential touring market, India would be on that stage, brandishing the trophy, year in, year out. With a population nudging 1.4 billion and projected to surpass that of China by 2022, India is about as vast as countries get. Nonetheless, when a big band comes to town, the comparative rarity of the event still makes global headlines.
U2’s show in December at Mumbai’s DY Patil Stadium, the very last stop on the fifth leg of The Joshua Tree Tour, wasn’t the first superstar show to come to India – far from it: The Stones played Mumbai and Bangalore in 2003, while Beyoncé and Shakira came in 2007, Metallica in 2011, Coldplay in 2016, and Ed Sheeran in 2015 and 2017, with other significant visitors in between.
But each major concert fires up the expectation that India’s biggest cities could soon become routine destinations for the world’s biggest artists. And U2’s show before a crowd of 42,590, staged by local ticketing giant BookMyShow in partnership with Live Nation, got the country dreaming once more.
“There were a lot of reservations from everybody coming into India,” says BookMyShow CEO and founder Ashish Hemrajani, who freely concedes that India has failed to meet international expectations for live shows in the past. “It was the first outing for U2 here; it was the first show of this scale and magnitude; it was the last show of the tour. There was a lot riding on it and everyone was on tenterhooks.”
BookMyShow has been scaling up its promoting exploits in recent years, bringing Cirque du Soleil, NBA pre-season games, an adapted Hindi Aladdin and the Coldplay-headlined Mumbai edition of the Global Citizen festival, but Hemrajani says U2 represented a new level and a new set of pressures.
“There were a lot of reservations from everybody coming into India”
“We have got a great team in India, but nothing prepares you for dealing with Arthur Fogel, with Jake Berry and the whole team,” he says. “But if you talk to the folks that we dealt with, they were very pleasantly surprised by the level of professionalism they found.”
More than anyone else in the Indian business, Hemrajani has both a vision and a platform to bring about a revolution in the nation’s live entertainment offering. BookMyShow sells between 35% and 50% of all cinema tickets in a cinema-mad nation (“we are a hot, dusty country, which is an assault on all your senses, and cinema is the cheapest, most comfortable form of indoor entertainment,” he explains), and played a part in the massive success of the Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket. If Hemrajani judges that India is ripe for some concert-going, the chances are he knows what he is talking about.
The same feeling has recently been in the air across the country. The preceding month, also at DY Patil Stadium, Katy Perry and Dua Lipa inaugurated the OnePlus Music Festival, along with local acts Amit Trivedi, Ritviz, as we keep searching and The Local Train. Both of the top-billers were new to the market, and again, the show was an unconventional labour of love, this time organised by the local operation of Chinese smartphone brand OnePlus, which rivals Samsung and Apple in India.
As OnePlus India general manager Vikas Agarwal told India’s The Telegraph newspaper: “[We were] not looking to organise everything by ourselves, but the country [was] not yet ready to organise such a large-scale event. [So] starting from the artist selection to the whole conceptualisation of the event, logistics – everything was done for the first time by the brand. I hope more such events will be organised in India.”
And then, of course, came Covid-19, to which we will inevitably return in a minute.
“The folks that we dealt with were very pleasantly surprised by the level of professionalism they found”
Still a mostly rural nation of numerous languages and cultures, heavily regionalised laws and huge inequality, India has always had more pressing priorities than slotting conveniently into a Western live music model. All the same, its entertainment market is highly evolved. The homegrown cinema industry enjoys a sophisticated, mostly mobile ticketing infrastructure, spearheaded by BookMyShow, with strong competition lately from Alibaba-backed Paytm. Both have diverse businesses and are busy across many sectors, including cricket, theatre, food and mobile payments.
Online ticketing was reckoned to be worth $330 million in 2017, according to Indian management consultant RedSeer, whose prediction of $580m in revenues this year has sadly been scuppered by recent events. In the past, the lion’s share of online ticket sales (55%), was for movies, with sport on 25% and events taking the remaining 20%, though both the latter categories are growing.
EDM, in particular, has found a booming home in India, where there is a large network of clubs and established festivals, from OML’s multi-city Bacardi NH7 Weekender to the monster Sunburn in Pune.
“The electronic music scene in the country has developed into its own industry and it’s spread to wider parts of the country,” says Dev Bhatia of dance music management and booking agency UnMute. “Having said that, I still feel we’re barely scratching the surface. Considering India will [soon] have five to six hundred million people under the age of 35 with cell phones and accessibility, the potential is endless.”
That potential is currently on pause. At the time of writing, India was attempting to relax its notably strict lockdown conditions even as it faced a record spike in Covid-19 infections. In a country where many millions of informal workers live on a daily wage, the economy can’t stand idle for long.
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McGuinness: Zoo TV tour changed the biz forever
Former U2 manager Paul McGuinness has spoken of the significant role he and the band played in the emergence of major multinational promoters such as Live Nation and AEG Live/Presents.
Interviewed by Ed Bicknell for the ILMC 29 Breakfast Meeting, McGuinness related how U2’s 1992–93 Zoo TV world tour indirectly laid the foundations for the rise of Live Nation et al. Describing the tour production as “extraordinary – but bank-breaking”, he said U2 were then “still operating like a punk band, with low ticket prices. If one of the promoters on that tour hadn’t paid, we’d have been ruined.”
“At the end of that tour – which made no money – I said we’d never do it again,” he continued. “I had to tell [then-agents] Ian Flooks and Frank Barsalona that I wasn’t going to use them anymore. That was quite an event…
“I decided the next tour was going to be underwritten by a single promoter. We worked with Arthur Fogel and Michael Cohl – that deal became SFX, then Clear Channel and now Live Nation.”
The interview, as is tradition, took place on the final morning of ILMC, following the previous evening’s Gala Dinner and Arthur Awards (see the winners here).
Bicknell began by asking how much of a role luck has played in McGuinness’s long career. McGuinness highlighted luck as one of the four key qualities needed in a manager – along with talent, stamina and ambition – and related an anecdote about Napoleon’s choice of marshals: “He said, most of all, they have to be lucky. Luck has an enormous amount to do with success in popular music.”
“U2 always understood they had two parallel careers: one in live and one in recording”
Reflecting on his pre-U2 management career, McGuinness said his first gig was for a Celtic rock band (a “poor man’s Horslips”) called Spud. “I managed to get them a record deal, and we did a little bit of touring, mostly in Germany and Sweden,” he explained. Spud, however, had “wives and responsibilities” and were loath to buy anything for the band – even guitar strings – feeling they were committed elsewhere. McGuinness said he thought they were “too old to make it” and resolved that “the next band I manage is going to be younger than that.”
Introduced to U2 by late rock critic Bill Graham, McGuinness said band and manager’s famous five-way royalty split was established from the outset. “I used to read about Brian Epstein, Andrew [Loog] Oldham… in the groups I was interested in there was an officer class and then the soldiers,” he explained. “In the Rolling Stones you had Mick and Keith and then everyone else; in The Beatles it was John and Paul, and then George and Ringo. That’s what broke up those groups.
“So, I said to U2: ‘There isn’t going to be any money for a while, so what there is you should split equally. And since there’s four of you and one of me, why don’t we split everything five ways?’”
On U2’s early touring career, McGuinness outlined how important the band’s live act was to establishing their reputation at a time when their records weren’t selling. “U2 always understood they had two parallel careers: one in live and one in recording,” he said. “We weren’t successful [with the latter] in the beginning – the first two records didn’t perform well, and there was the constant threat of being dropped.
“Only with the third album [War] did we have success on record. By then we were known across America, Europe… we had a very military style: we targeted each country one by one and tried to build ourselves in each at the same speed.”
“In the early ’80s,” he continued, “we’d do three months in the US in one go every year. That meant playing in as many cities as possible – and major cities twice each, so you’d hopefully see progress from a club to an auditorium [when you returned].
“Everyone liked the idea of touring an in-the-round stadium production, but it took a lot of money and imagination to turn it into a reality. I don’t think anyone will ever do it again”
“The first show we played in LA was the [600-cap.] Country Club, and because we had support from K-Rock and the LA Times, it was sold out. When we returned three months later, we were able to sell out the 3,000-seat Santa Monica Civic [Center].”
McGuinness said a consequence of that early focus on live is that a lot of the promoters of their first shows “grew up with us.” Adding “Very often they’re now Live Nation territory bosses, so the sensation is often of still doing business with the same people.”
McGuinness stepped down as U2’s manager in 2013, two years after the conclusion of the innovative 360° tour, which saw the band play ‘in the round’ with the audience in a circular configuration around the stage – still the highest-grossing concert tour of all time.
Despite the tour netting him and his band more than US$736 million, McGuinness said his favourite U2 show is still their first performance at Madison Square Garden, in 1985. (The same is true for Dire Straits, agreed ex-manager Bicknell.) “Even though you get paid less, as the union has cottoned on to how sentimental bands are over the venue – I think there are union stagehands from New Jersey who haven’t left their houses in 20 years that are still getting paid – the vibe is just extraordinary,” he commented.
With discussion – inevitably – turning briefly to secondary ticketing, McGuinness said the price scaling for the 360° tour was “pretty good. We had $25 tickets further from the stage, with prices going all the way up to $120, $150, all sold out.”
“Everyone liked the idea of touring an in-the-round stadium production,” he concluded, “but it took a lot of money and imagination to turn it into a reality. I don’t think anyone will ever do it again.”
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