A Small Strategy for Selling Concerts
From left, Michael Swier, John Moore and Jim Glancy, the principal partners of Bowery Presents.
The music industry may seem like a broken record of bad news these days, with plunging album sales and confusion over the digital future. But in the concert business at least one corner is booming: clubs.
The Fillmore at Irving Plaza.
In New York heated competition among concert promoters has driven a building spree of small and midsize spaces over the last two years. And a pivotal player in this behind-the-scenes contest has emerged in the Bowery Presents, a promoter that has grown steadily from crowded downtown boîtes to the big leagues of the concert industry.
“What we do well is work with bands at the Mercury Lounge level and grow them as far as possible, all the way to the Garden or beyond,” said John Moore, one of the company’s three principal partners, in an interview this week at its headquarters, five flights above a grungy block on the Lower East Side.
An indie-rock tastemaker whose résumé includes early shows by the White Stripes and Arctic Monkeys, the Bowery Presents has become an unlikely local challenger to Live Nation and A.E.G. Live, the two dominant national promoters. But over the last year the Bowery Presents has caught the attention of the touring industry with concerts at major halls like Town Hall and Madison Square Garden and with a series of high-profile executive poachings.
Its competition is formidable. Live Nation, a $1.5 billion public company, puts on concerts at about two dozen locations in New York, including the Roseland and Hammerstein Ballrooms, the newly renamed Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza, and the Nikon at Jones Beach Theater. A.E.G. Live, the operator of the Nokia Theater in Times Square, is a unit of the Anschutz Company, led by the billionaire Philip F. Anschutz.
By comparison the Bowery enterprise is modest. It started with the 250-capacity Mercury Lounge on East Houston Street, which opened in 1994 for $250,000, some $35,000 of which came from the maxed-out credit cards of Michael Swier, one of the Bowery Presents partners. Four years later came the 575-capacity, $1 million Bowery Ballroom, and in 2004 the company began booking Webster Hall, which fits 1,400. Last year it acquired Northsix in Brooklyn, which will open in September as the Music Hall of Williamsburg, and the 3,000-capacity former Exit dance club on West 56th Street, to reopen as a rock hall in October.
The Bowery Presents clubs have been favorites of musicians and fans, and its bookings have been influential in the rock world’s constantly shifting status games.
“There’s something really special about the Bowery Ballroom,” said Daniel Kessler, the lead guitarist of Interpol, which played an unannounced show there Tuesday to celebrate its new album, “Our Love to Admire” (Capitol). “It has a real family kind of feel to it, and it’s one of the few places in the world where you can stand anywhere and have a good view of the stage, and the sound is amazing.”
The Bowery Presents has no outside investors, its partners say, and has paid for its expansions with cash and bank loans. “We’ve saved our pennies,” Mr. Swier said. The company would not reveal the costs of the new spaces, saying only that they are multimillion-dollar projects.
As a club business Bowery Presents lost out when bands outgrew its network and went elsewhere for bigger bookings. Arctic Monkeys’ first New York shows were at the Mercury and the Bowery Ballroom, for example, but its last two local gigs were at Roseland and Hammerstein, halls booked by Live Nation.
The company’s fortunes changed last summer when Jim Glancy, president of the New York division of Live Nation and a prominent figure in the business, left to become a Bowery partner. Later the company also hired away Randy Henner, a senior vice president under Mr. Glancy at Live Nation, as well as Josh Moore, a cousin of John Moore’s who had been booking the Nokia Theater.
“We figured it was going to take us about five years to get up to speed as a full-service, open-room promoter in New York,” Mr. Swier said. But with Mr. Glancy, the company began booking bigger — and thus far more lucrative — shows at major concert halls. “We were able to get to that five-year plan right then and there,” Mr. Swier added
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As the Bowery Presents has expanded, Live Nation has moved to compete with it. For years Live Nation, which was spun off from Clear Channel Communications in 2005, had no smaller club in New York than the 1,100-capacity Irving Plaza. But in March its new Blender Theater at Gramercy, a space for 650 on East 23rd Street, opened at a cost of $1.5 million. Live Nation also helped develop two rooms in the 300- to 350-capacity range: Rebel on West 30th Street in Manhattan and the Luna Lounge in Williamsburg.
The Highline Ballroom.
At the same time the Bensusan family, which owns the Blue Note and the B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, opened the 700-capacity Highline Ballroom in April for “in excess of $3.5 million,” Steve Bensusan said. A.E.G., which spent $21 million to build the Nokia two years ago, is consulting on the Highline.
The growth in clubs coincides with a national shift toward smaller spaces as ticket sales for stadiums and outdoor amphitheaters have gradually declined. Last year Live Nation bought the House of Blues club chain for $350 million, and the company has been selling off some of its amphitheaters.
“What we’re seeing is a refocusing in the concert business to midsize venues,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the touring industry trade magazine. “Looking forward, the conventional wisdom is that there will be fewer arena-level, large-amphitheater acts.”
And with the record industry in turmoil, the burden of artist development has fallen more heavily on the touring business.
“We have less of a safety net than in the bad old days,” said Bruce Moran, Mr. Glancy’s replacement as president of Live Nation’s New York division. “We can’t expect a label to buy hundreds of tickets for a developing artist. We can’t expect them to buy a full-page ad to support a show.”
There is no industry consensus about how the rapid club growth will affect concertgoers. In the short term it provides an abundance of new concert sites, feeding a market that has been hungry for more midsize rooms for years. But with increased competition among promoters comes expensive bidding wars for talent, which could lead to higher ticket prices.
“There’s a war,” said John Scher, a veteran New York promoter who puts on shows independently at the Concert Hall at the Society for Ethical Culture and elsewhere. “No question, there’s a war. But the only people who benefit from this war are artists and managers and agents.”
Lacking the deep resources of Live Nation or A.E.G., the Bowery faces significant risk in its expansion. But Mr. Glancy said New York’s insatiable appetite for live music would limit losses.
“Agents don’t want to be sitting in an arena where their artist is playing and say, ‘Look at that: It’s at 60 percent capacity,’ ” he said. “That might happen in other cities, but in New York it’s rare. Can we afford 25 to 35 risky arena shows a year? No, but we can have a couple, and if we lose X amount of dollars on those shows, we can absorb that.”
This year the Bowery Presents has sold out two concerts each by Guster and Levon Helm at the Beacon Theater, seven nights of Bright Eyes at Town Hall and one by John Mayer at Madison Square Garden. Out of seven shows at the 3,400-capacity United Palace in Washington Heights, six have sold out, Mr. Glancy said, and he expected the White Stripes to sell out their concert at the Garden in July. The first acts the company booked for Madison Square Garden included some far from its indie-rock roots, like Barry Manilow, Meat Loaf and Anita Baker. Skeptics might question whether these strange bedfellows could dilute the Bowery’s brand as a hip tastemaker. But the partners say they have no regrets.
“We hold our heads high with Manilow, with John Mayer, with things that might go under more of a mainstream banner,” Mr. Moore said. “Our core business is great music.”
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