Welcome to Tickets to Travel, the business of travel experiences, the podcast where we explore the fascinating intersection of live events, destinations, and the travel industry. I'm your host, Mario Bedouin, and on today's episode, we're diving into the strategy around building travel experiences for top artists like Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Adele, and discussing the commercial differences between a stadium show and a concert.
A Vegas residency and a top tier festival like Coachella. Joining us today is Alex McClellan, a seasoned business architect with just a ton of targeted experience, crafting groundbreaking music experiences and live events. From promoting events for global icons like Young Thug, Kaigo, and David Guetta during his college days in Philadelphia, to managing high profile campaigns like Emo Night, Vegas Vacation, Kaigo's Palm Tree Festival in Cabo, And the infamous Project Ocean during his time at Pollen.
Alex has seen it all, whether shaping media growth strategies at Accenture or building AI solutions at a HR SaaS unicorn. Today, Alex's career is a masterclass in bridging creativity and commercial strategy in travel experiences and live events. So subscribe anywhere you get your podcast because Tickets to Travel starts now.
Welcome to Tickets to Travel. I am your host, Mario Bedouin, and we talk about the business of travel experiences. And on today's episode, we have our good friend, strategist, live music event strategist, music industry strategist, Alex McClellan. Welcome to the pod, Alex. I'm excited to be here. Really excited to talk.
I am excited just as well. Pulling back the curtain a little bit for some people, when you start to plan these type of podcasts, you work with your guests, you get some information, you sent me a whole bunch of stuff about your background, but there's one glaring piece that stuck out to me and that was that you're team Kendrick now.
You're Team Kendrick when I specifically remember you being Team Drake for a long time. I actually believe you told me once that he was the best rapper alive. So I would just like to get your background or the reasoning why you've switched over your fan perspective. It's really been one of the most invigorating things that's happened in the history of hip hop.
There you go. I think the beef was really exciting, engaging. I think it brought a lot of people into the culture that maybe hadn't been engaged with it. So overall, I think it's very positive. At the day, I think that Drake made some moves in his strategic decisions throughout the process that didn't behoove him or his team.
And Kendrick was very Clever, thoughtful, and quite frankly, diabolical in some ways. And I think not like us was really just the accents on the overall conflict to see what they're going to do with the tour. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit today. Yeah. It's really been a fun thing to watch from the sidelines.
We're always going to relate it back to the impact of what these artists do, the live event, back to travel. Right. The one thing that came out of that beef, which was, I'm a little bit like the grumpy old man of hip hop. I think when we were working together, yeah, I was like, listen, I still have the far side and tribe called quest playing.
And you guys were like, no, great. Drake is amazing. You and Calais, shout out to Calais. This whole shift with the beef itself, it had, there hadn't been one in a long time. And so from a industry's perspective, how do you think that beef, the releasing of tracks affected, one, just their overall sort of maybe touring strategy?
But just maybe if you had some background on how the streaming world works with these new artists or newer artists. Right now with Drake's team, I think this is mostly what they're focused on. There's been some rumors floating around that his team believes that Universal was actually working alongside Kendrick in a way that was a little bit potentially Motivated by financial foresight, and this is the lawsuit.
My understanding of the situation is that Drake and Universal are in the middle of negotiating his new contract right now. The way that the labels have been doing this with the superstar acts has evolved quite a bit over the last Say five, eight years. It used to be you'd sign a overall deal, you get a big advance and then it was a percentage across everything.
But the labels will retain ownership to the masters. When you get to be the level that Drake and Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, some of these superstar acts are at, Adele, of course, they end up having so much power now because everything in the digital era makes it very easy for them to market and distribute their music.
So a lot of the traditional responsibilities to the labels. Have fallen out as a result of that. And now the new deals that they're structuring are really centered more around the artist gets huge advance up front and the rumors was Drake's last deal was like four or 500 million that was recouped against his music.
Right. But Drake retains all his masters. So he owns all his music in the same way Taylor Swift does. Hendrix new deal is pretty reflective of that as well. And then the label in him will split some sort of distribution based off of whatever revenue they generate from some of these other channels, like Sync and things like that.
And so I, what they're saying, which would make a lot of sense of why Drake got so upset about the way things played out is that UNG is trying to suppress his negotiating leverage right now by boosting Kendrick and making sure that he gets preferential access to all their marketing channels, because then that's going to reflect poorly on Drake.
It's going to drive down his streaming numbers. And then when you get in the room with the business analysts and the finance guys like me, they can say, Hey, you're down 25 percent year over year, that was the advance that we gave you last time. And so. I think that Drake's not even Kendrick's is exactly the opposite where I think they just reached a new deal and he got a, it's my understanding, like a nine figure advance.
It's not going to be as much as Drake probably at this moment in time. Just Kendrick's never been quite as much of a commercial draw in the streaming world as Drake has been, but he's very incentivized now to continue dropping music, which it's clear the signal is from the market that. Kendrick's highest commercial peaks of his career have been anchored on the beef and the tangents that have come off the back of that.
So, it is really, I think they both changed the trajectory of their careers and their financial earnings potential as a result of this. Ultimately, I think Kendrick definitely came out ahead in that world as well. So, a regular fan, as I am, and I don't dig into it as much, what I heard was that he's claiming, Drake is claiming that, They're devaluing his brand in such a way where that'll have repercussions into the future and in terms of the value of his overall brand.
And so I think that this is a good kind of segue in terms of how this gets into live event touring because how is this beef going to affect one, Kendrick's tour that's coming up into 2025? And I'm not sure, has Drake said that he's gonna tour at all? So Drake's been relegated to Australia right now.
They're doing Australia, like, which is cool. He hasn't been over there in a long time. And I think one of the challenges with the superstar acts, especially on these international acts, Australia in specific, it's really difficult to get there. It's long. There's not that many big cities you can play. So the economics don't make quite as much sense for a promoter to want to pick that up.
So it's cool that he's going to give those dates. We'll see how he feels coming out of that. And if there's some good momentum and positive press out of the shows. At the day, Drake has still the highest grossing hip hop tour of all time with what he did last year with 21 and then subsequently J. Cole.
So it's clear that there's still demand. Do I think he can sell out a bunch of arenas in almost every city in the whole world? Yes, I also think that too. I think pivoting over to what Kendrick is doing. He decided to go to stadiums. I think this is also a fold of his animosity towards Drake, if you will.
Drake had always been rumored to want to do a stadium tour. It's my understanding, and don't quote me on this, I don't think any rapper has ever done a stadium tour. Jay Z went out with Justin Timberlake about 10 or 15 years ago, but Justin Timberlake is obviously a pop star, so you have a lot of tickets there.
Eminem and Kanye have played stadiums before, Drake has too, so they're capable of selling that amount of tickets in one night, but having a whole tour where you're doing Yeah. 35, 35, 000 to 50, 000 tickets across maybe 50 or 20 cities is pretty significant in LA, New York. It'll be pretty straightforward.
They'll have a lot of success there, but doing something like a Minneapolis or Seattle where they're big cities, but there's just not nearly the population density. Some of these other places it's a little more challenging. And so I think with Kendrick, he wanted to do this as a way to signal to Drake that, Hey, I'm bigger than you in every single way.
Okay. And to do that, he decided to recruit SZA's an interesting choice, as a lot of listeners may know, SZA and Kendrick have been label mates for a long time on TDE, Topgog Entertainment, until Kendrick broke off and made his own venture last year. They've been close friends for a long time and SZA last year just wrapped up her humongous tour for her album in 2022, S.
O. S. She was doing probably two to three sellouts. Say the resale tickets were 3 to 4x in the secondary market, which is always a good signal of the demand, is the multiple on the tickets in the secondary market. And they thought that putting the two of them together would give them enough commercial horsepower to do the stadium tour.
Which then unlocks, I think, a lot of whole different opportunities, a la Taylor Swift. And we saw her and Beyoncé both spin up, effectively, entire travel economies. around each of these respective stadium dates that they were playing because it became a destination of sorts that people wanted to come and fly into and there's all this bartering about which show is the right one to go to and are they gonna have a special guest that night and do I want to go see Beyonce in Atlanta because it's Atlanta or Houston because you might bring out Megan Thee Stallion.
Or do I stay here in LA and get lucky with Kendrick Lamar? And I think that factors into a lot of people's brain psychology when they're making these purchasing decisions, that it's not just focused on going to see the show. It's can we build a whole experience around watching this, building a whole vacation around having one of these stadium dates at the epicenter because it's such a cultural milestone that really breaks through the noise.
Absolutely, you're hitting on the exact reason why we are talking today on a podcast is that Taylor's five billion dollar injection into the economy. I'm pretty sure Beyonce's was, was, was fairly close as well, but the whole traveling to the destination, the live event becomes the reason. Why you pick, right?
There's this famous Dodge of this woman who said, it's cheaper to take my family to Norway or to Paris than to go to Miami or LA to see Taylor Swift. I think it's over the last two years at this point, this has been a real moment for. Event travel, live event travel in general. And I debated you a bit in that because I think that Kendrick's tour will start to follow the same thing.
And what we try to educate everyone on, especially the travel professional, is to be looking out for those dates. To make sure that you have a particular strategy. Against how you're going to set the rates, how much inventory you want to sell, what you're going to separate in terms of group and transient sales, and those type of things that are going to follow the pace of what a tour looks like.
And so I think that there is going to be just a ton of opportunity on the ticketing side, obviously, but also in travel. And with that said, what's your feeling now about a destination preparing for a Kendrick show? I think it's a multifaceted question, Marius. Why don't we answer and start by talking about the stadium shows.
There's so much fragmentation in the market. There's not really somebody delivering. This holistic travel experience. And so I'll give an example. I have a milestone birthday coming up next year, uh, not to date myself. And I was, it's, it's a couple of weeks after the Kendrick date in LA. And I was partly like, should I just rent out a suite for Kendrick and invite 25 or 30 of my friends?
And then we'll just do that. Everyone knows how much I love his music. All my friends love his music too. I've probably seen Kendrick with most of the people I would be inviting anyway, at some point. It makes a lot of sense, but if I'm going to have 25 people traveling in and I want to do this, I got to go book the suite through show five, which is actually separate from ticket master and live nation who's promoting the tour.
So they may or may not be getting a cut. They probably are if they have good business analysts, but that's unclear. Then I gotta find a place for all my friends to stay, and some of them might get an Airbnb, but they gotta do that on their own, and sometimes there's a hotel next door to where I live, so some of them might stay there, but that's a fragmented experience, because now we got 30 people here to see Kendrick Lamar and SZA, which is great, that's so exciting.
But it's like a whole weekend would be really advantageous to have a lot of other activities or somebody kind of facilitating the creation of that experience. And so I think that is all to say with the stadium tours, it's really important for either tour operators, hotel groups, rental organizations to be brokering relationships directly with either the promoters, in this case, and then subsequently their partner to get an offer.
Or with the venues directly. And I think there's advantages and disadvantages to both of those models. Obviously Live Nation and Ticketmaster have so much inventory of other events, but if you're building experience, you want to do something that's unique for a stadium show because you know that these are going to be these big milestone cultural moments.
We're not putting some undiscovered act. It's Beyonce. It's Taylor Swift. It's Kendrick Lamar and SZA. It's Luke Combs and Morgan Walling. It acts of that caliber. Then I think there's a huge market wedge for a hospitality provider to start building out a more robust experience and have the true, like, Kendrick Lamar experience in Los Angeles.
He's from here. He lives in Los Angeles. He's, this is what he's doing for his brand. And really make it so people can see the world or experience the world and experience the show in Los Angeles specifically through his experience. So, I think there's a huge opportunity here for like the hotel and the destination, the tourism board, hospitality companies as well.
And I think right now the challenge is that, It's difficult to do that operationally and everybody has one piece of that equation, but nobody is necessarily doing that at scale just yet. Right. I think a very interesting case when you look at Los Angeles or you look at another, it may be a primary market, but one that is ingrained in entertainment, Las Vegas, Nevada.
So in Las Vegas, Nevada's case, right, there are residencies now. And so how does that model, how did that disrupt live events in terms of. From the artist's perspective, the label, the promoter's perspective, because what you just said was very unique to Los Angeles with Kendrick. He's from there. There are certain things that's just certain aesthetic that is needed to be performing in Los Angeles.
But in Las Vegas, you always have hotel rooms. You always have inventory. It's the biggest destination for entertainment. Do you know a little bit about the background of maybe the shift of. Not doing stadium shows, festivals, and then of course now with Adele and Usher and others who have joined the fold with Vegas residencies.
Yeah, it's a great question, Mario. We, I think for the listeners, short primer on how residencies came to be. It started in the 50s as a way to draw business. And I think, yeah, for instance, Usher was one of the early ones. And then that was always how it would go. You go see the show, it was Vegas. There was the attraction of being able to gamble and Sin City and all that allure of being there.
And then in the mid 2000s, some of the casino groups started hiring a bunch of hedge fund guys, and they got a little bit smart about how to make money as they often are, and they realized that they could put DJs in the nightclubs that were really popular. And this is. When the EDM bubble was on fire, so Cascade and Deadmau5 and Calvin Harris were the most desirable acts in the whole world to ever be seen, they still are in my opinion.
And they realized that they could put them into the clubs and use that as a way to drum up traffic for the hotels. And once you, as everybody knows, once you go to Vegas, you somehow have a 500 trip that instantly turns into a 5, 000 trip. And you're like, where did the other 4, 500 go? And those guys are pretty good.
Blackjack table. That's where it went. Yeah, that's right. Well, the shows or the dinner or the 17th espresso martini, if you're in my case. And. They used that and they realized that the club could be a huge business driver by becoming this attraction. You already have the backdrop of Vegas, so it's a very desirable place to visit.
It's warm, it's easy to get to, lots of flights, lots of hotel inventory, as you said, Mario. So they have all the infrastructure pieces that they need. And then they have this kind of competitive differentiator where it's usually Calvin Harris is playing 10 festival sets at that time. I had gone like 10 or 12 years without seeing Calvin Harris from the first time I saw him until when I saw him at Coachella last year.
He just wasn't really playing shows like that, but he would go routinely to Vegas. So it was like, you actually had to come to him. I think when the advantages for the acts is they feel like they have a home base almost. It's like in this way, a sports team might feel like they have a home game. If you're Calvin Harris playing 500 days of army or whatever he's done now at this point in his career.
You are so familiar and comfortable with the promoter and the team and how everything works there. So, I think that's been a big advantage. And then they realized that they can operate the tickets at a loss relative to what they'll pay Calvin. Cause he's still getting a few hundred thousand dollars a night.
Now, at this point, it's pretty hard to know exactly what that draw looks like. So, the promoter's actually losing money on the tickets to pay Calvin Harris to be there. But then they're selling 100 drinks at the club, make most of it back on your table service right there, so you're break even. And then everything else on top of that is gravy.
I came with my best friends, a bachelorette party, a bachelor party, someone's 30th, whatever it might be, to come see Calvin Harris. They, they, the, the club and in the hotel group may have lost a little bit of money. On the actual ticket transaction, but we bought a bunch of hotel rooms, which gives them 20 percent margin.
And as you mentioned, Mario, my friends, do you love to play the blackjack table? They love to play. It feels like even more when they lose, they always make their donations as well. And then of course we do some dinners and things like that. So you end up walking away with a revenue per person. That's pretty good, but your margin in these other places, you can make it up and it become incredible.
So it's a really smart business decision. It's similar to a resort strategy for a big property, right? You keep everybody on property, they're going to eat there, they're going to do the activities that are based at their beach. And they don't really have to leave. They don't have to go to a competitor to experience something else.
Las Vegas in particular is just set up for that. It just makes complete sense. The flip side is this becomes a little bit of an arms race. And we're seeing that right now in Vegas is a great example. The two highest caliber resorts targeted at people under the age of 45 are Resorts World and The Wynn, right?
Like those are the two marquee places to be. And Talon, those people are gay. Travis Scott, who is headlining Coachella next year, will play some club shows at Resorts World now. The Swedish House Mafia, who wasn't even a group for years, is playing New Year's Eve at The Wynn. And they have to, because of each other, now everybody adopting the strategy, the copycat strategy, have to up the ante with the top of their game.
And it's interesting. On one hand, it's very expensive to do that, and you really have to be a little bit deliberate about what the traffic looks like and how much that cohort of business that's come in to see the show is generating for the rest of the properties in your other business lines at the, at the resort.
It's a great experience for consumers, because like I said, if you're a person that's never seen The Sweet Shoppe's Mafia are one of the greatest dance music groups that has ever walked the planet of Earth. Or you really love Travis Scott, you can just go to Vegas and do that on a random weekend. It's a pretty incredible experience, I think, that the club promoters have created in Vegas.
I think it's definitely some competitive friction there in terms of the investments that's required to get the caliber of talent to make you stand out. But once you're willing to make that investment, if you can figure out how to make the dollars work in the other parts of your business lines, it's an awesome consumer experience.
And I think it keeps people coming back and becoming return customers, which is a Absolutely. It helps you target the right demographics to right audiences because Swedish House Mafia was my jam back in 15 years ago or whatever it was. We've all gotten a little bit older, got a few more bucks. And so maybe you want to be cool and see the new DJ who's out there, but if you have the option, you want to spend the money for 40, 50, 000 for a table to see Swedish House Mafia, it's there for you.
And so what's interesting about this though is, yes, from a hospitality and travel perspective, they're using this talent to drive demand. Now, what does that mean for the artists themselves? What do you think the thought was? Other than the obvious, I would think for Adele, for example, probably doesn't want to tour, doesn't want to travel a lot, she wants to stay home.
But from a, I guess from an economic or business perspective, like what is the, what's the thinking behind it with the particular artist to go into a residency? Yeah, it's money is usually the answer with most artists, most people, let's be honest. It's a lot of money for the, maybe not the same amount of work that they would put in for another experience.
So imagine you're Calvin Harris last year, you're making your big comeback show at Coachella. You have to put together a humongous set, there's a visual director that you're working with, there's a lighting director that you're working with, a sound engineer, there's a lot of thought processing. You have world class people supporting you.
If you're him at this point in his career, he's one of the greatest DJs that's ever walked the earth. When you're at the club, you have a couple of things that you can do as an artist. It's One, it's just not as much pressure to deliver an experience like that where hundreds of millions of people around the world are watching the live stream of what you're doing.
And I think that's a peace of mind. But two, it also gives an opportunity to like, try some new stuff out. Imagine, Calvin had this alter ego for a little while, Love Regenerator, I think is what he called it. It was like house music, but he just, he double timed it a little bit. He was doing this in like 2017, 2018, house didn't really explode in the States until around the time of the pandemic.
If he'd done it now, I think it would've worked out way, way differently, so he was, uh, just way too ahead of the curve in that way. It gives you the opportunity to go and play something new or test out new music in the same way that really high powered stand up comics will show up at the Comedy Cellar in L.
A. to test out their new stuff. And then I think just the economics of it are great. You're a cowboy and you can come in and play a show for two hours and make 500, 000. You know that the casino is making a ton of money on suckers like me that are gonna go make their donation on the floor. And you also get to connect with a lot of different fans.
You give your fans an opportunity to come see you and enjoy the music that they love. So it's like a very positive some game. And when you establish a relationship with one of these organizations, typically they usually do exclusives in Vegas. Most of the time you work with a single group, which you don't play multiple other venues across the strip, but you'll work with one group.
And I think the. Opportunity to just be working with the same people, you're working with the same promoter, you have the same hospitality team on site, you stay in the same room that they always put you in, they know what type of sushi you like at the restaurant for your, your pre show meal. It's just a level of comfortability that you can't get when you're doing a 30 day tour on the road.
No, agreed. That's the other thing. When you, you factor in the travel, you think about Taylor Swift. She apparently gifted the truck guys who drive the trucks because there's something like 70 trucks to pull together her tour. Yeah. She gave them each, uh, 100k in cash. And so it's not just the fans attending.
It's having impact with the tour itself, because it's like moving a city to every destination, setting up and making it happen. I think the economics itself from a performance, we know this too, Alex from working at Pollen. The cost of the production itself and the cost of the talent is really the thing that stands out the most on the P& L.
And so you essentially eliminate that to a certain degree by having a residency. But, no, very well said. So we've talked about a stadium show in Los Angeles, we've talked about residencies in Las Vegas, Coachella. So that's a whole different travel animal in general, and I've never been. What's it like, and what do you think?
is the future for it because they've changed up the lineup a bit. And of course, we'll relate this back to travel, but what are your initial thoughts when I ask you the question? I see you light up. So, I know you're a huge fan. My friends are gonna laugh when they listen to us, because I should be on the Kotel payroll at this point.
I think Golden Voice should listen for them. I think it's the most incredible festival in the United States. They have created an experience where you can see the most avant garde acts and the most, what I would call, booty shake acts. Right. One place. It's pretty incredible to go and see an Afrobeats act and then a reggaeton act.
And then finish off the day watching Lana Del Rey head meringue. That's an incredible experience that not a lot of people can curate. And I think the smart thing that Coachella did to facilitate that foundation is creating an environment that the artists really love to be in. The reason they're able to get such high profile acts every year is because they have This reputation of being a hangout for all the people that work in the industry.
So you're an act, you want to come see your friends that are also acting or out on the road most of the year, like we just talked about source of their income, all the label bosses and the promoter bosses are going to be there. And it's funny to think of like musicians having bosses like desk job people, but they do.
And the A& Rs are their bosses and they do dictate the contract negotiations that they have and how much money they're getting. So there's a vested interest in making them happy. And then you get to come hang out in paradise. I think one of the things that people don't talk about with Coachella as much as they should.
The reason I think they've been successful relative to some of the other awesome promotions that exist in the United States, like Bonnaroo, or Lollapalooza, or ACL, where you happen to be on a Ferris wheel. That's right. And it's 95 degrees probably. It's in April. So a lot of the cold weather people that are traveling in are getting their first taste of summer.
There's a million reasons why it's just an awesome place to be. Yeah, that's right. They have a lot of things that work in their favor. What's interesting about the lineup is it's been evolving for a little bit. The history of the festival for those that maybe aren't quite as familiar. It starts in the late nineties off the back of this dispute that Ticketmaster and Pearl Jam had.
And Ticketmaster said that they're not allowed to play, Pearl Jam is not allowed to play at any of the venues that were partnered with Ticketmaster in the L. A. area. And that's a pretty common thing that will happen in music, it's called a radius clause. The reason that you do it is if you're a promoter, you don't want to book a show with, I'll use Calvin Harris to continue our example with Calvin Harris.
Thinking that you're going to make a few million bucks. And then Calvin Harris books a show up the road in Palm Springs where people can go just see him there. So now you've actually really impacted the total addressable market, the tan of people that might be interested in your experience. You put your revenue and your profit margin potentially at risk.
And so, Ticketmaster, Radius Klaus, Pearl Jam, which is funny because Pearl Jam was one of the biggest bands in the world at that period of time, and are awesome in general. They ended up somehow getting connected with this wealthy entrepreneur that owns the rights to the polo grounds, and he said they could do the show there, they do it, they lose a ton of money, it's like a horrible experience, but they're like, Oh, this is a pretty cool concert venue, maybe we could try this out.
They do the first cartel in the end of the 1990s, I think it was 99 or 98, something like that. And it's like back in Rage Against the Machine, like, rock acts. Golden Boys was a heavy rock promoter at that time. And it still loses a lot of money and it doesn't really work too good. But AEG is this experience is incredible.
We just need to have some guardrails of a big promoter conglomerate that can provide support and financial funding to these guys to blow this thing out. So they sell 50 percent of Coachella to AEG, which was probably one of the side of the deal you're on, probably one of the best or worst deals that happened in the history of anything related to music.
And then they start hyperscaling it. And so in the early 2000s it becomes a huge rock festival. Um, And they are booking acts like Bjork, and Muse, and Arcade Fire, and all the cool bands that existed at that time. Then in the middle to late 2000s, early 10s, was when hip hop was on fire. Lil Wayne is probably the biggest act on the earth in that time.
Jay Z is humongous. And so Coachella embraces this and starts booking some of those types of acts. They had Snoop Dogg, obviously, and Tupac do the infamous hologram performance. That's right. Uh, Madonna played around that time. They really started expanding the aperture of what they became. And so now you have all these things that are working for you in Coachella's favor, that we described a few minutes ago.
And you have the strong reputation of being a really notable fest in the landscape of music festivals. You have to start to respond to the commercial opportunity that you have. And they're realizing now, we can print money here. And so in the middle of the 2010s, they start embracing some of these acts because the landscape of music is changing.
Now hip hop has gone from being a sideshow, In the 80s, to being like gangsta rap in the 90s, to like Eminem and Kanye West in the 2000s, now hip hop is on pantheon, it becomes pop at that point. That's right, and pop music is bustling at that time, the ADRs have gotten really good, Spotify is helping people hear more stuff that they wouldn't have heard otherwise.
And Coachella really decided to embrace that in the middle of the 2010s, and run towards those acts, and they were willing to expand the aperture. Coachella decided we're gonna respond to the market, and they started booking these humongous headliners. And so in the middle of 2010s, they're getting people that have never played festivals before every year doing something amazing.
I think it really culminated maybe in like the 2016, 2017, 2018 timeline, which is when I first started going to Coachella. You know, they had acts like Kendrick Lamar, the week that he put out Damn, they have Radiohead, who had not been playing shows at all at that time. Lady Gaga filling in for Beyonce, because Lady Gaga was in Palm Springs doing Stars Born.
And Beyonce to pull off having her first set of twins. Then they have Beyonce the next year with Eminem. And Eminem is not playing a show in ever Eminem. Wow. How many times have you been? I think this year will be my time coming up. So do you, what, okay. So just sidebar on the history lesson, which is awesome, by the way, but.
What was your favorite one? I always say they're all, they're like children. They're all my favorites. I've had so much self discovery there. And in key acts that you would never otherwise see, it's giving me an opportunity to see hundreds of acts over the course of those. Right. I think my favorite in my heart will be, 2017 was my first year.
I wanted my two college best friends and the headliners were Radiohead, Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar, which is pretty remarkable. That's a very well rounded lineup right there. There was just a bunch of acts that were amazing. And I think that was a good year. The best line of the year was probably 2018.
I mean, it's A Time and now it's The Weeknd. That's three of the twenty five greatest recordings. Why I stopped you, because I can't even imagine what that would cost as a single stadium date. Like, now, especially. With The Weeknd just launched his Rose Bowl. Is that a residency or is it a, that's a one timer?
He said it's going to be a one off, but I think his team is pretty progressive in the things that they're willing to explore and consider. It's possible that they're going to look at something like that. I think you brought up a good point though, Mario, about the tension now going into this year was that Coachella really had to deliver on some strong headliners.
I think last year the headliners were. Wanda Ray, Doe Ducat, and No Doubt, which to me was, I'm like, yo, bangers. All those acts. But some people felt that had not historically been up to the average, that Coachella had always been at. Sure. I mean, I think it really uncovers a challenging problem that they had where Live Nation has done such a good job building out this touring product that we were talking about with Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar a little bit earlier in the conversation, that it makes it almost more financially lucrative for artists to go that route than do festivals.
For a long time, as Coachella was scaling the festival in the 2010s, one of the main advantages of playing it was that you were going to make two to two and a half X what you would make for a normal show. So you were getting way more money for a shorter set time. Where you could just come pop in. You don't have to do too much work.
You obviously have to set up the whole infrastructure and deliver on a great performance because it's a special place. But you don't have to do all the work of touring. Right. And then you can also come hang out with your friends the rest of the weekend. And also see a bunch of acts that you probably love individually because you're a musician and you love music.
And so it was really lucrative. But now that Live Nation has done such a good job of creating the pressure and AEG subsequently, but really Live Nation, I think, has created the pricing pressure here. Of having these great arena tours that clear out every ticket or stadium run if you're at the level of Beyonce or The Weeknd.
It makes more sense for you to do that because you want the show, when you get to that level, you want the show to be exactly how you want it to be. You want every single detail. For those that saw Renaissance by Beyonce, it's so technical and organized and every detail was so manicured. You can tell that Beyonce had her fingerprints all over it.
Right. And I think if you're them, you'd rather go do that than have to retrofit into production guidelines and the guardrails that the festival has to operate in. So if we look at the lineup this year on Saturday, Charli XCX is the primary supporter of the sub headliner, Green Day is the headliner, and Charli obviously is coming off the biggest year of her career.
One of the biggest years in pop, in recent memory, she's just done Brat. It's iconic, you probably know it. Mario, I know that's not your kind of music. I've heard it. I get it. Good. It's good. It sure is. And so if you're Charlie. You just wrapped up a tour with Troye Sivan, where you did, I think they did like maybe 25 or 30 dates across North America.
They cleared out every ticket. Resale was like 2 or 3x, so it was really difficult to get in. And they actually just added some more dates because they had such demand, they were sure to sell it. So if you're Charlie, it's, yeah, I could come play Coachella, and Coachella was probably paying Charlie, if I had to guess, maybe like a million and a half, somewhere in that range, a million and a half probably.
We'll come back to that. Keep going. And she's making a good payday there. But her guarantee on the tour is probably that as well. And if you're Charlie, you don't mind being on the road, which is again, some acts, you might be on the road, which is why there's a lot of different products in ways that you can dress this up to make it work for the artists.
We talked about residencies. We talked about stadium show. We talked about festivals now. I think she is doing this because she thinks Coachella is cool and she loves a cultural cachet and I know that Golden Voice has a really strong relationship with Charli, she plays a lot of events locally in LA to like promote her album, does pop ups and things like that, but that's something that they've nurtured for a long time.
If you're her, you don't need the payday of being here. Now, for us, it's gonna be incredible. I guarantee you, one of the three or four biggest audiences of the weekend is going to be at main stage when Charlie plays. It's quite possible. I don't know exactly how they're gonna do her and Travis and Green Day, if it's all gonna be on Saturday or what, because that's three gigantic superstar acts with like very cult followings that people are gonna want to try to see all of them.
If you're her or Sabrina Carpenter who was in this same space last year, you can just go on the tour and Sabrina's Nosebleeds are selling for 500. You don't need to go play festivals anymore if you don't want to. If you want to, it's fun. Cool, go check out all the European cities in the summer. Fans adore you and you should create the opportunity for them to see your music.
If you're talking about a financial perspective, LiveNation will give you whatever deal you want if you're a subreddit partner because they are so sure they're selling out every ticket that the ancillaries will make up for it and then some. They drive demand. That's right. A ticket first driver. And yeah, that's why they spend so much for the talent.
So as a veteran of Coachella, eight times you said? Yeah, something like that. So how do you book your travel? Yeah. It's a good question, Warner. So. We historically have always done Airbnbs. There's a few different options for people that haven't been. You can camp. I have no interest in doing that. It's about 95 degrees in the middle of the day at Coachella, so by 7 a.
m. It's dusty and hot. You're not doing a lot of sleeping. Obviously, people have some ways that they're able to circumvent their need for sleep at a place like Coachella, which is all great. Which, you'd never partake in that stuff. No, of course not. Yeah, that's part of why
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Palm Springs is the bad job. It's a really Indio a talent about 2030 minutes away from Palm Springs is the backdrop for the festival. And it's mostly a retirement community, so a lot of the people that own property in Palm Springs and the adjacent areas are snowbirds, and they come out in the winter, and there's a ton of golf courses out there, it's a pretty slow and sleepy place, it's nice, I like it, it's very grounding, I like going out there every, you know, few months to just clear my head.
And a lot of them will leave by the early spring because it starts to get really hot and they don't want to be there in the time. So you have actually all these houses that are sitting empty that are really strong rental properties. And so I think that's a huge competitive advantage that Coachella has carved out.
Versus a place like, if you look up to Chicago, La Palooza, I think that was the last music festival I went to. Chicago has a ton of inventory because you're in a metropolitan area, but you don't necessarily have people exodus. And obviously now with Coachella being 25 years in, they have. a learned behavior amongst the residents that they know, even if they are still hanging out for a few more weeks, they should leave those two weekends.
One, because it's annoying and two, because you're making a lot of money renting out your apartment. And the third piece is that Coachella partners with a group called Valley Music Travel. I'm not sure who their parent company is or if they're independent, but they basically put together, they package up the whole experience for you, which is really great.
I think people have had a really awesome experience working with that. And. What they'll do is they'll develop an itinerary for you for folks flying in. And Coachella is obviously probably the most recognizable music festival in the world outside maybe Glastonbury. And you get a lot of people that fly in from all around the world.
It's one of my favorite things every year is meeting people from Brazil or the UK or Australia that are there for the first time. And they'll book your transit out from Los Angeles, LAX, because most people fly into LAX, out to India, which is about two to three hours, usually a little more during Coachella because a lot of traffic, of course.
Then they'll book your hotel and they have a whole bunch of different options. I think they have things from like teepees that you can clamp it. Like a glamping set up. All the way through they have partnerships with some of the local hotels, things that are a little bit more economy, like the Hampton Inn, all the way up to a nice Marriott resorts that are out there.
And then they'll get your tickets here based off of what you want. So it's a pretty cool platform that they developed. I think it's a model that a lot of organizations can follow. Now, the thing is that Valley Music Travels done very well is that they know this product really well, and there's a lot of.
They need to be true for that to be successful. You have to have your bus operator at LAX, which is anyone that's flown to LAX knows how. What a beautiful joy that can be in being there. That's sarcasm. Listen, it's getting better. They're supposed to be building a train soon. We're hosting the Olympics here in 2028 and we have the World Cup in 2026, so.
We'll need to actually more infrastructure for exactly. And that's why they're making the super trains, the same idea. That that's right. There's so many people every weekend. One of my friends from L. A. is in Vegas every single weekend. It feels like at this point. So I think Valley Music Travels done a really good job developing a product that is fit for purpose at Coachella because they're the experts.
And I think one of the things that Tor operators can look at and as they try to maybe build a copycat product is thinking about how you can create really discreet value across that sort of product flow. And if you're a consumer, you've never been to Coachella before, right? I don't need to do all that because I know I'm going to drive on the ropes.
Right. I know where's a good place to stay. Is this walking distance from the fest, is it not, would festival take a tear to get, but if, if you're not, and so you had to go think about how you could build the relationships, one with the lodging, whether that's rental providers or hotel organizations, then you got to think about, okay, how do I get the wholesale inventory from the festival or events that I want to build this around?
Then I think it's really important to think about the fringe stuff too. Like how are people going to get to the festival? You need to include the Charlotte pass from their hotel. Okay. That's easy. How about from LAX to, to India? It's coming. Hey, time travel. Listen, nothing is one step. And I, I, it's really, yeah.
It's boring. I think you've created something that adds a lot of value and it gives you the opportunity to then go capture a margin. A lot of the people come to Coachella on average, or it would have been more affluent, so it's not necessarily about the money they'll pay an extra 20 or 30%. Right. Which is a nice fat margin for you to take home.
But you've got to integrate this seamless experience because people coming from Australia don't want to be having a challenge figuring out where to find this stupid Coachella bus that they got to get on, they're confused and lost, like you really got to deliver that in a way that's very simple. I think there's a lot of money at play here from our experience.
No, 100%. It's been proven when you look at the Super Bowl and On Location and companies like that who have been doing this at scale for a long time, they've thought of every single thing and Obviously, it's not cheap. It's not something that the regular fan will be able to afford, but again, it's a service that is needed because these artists drive that type of demand.
Switching gears a little bit, Alex, we met at a place called Pollen a few years back, and it's an underlying theme in this podcast about really how I got to this point of One, being an online travel vet for many years, and then meeting the team at Pollen and understanding the entertainment, the live entertainment festival world a little bit better.
And then the application of travel to that. You were a strategist there. And I also had another strategist on a podcast earlier. Her name is Christine. And I would ask her the question, what was your favorite Pollen event? And she, without hesitation, came back and said, Emo Night in Vegas. Now, she was very forward and said, I didn't work on that one, but it was a great time.
You did work on that one, right? I sure did. And I do remember that one in particular, that particular destination festival event with the emo night crew being one that the best way to sum it up really is the best vibes. The community was happy. The travel was well thought out. The lineups were well thought out.
Can you tell us a little bit about the process of building something like that through Pollen? Great that you got to chat with Christine. She's brilliant. She's coming back too. Maybe we'll get you both on here. Yeah, she's a busy burst. She is. I, I think HEMO Night was a great confluence of some of our, what we called experience design principles at Paulanen.
I think for people that are thinking about how they can generate some of these music travel experiences, which I think nobody has really perfected just yet, YNation has. Some good products there, but I think they have a lot of room to grow. Coachella is another example, but there's a lot of things that have to be considering.
So we talked a lot at Pollen about experience designing. What that really meant is about having the right content. So in this case, it was Emo Night and the associated acts and partners that would work with them. And the place that it would go in, why does it fit here and why does it make sense? Emo Night in Vegas was just like a conceptual build there.
It's obvious that we do that, right? Cover that, but I think in particular what's interesting about it is the juxtaposition of that community in Las Vegas. Right? That's a very rare sight to see emo kids to generalize. We get in a very glamorous setting of Las Vegas. We did. I think the thing that made the Emo Night partnership so strong was that Morgan and TJ have such a great control over their brand.
They know everything it is that they need to know about their audience and exactly how to deliver it to them. And it may not feel intuitive to take people that self identify as sad boys and sad girls. In their words, To a place like Las Vegas, but it ended up being the first time that a lot of them had a community like that in Vegas.
And it was so successful, quite frankly, of what we did. Fast forward two years. Live Nation built out their own product, copycatting precisely what we had done at Pollen, called When We Were Young Festival, which I'm sure many of you have heard of, and they're having awesome acts. I think another example of us doing this at Pollen was with J Balvin, when we had launched his product around Mexican Independence Day.
Why not use some of the Spanish speaking locales that we worked with, we had relationships in Cabo, and Puerto Vallarta, and Cancun, and some other places that maybe would have felt a little bit boring to live. But I think one of the things that worked really well with that experience is that there hadn't been a Latin music festival, a reggaeton music festival in Vegas to that time.
So we were the first ones that had ever done something like that and people were saying, oh cool, I never had had a space that I felt like really meets my individual needs. I think this even ties out to what we were talking about a few minutes ago with Charlie and Sabrina in that. Part of the reason that they're able to go on these crazy tours is that artists now have really deep relationships with their individual communities, right?
You have this concept of a super fan that everybody talks about that I think sometimes a little overgeneralized and not really that helpful. But I think that means that you have a lot of, we, we would measure every artist by the concept of breadth. So what's their reach? Taylor Swift is a great example with a tremendous amount of depth, right?
When you talk about a person like BTS. Where BTS ARMY is the most legion thing and when they did a reunion starting next year, and hopefully at Coachella in 2026, they will have people that have flown from all over the world to see them because they, the fans want to do anything that they want to do, everything.
They want to be engaged with everything that the act is dealing. And I think going back to the Emo Night and J Balvin examples, when you can find these pockets or sub communities, And build something that feels like it speaks to them directly, you're going to have a really strong emotional incentive to drive them to come.
And then now if you're on top of it from a business operations perspective, you're going to do all the work for me and plan all my events and put together my hotel and maybe some food and beverage vouchers. You have a really strong meaningful business model. So I think you're going to have perfect harmony really because of a lot of the work that TJ and Morgan had done in developing.
They're branded, understanding their audience in a very deep way. And then obviously all credit to Karan as well for helping them bring that vision to life. Mr. Rahm, Karan Rahm. I think one of the things I learned throughout that process was the value of the lineup. As a pedestrian fan of something, in terms of seeing when the on sale would go out and having the right lineup set up.
And so I always wanted to ask you, I don't think I've ever really asked you, like what were some of the things, because you did a couple of other kind of major projects. In terms of lineup development, what goes into that? I'm going to get myself in trouble with this response. It's okay. Yeah. I was going to hear it.
Here's the thing about line of development. It was something that we talk a lot about at Pollen. We had a tremendous data science team at Pollen that I worked very closely with, led by Alex Waria, who used to be an advisor to Daniel Atkin at Spotify. And he had this guy on his team named Devin Hollier, who's one of my close friends as well.
And him and I had been doing this project where we were taking a bunch of, we took, I think, maybe the top 1, 000 acts on Spotify or something. And Devin built out this really cool music psychology framework where we were measuring the moods of an individual artist based from the emotional sentiment of their songs.
And then you could see an artist like Drake is very balanced because he has a mix of high energy songs like nonstop, but he also has his melancholy songs like Western Road Flows. And it gave you an ability to look at and take a little bit more of a data driven approach to the way that you're curating a lineup.
So if you're thinking going back to our experience design principles at Pollen, we always want to have a mix of like party and fun and excitement where everyone's gassed to be there. And And then we wanted to have some downtime where people could rest and recover. If you're doing a beach vacation at some of the resorts that you had mentioned earlier, Mario, you're going to have a lot more relaxation.
If you're going to Cabo for a four day, five day music experience. You, you, part of your experience is that you want to chill on the beach with your friends and if y'all there, whoever you might be there with. And we wanted to make sure that we were curating the itinerary and the lineup around that. Now, Devin and I were trying to do something that was pretty transformational in the way of we think about line of development in a lot of most promoters.
And, and I think sometimes much to their chagrin awkward on vibes, a lot of people that what you would call a talent bookers in this world. Doing the jobs of curating these lineups have been in music their whole careers. A lot of them have not gone to college or they're not doing fancy data science projects in Python.
Know their audience. In the case of Morgan and TJ with Emo Night, they just know what the audience wants to see. Because they're at Avalon and previously at the Echoplex in LA every weekend. Talking to their fans and they know these are the people they keep asking us for. We used to not have the money to get someone like MGK but now we have this big high scale, higher revenue experience in Vegas, but it gives us the flexibility to have an artist of that caliber coming to show up.
And so I think using them as kind of example, you pivot over to Coachella to continue our, our thread there. Mr. Tillett, who runs Golden Voice, I've heard people have told me that his primary job at this point in his career, and you know it works, his primary job is staying topped in with the artists. They say he just listens to an insane amount of music.
When he sees something that he really likes, even if they're early in their career, he will go meet them personally. He really nurtures those relationships. And he has a clear framework in his head about how he wants to do it. Now, I'm sure there is some commercial considerations from the bosses at AEG that they say, Hey, we'd really like to accomplish X, Y, Z this year in terms of revenue target.
But Mr. Tillett has this really cool thread in his brain where he's able to take that business guidance and say, I think this is the picture I want to put together. I know of Lee Yaga, Green Day, Post Malone, and Travis Scott are my anchors this year. This is the type of support that I want to put around them.
It's very vibes based. And so I think it's really fascinating part of this humongous economy, because as you said, Mario, the single biggest expense for all of these types of experience is the talent. And you see a lot of festivals and experiences strike out on this time and time again, because they book a lineup with some level of confidence that these apps are going to sell, but it's an app that has played a lot of shows already.
And you put together a lineup that looks cool on a poster, but then the event doesn't sell the way they wanted to because I've already seen Megan Thee Stallion. I'm not saying it's a washer. So I'm headliners at Coachella five times. I'm not necessarily going to fly to Houston for a Megan Thee Stallion experience, but I will get to see her at Coachella.
Like you have this friction that people are making those direct trade offs in their head about those decisions. A thousand percent. A thousand percent. I, I was laughing because I spent a little time around the Live Nation folks, especially if you're in ticketing, you deal with a lot of promoters and that is exactly the metric they're looking for, vibes.
And that was one of the things that I was always. You actually just reminded me of it is that Varya and you got everybody on strategy appalled. You had figured out the metrics or the formula for what a proper Vosh would be in one of these destination festivals. The properties were part of it. And that's where my team got involved as well.
But just fascinating way to look at it. It is Mario, but you know what, man, at the end of the day, I can make my pretty shards. Devin is literally genius as was Alex, but we're going to put them on this show. And she's there for you. At the end of the day, data science doesn't sell where it says vibes do, right?
Like people look poster and they just say, is it good or not? They're making these calculations in your head and as a strategist and a great business operator, it's your job to figure out what that framework is and crack that code empirically. But people are doing that in a way that's very implicit and very difficult to quantify and they look at it and they just say, is it good or not?
And yet this hits or this does not hit. And I think that's why the process works this way. I imagine that I'd like to believe that's AGMI Nation are hopefully doing some projects like this internally to maybe be a little bit more rigorous about this because it sucks for the artists. When you get on a poster and the show gets canceled, it sucks for the fans when something gets canceled.
It's in everybody's vested interest, and especially Vibe Nation or AEG, of course, when you have to cancel experience because you lose a lot of money. It's in everyone's vested interest to have the highest possible hit rate of a poster. Fans get to see what they were originally promised and the acts don't look like they can't sell.
Alex, I think we have gotten to a point here where I typically ask the guest what their perfect travel experience is. So whether that's a destination or a particular artist that they'd like to see in a exotic destination, but here's the thing. We're going to keep talking, man. This is going to be a, another, consider this the first part of the Alex McClellan sessions.
And so do you promise to come back on Tickets to Travel? Absolutely. We just uncovered a whole nother thing here. I like this concept of hard tickets and soft tickets and what that means. We didn't even get into that today. And I think that would be a helpful framework to totally great into our conversations here.
Yeah, I mean, I, I, yeah, I work in South. No, man, we love it. And it's been educational yet entertaining. And so we will have you come back. So thank you for joining us today on tickets to travel. Appreciate it, man. Thank you for having me. Attention, travel and ticketing innovators, whether you're a startup disrupting the industry or an established company, ready to take your distribution strategy to the next level.
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