A talk with Disco Donnie Estopinal, CEO of Disco Presents [Larry LeBlanc]
CEO of mega-concert promoter Disco Presents, Disco Donnie, discusses his journey that has led to his company’s 30th anniversary this year.
by Larry LeBlanc of Celebrity Access
This week In the Hot Seat with Larry LeBlanc: Disco Donnie Estopinal, CEO, Disco Presents.
One of the foremost independent music promoters in America, DiscoDonnieEstopinal knows how to throw a party and keep it rocking.
With his 30th-anniversary celebration, Disco Donnie draws attention to the fact that he has crafted his own lane (as far from the spotlight as it gets–but its’ impact can’t be overstated) — creating a distinctive niche under the umbrella Disco Donnie Presents which has now been rebranded as Disco Presents complete with a new logo.
As Disco Donnie explains, “What we have built is bigger than just me now – it’s about the Disco Events team and the Disco fan community, and it deserves a name that exemplifies that. We’re excited for a fresh start and heading into our biggest years ahead.”
Since its founding in 1994, Disco Events has produced over 20,000 shows and sold more than 20,000,000 tickets in over 100 cities throughout North America, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama, and the Dominican Republic.
This includes throwing raves in legit and non-legit warehouse and club venues and presenting massive multi-day festivals.
To kick off the 30th-anniversary celebrations, Disco Presents has announced Disco’s Zoolu, a three-day festival during Mardi Gras, with headliners including Illenium and RL Grime. Rabbit in The Moon (Live) is also joining for a special throwback event, “Zoolu Allstars.
Also announced were 30th anniversary-inspired sweepstakes, special ticket deals, festival activations, and fan contests.
Already holding an impressive event franchise portfolio, including Freaky Deaky, Ubbi Dubbi, Out, Ultimate Music Experience, Sunset Music Festival, and others, DDP’s most recent expansion kicked off with the acquisition of Lights All Night in 2022, further solidifying its position as Texas’s foremost independent promoter.
But there was more of Texas for Disco Donnie to conquer.
Donnie Estopinal (Photo: Tyler Church)
In 2023, he helmed pivotal partnerships with Third String Entertainment for So What!?, and the alternative rock festival Unsilent Night. Additionally, DDP joined forces with Illfest, and established groundbreaking alliances with Tahoe Live, and Shaquille O’Neal.
Considerably different from anything Disco Donnie has ever done before is the upcoming Texas Eclipse Festival in Burnet, Texas from April 5th to 9th The event will take place at the 1,200-acre Reveille Peak Ranch deep within the Texas Hill Country — just 60 miles outside of Austin–with 200 acres of camping grounds, and 50 miles of trails.
In the early 1990s, you might have spotted Louisiana State University student Donnie Estopinal waiting tables in New Orleans and pondering whether to follow his mother and be an accountant.
After co-workers coaxed him to attend local dance parties, youth Donnie fell in love with the dance culture, and he decided to start throwing parties himself.
Disco Donnie’s first party in 1994, Ultra Phat, took place in a warehouse space above a local bar, Café Siam. He threw parties there throughout the year—500 people at $5 a head—until the New Orleans police shut him down for alleged unlawful booze sales and excessive noise.
In 1995, Disco Donnie started throwing wildly successful raves at the historic State Palace in New Orleans, and he became a major player in America’s emerging EDM culture.
By the mid-90s, Disco Donnie was also doing shows in Atlanta, Mississippi, Louisiana, Houston, and Austin in both legit and underground venues.
Disco Donnie’s parties at State Palace eventually caught the attention of the Drug Enforcement Agency from the New Orleans field office. Under its Operation Rave Review, undercover agents had been surveying Donnie’s raves for 8 months. The DEA raided the State Palace Theater and office on Aug.26, 2000, on the suspicion that the venue and/or Disco Donnie were selling drugs backstage.
Even though the DEA agents tore through the State Palace until 1 A.M., they found no illegal drugs other than a joint that a bartender had. After this fruitless search, the DEA officers left, and the rave party resumed as planned.
Next, Disco Donnie and State Palace Theater owners, the Brunets brothers, were indicted under a grand jury for a violation of the Crack House Statute with an ongoing criminal enterprise (Title 21 U.S. Code, Section 856(a)(2) as part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.
Facing up to 20 years in prison, and a fine of up to $500,000 or both, Disco Donnie refused to capitulate. He continued throwing raves at the State Palace despite the occasional shutdown. He also started doing weekly shows at House of Blues New Orleans.
After the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took up the case, coupled with media and public outcry, the U.S. Attorney’s Office dropped all charges against the three defendants but fined the Brunets’ corporation, Barbecue of New Orleans Inc. $100,000 for allowing the venue to be used as a site for the use and distribution of drugs.
While the American music industry was slow to recognize EDM, fans got on board on their own, without radio or TV support. Over the years, a handful of electronic festivals– HARD Summer, Electric Daisy, Moonrise, Electric Forest, and others transformed the live music business and become a vital revenue stream for the electronic music industry.
Starting in 1998 with a partnership with Pasquale Rotella, and Insomniac, Disco Donnie first worked on the flagship electronic music festival Electric Daisy Carnival, and Nocturnal Wonderland, and later brought the Electric Daisy Carnival to Dallas, Orlando, Puerto Rico, New York, and Las Vegas. He brought Nocturnal Wonderland to Austin, Beyond Wonderland to Seattle, and co-founded Electric Forest in Michigan.
In 2001, Disco Donnie moved to Ohio and expanded into producing shows in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Nashville, and Memphis.
When Robert X. Sillerman relaunched SFX Entertainment in 2012. Disco Donnie Present was its first acquisition after SFX’s revamping. Then in 2016, SFX Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At the end of the year, the company went private and was renamed LiveStyle, with Sillerman exiting the company.
Disco Donnie bought back his company from LiveStyle in 2020 and never looked back.
As one of the leading live music presenters, you have built up quite a dynamic dance empire.
The rebranding of Disco Donnie Presents to Disco Presents celebrates your company’s 30th anniversary and is an acknowledgment of your unquestionable expertise as an innovator in developing new shows and finding new venues.
Luckily, I have made a lot of relationships, and hopefully, I have always treated everybody fairly. I am constantly being sent new venues and new concepts. and we are always looking. I am always challenging my team to come up with new ideas where we already do events; but what kind of events can we do that are different? That can make a statement and leave a mark.
The umbrella term EDM–with its multiple subgenres–is as mainstream as it gets today. It has long shifted from its early underground warehouse roots to the big festival main stages, and many DJs are now celebrities as they challenge the distinction between DJing and live performance while promoters like you are pushing for the next thing.
Disco Presents will most likely produce 700 shows this year as Disco Donnie Presents also did last year.
You know, pre-COVID we were hitting probably a thousand shows a year. Now we are, yes, in the 700 range.
After COVID-19 restrictions shut down the touring business for most of 2020 and 2021, you hosted the first major festival in America in 2021 since the pandemic took hold: Ubbi Dubbi at Texas Motorplex in Ennis, Texas on April 24-25 with a lineup of top EDM talent including Illenium, Kaskade, Destructo, Joyryde and others. It was reduced capacity, but still a major event that turned heads in the industry.
When we walked in at Ubbi Dubbi, and I saw everything that was going on, I turned to my wife and said, “I can’t believe that I actually do this. This is what I do.”
You only gave your team a seven-week warning that you had committed to a return to a festival model with the Ubbi Dubbi event in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It wasn’t for me; it was for all of us. For our mental health. We needed this, we really needed this.”
This year’s Ubbi Dubbi Festival again takes place at Panther Island, Fort Worth, Texas, May 25th & 26th featuring Afrojack, Galantis, Elderbrook, Audien, Le Youth, Crankdat, Kaleena Zanders, Juelz, nimino, IT’S MURPH, and more.
2023 wasn’t as difficult for live music in America as some had predicted.
I think the confidence in the air was good. There was a lot of traffic near the end of the year as a lot of people were touring. The big stuff still performed well. I think that a lot of the smaller and middle stuff didn’t do so hot.
2024 is shaping up to be a banner year for you.
Yeah, everything is going well. I am going to Austin in early March for iLLfest and to do another site visit for Texas Eclipse. Then I will be going back a week before Texas Eclipse to get ready for the big Eclipse show coming up in Texas in April. That’s kind of the largest show that I have done on my own.
What office staff do you work with?
We’ve never really had an office. We were mobile before COVID. Our team is around 20 full-time people and they work all over the country. Some are in California. Some are in Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Texas, and some are in New York. We are spread out everywhere. Then, of course, if we do a festival or another show, we probably hire another thousand people.
Meanwhile, married to a Puerto Rican, you live outside North America.
Yes, in Puerto Rico. I’ve been living there for 13 years.
You have been doing artist-curated, all-inclusive destination music festivals in Mexico since 2021.
Our next one is in Cancun at the end of April (April 26-28) called Paradise Blue Festival at Paradisus Cancun. They are artist-driven, so it’s all headlining bands. It’s really good seeing them all come together. They (fans) are all there for the same reason. It is just a whole different experience. Everybody is into the same thing. It’s just very rewarding to see the crowds and see how happy they are.
Are there restrictions or obstacles to doing shows in Mexico?
I’ve done shows in Mexico previously, and in Panama, the Dominican Republic, and in Puerto Rico. There are challenges working outside the United States, but we have been able to work through that and work with resorts. They have been great at issuing permits and helping us with all of the red tape that we need to do a show in Mexico. In that way, it is different. There is a language barrier between us and the staff, but we have been able to balance that out. Every time we do a show down there, we are getting better, and better at it. We will probably do a lot more.
Other than the corporate rebrand, you have recently overseen a number of strategic collaborations including Illfest, Tahoe Live, Shaquille O’Neal, and the pop-punk festival So What?! Also, you moved DP’s flagship Halloween festival Freaky Deaky from Austin to Houston.
As well, in what may be the crowning glory of your career, you have partnered with Mitch Morales’s Probably Nothing event company for Texas Eclipse April 5th-9th, 2024 which may reset the boundaries of conventional festivals by converging music, space, science, art, tech, and wellness.
Did COVID coupled with the live music industry retrenchment, brought about further by layoffs, and consolidations of booking and promoter companies, lead to a period of reflection for you to think about diversifying Disco Presents’ portfolio?
That wasn’t so much a questioning period. That was more like, “Oh shit.” I think what you are seeing is that over a…. I sold my company 10 years ago, and I bought it back during the first two weeks of everything shutting down (due to COVID-19). That wasn’t so much a questioning period. That was more like, “Oh shit.” I think what you are seeing is that over a…. I sold my company 10 years ago, and I bought it back during the first two weeks of everything shutting down (due to COVID-19). So once I got my company back, and everything came back, I was able to be more fluid and be able to make different moves when you are independent than when you are part of a larger company. You don’t have to get approval on everything. That kind of thing would hold me back and slow me down.
Now that I am back as an independent a lot of deals are coming my way. People are reaching out to me. I’m hearing, “I wanted to work with you before, but you were with a big company. I want to work with someone independently. I see what you are doing. I have this venue. So…”
In 2023, you moved your flagship Halloween celebration festival, Freaky Deaky, from Houston to Austin’s Travis County Exposition Center. Why?
Two things. The venue we had used in 2019 was sold. The land was sold so we didn’t have a home. We had known that this was coming so we had been looking for alternative venues in the area for three or four years.
Freaky Deaky was founded by React Presents in 2008, which began a big Halloween party in Austin featuring carnival rides, games, costume contests, art, music and more.
After years of bringing Houston and Dallas “Something Wicked” and “Something Wonderful,” you chose not to return to those festivals in 2018. You partnered with React Presents on Freaky Deaky and announced that the festival would be held at the Sam Houston Raceway in northwest Houston supported by four headliners, Excision, DJ Snake, Porter Robinson, and Kaskade, which sent the EDM community and the internet in a frenzy.
You were quoted as saying, “We moved from Houston to Austin just so people wouldn’t complain.”
Well, they complained anyway. But I did a $99 ticket—which is like a price from 12 years ago—just to buffer against people being mad that it was moving. People bought those and they were then very excited about moving Freaky Deaky to Austin.
After Travis Scott’s AstroWorld tragedy in 2021 it has become very difficult to secure festival venue space near Houston.
Yes, just because of all of the dynamics. and the things that you would need to do to produce a show there. I don’t even know if there’s been another festival there, but it is definitely a challenge. I had done festivals in and around the Austin area before. I have been doing shows there since probably since ’96. So, it just made a lot of sense to move it for one year as we continue to look for another venue to return to next year.
(At the rapper Travis Scott’s hometown November 5th, 2021, AstroWorld Festival in Houston, 10 young people were killed, and many more were injured, some severely, due to “crowd crush” or “crowd surge” as hundreds had rushed the event perimeter.)
You also became involved with several pivotal events. One is Shaquille O’Neal, and the touring live event series, Shaq’s ‘Bass All Stars. Will that type of celebrity partnership become more common in the future? It’s the type of affiliation that provides razzle-dazzle in the mix. I’d go to a festival just to see Shaq.
Yeah. He wanted to do his festival, and he has a house in Dallas. We had worked together before. So his team called us up, and they asked, “Do you guys want to partner with us on a festival?” So we put Shaq’s Bass All Stars Festival. together, and about 14,000 people turned up. Sometimes you don’t know what you are going to get. So those numbers were surprising to all of us. That it was so big, and that it was so well received by the community.
The one-day Shaq’s’Bass All Stars event at the Panther Island Pavilion in Fort Worth on Sept. 18th, 2023, featured one of the deepest bass lineups of 2023. One day of 16 of bass music’s most prestigious acts— Alison Wonderland, Sullivan King, Crankdat, Kai Wachi, and LAYZ; all for fans of trap, dubstep, drum and bass, and melodic bass on two stages.
Of course, Shaq is basketball royalty, a player that was the dominant center of his era. He won four NBA titles. Under the artist name, Diesel, he has become respected as a true artist and entertainer amongst his peers and fans.
He’s a rock star there. He’s a rock star everywhere but especially there. The local media, the local TV stations, everybody was announcing the event, and talking about it all the time. They showed up and videoed the show. We allowed them five minutes. We are now working on this year.
Tell me about your joint venture with Dallas-based Third String Entertainment. Why get involved with Mike Ziemer and Orlando Mendoza and present the So What?! Music Festival, and the alternative rock festival Unsilent Night under the Disco Punk banner?
Third String launched So What!? in 2008, with the eclectic event being early on soon-to-be stars like G-Eazy, A Day To Remember, and Bring Me The Horizon. Showcasing artists in punk, hip-hop, metal, and more, the event’s headliners have included Rae Sremmurd, Simple Plan, 100 Gecs, and more.
Mike is married to Anna (Anna Marie Taylor Cavitt-Ziemer) who worked with me (as regional marketing & operations manager) for a long time.
(A formidable live event figure Anna, aka AMC, is from Dallas and has been working on festival events for decades, racking up more than 1,000 shows. Her career kicked off at 17 when she worked at her first major festival, Tomorroworld.
So we were kind of in the same circles, and we were trading information and venue numbers. We had been talking about working together for a couple of years. Whether it was as one combo or we would do an EDM festival one weekend, and they would do their festival the next weekend, and we would share costs. In 2022, I almost got involved with So What?! We had a long conversation, but it was rushed, so it never got done. Last year we had a full year to delve into it and work out a partnership. It’s doing very well.
You and your team also were quite busy already.
We were busy, but we still have a team. Once we put something in the system we can start working on new things. So this made a lot of sense. We have worked on expanding So What?! this year. That is why they wanted to work with us because we could take it to other places and grow off the brand.
As Mike Ziemer has said about So What?!, “It’s bigger than Texas.”
Correct. It’s still safe so they are definitely onto something.
(So What!? will take place at Panther Island Pavilion in Fort Worth on June 2nd and June 3rd. Among those that will be featured are: Boys Like Girls, Mayday Parade, Silverstein, The Devil Wears Prada, 30H!3, Iann Dior, Knuckle Puck, Norma Jean, Oh Sleeper, the Secret Handshake, Veil of Maya, Asking Alexandria, P.O.D., Switchfoot, Reliant K, the Amity Affliction, Attila, Currentws, Dying Wish, He Is Legend, Saosin, the Almost, Thousand Below, and many others.)
At the same time, you picked up a co-present with LIVE, the brand behind Tahoe Live, Salt Lake Live, and Park City Live.
Yeah, new events. We did Tahoe Live (on Dec. 15th and 16th, 2023 featuring Rezz, DJ Diesel, Disco Lines, Boogie T, Eazybaked, J. Worra, Kowta b2b Downlo, Levity, Nostalgix, Rusko, Ship Wrek, Truth, Cat Liu, and Daneger). When the guy who does Tahoe Live contacted me, I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve wanted to do this because most of my shows are in warm weather areas. So a big part of the year’s shows are blocked (booked) out. You can’t do shows in June, July and August. Then it’s too cold to do a show in January, and February. Basically, six months out of the year, you are blocked out. So it’s really cool to do a show at the bottom of a ski resort and be able to then take it around to multiple ski resorts.
Who wants to be watching acts while freezing their ass off?
People are used to it. If they wear the right amount of clothes, drink the right spirits and stuff, and step around enough, they are going to be fine. As long as it’s not a crazy minus 30 below or something like that. If we had something we’d probably have to talk about not doing the show. If it’s going to be in the high 20s to the high 40s, okay. And the shows go from 3 PM to 10 PM. So there’s a lot of time for a lot of daylight.
Tahoe Live is quite different from anything you’ve done.
Yeah. I’m always trying to do new things, and it’s exciting. We hadn’t done a show in the snow before. So we learned something new.
Also quite different from what you’ve done is the Texas Eclipse Festival in Burnet, Texas from April 5th to 9th.
Seeing the eclipse at this venue will definitely be a very exciting time for our team.
The April 8th eclipse is expected to last 4 minutes and 20 seconds, and will be seen across Texas and a large swath of North America as it heads east, with the first location in continental North America to experience totality being Mexico’s Pacific coast at around 11:07 a.m. PDT., according to an information page created by NASA. The eclipse is expected to be visible in Texas at approximately 12:23 p.m. CDT.
The Texas Eclipse Festival event will take place at the 1,200-acre Reveille Peak Ranch deep within the Texas Hill Country — just 60 miles outside of Austin–with 200 acres of camping grounds, and 50 miles of trails.
We looked at a couple of spots, and this one is an hour away from Austin, and an hour away from San Antonio. So there are a lot of flights for people to come in.
The venue is huge. It’s rolling hills, and there are lakes and trees and bluebonnets everywhere which will be in season. The venue is really special.
Reveille Peak Ranch is a working ranch designed for outdoor adventure events.
Yeah, BMX and others do events there as well. They do military training. There are so many different things going on. It’s fully operational year-round. So it’s not like going to a piece of land that doesn’t have anything; that doesn’t have any infrastructure or anything. This is already built out. Still, we have a lot of work to do.
Describe the initial meeting when this eclipse idea came up. “You know there’s an eclipse coming in 2024. Do you think we can build an event around that, Danny? What do you think?” Is that how the discussion went?
It (the conversation) actually started after the last one (eclipse) in Oregon in 2017. People that I know, and people that I worked with, had gone to that (the weeklong Oregon Eclipse Festival 2017 at Big Summit Prairie private ranch attended by 30,000 people) and worked at that show. They were like, “You need to put this on your radar that the eclipse is going to be in Texas in 2024.”
I was like (joking), “Oh yeah. I might be dead by then.” So probably about two years ago, we started having discussions again. Then I was looking at another venue, and my partner Mitch Morales with Probably Nothing (an experiential company that specializes in creating unique activations at large events and festivals) found this venue. So I checked it out. And that was it. Basically the location of the venue, the owner, the look of it, and they already do events there. It is almost a perfect venue for what this is going to be.
The August 2017 eclipse was the first with a path of totality crossing the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the U.S. since the solar eclipse of 1918. Also, its path of totality made landfall exclusively within the United States, making it the first such eclipse since the country’s declaration of independence in 1776.
There are so many ancillary aspects of doing the eclipse event with Thought leaders including NASA Astronaut Nicole Stott, Dr. Sian Proctor (SpaceX Astronaut), MAPS founder Rick Doblin, and artists rooted from various cultures from all corners of the world such as STS9, Seth Troxler, and a tribute to Goa Gil.
Among the production collaborators are Symbiosis (California), Re: birth (Japan), Strawberry Fields (Australia), Earth Frequency (Australia), Bachstelzen (Germany), Beloved (Oregon), Origin (South Africa), Meadows in the Mountain (Bulgaria), Bass Coast (Canada), Ometeotl (Mexico), DisQo PereZoso (Costa Rica), Cosmic Convergence (Guatemala).
We are working with those people who organized the eclipse event in Oregon in 2017. We want to keep Texas Eclipse just as true because I heard that event was amazing, and we really want to keep it true to the roots of that as much as possible. So we have a lot of different collaborators from all over the world, Besides the music, we will have artists, speakers, comedians, interactive areas, and we will even have astronauts. All kinds of different things that we are going to have. It is one of the most challenging things that we have ever done. It’s exciting.
Crowd safety is a primary concern for all promoters today, Texas authorities are very wary of outdoor events. They aren’t likely to understand EDM either though their kids likely attend your concerts.
Crowd safety is a big concern, and we spend a lot of money trying to make sure whatever festival comes through our doors that there are responsibilities that we need to protect, and keep them safe. So we spend a lot of time and effort doing that. Luckily, with our crowds, they are not trying to rush to the front, or trying to rush anywhere. If there’s a bunch of people somewhere, they probably won’t go that way. They will go to the empty space, right? So it’s a little bit different here (in Texas). They don’t have to be close up to the artist to enjoy the show and get the full experience. They can be in the back. They can be in the middle. Some people want to be in the front. But a lot of people aren’t trying to overcrowd a place. We are very lucky on that side.
You did a show at the Austin Music Hall in 1996.
That was my first dalliance with Texas.
You came full force to Texas in 1997 doing shows in Houston and Austin while you were also doing shows in Atlanta, Mississippi, and Louisiana in both legit and underground venues featuring Frankie Bones, Paul Oakenfold, the Crystal Method, Keoki, Clint Mansell, LTJ Bukem, Derrick Carter, Freaky Chakra, and Single Cell Orchestra and others.
What first attracted you to Texas as a promoter?
It made a lot of sense for me because I was living in New Orleans, and they were doing a lot of shows in Texas and we would travel over there. I would promote over there and test different ideas. Kinda see what they were doing.
This was back when practically every major American city had their own promoters. Certainly, that was true of Texas.
It was kind of like the mob. I couldn’t come in from New Orleans and go into Houston or Dallas because they already had all their families there. And they were all fighting. But behind the scenes. I was backing people in Houston, Austin, and Dallas. That was in the mid to late ‘90s Then the market crashed after 9/11. It was already going down; we just couldn’t see it. And hip hop came on so strong in 2001 and all those (traditional) promoters just went away. They either disappeared or stopped doing shows. Also with the government crackdown (on drugs). It just didn’t make a lot of sense with all of the risk, and all the eyeballs on what was going on to be doing shows. That was kind of when I started reaching back out to the promoters, the old promoters, saying, “Hey why don’t we start doing shows again? I will back you.” I didn’t have any money, but I had “pretend money.” I was pretending that I had money. “I will back you, and we will do shows. And when the whole scene comes back, we will do cheap tickets” — and now we are talking about being online because we are starting to give people data. “We will do cheap tickets and when the market comes back we will be able to run it. We will be in charge of it.” That is how I kind of worked my way through checks in Houston, Dallas, Austin San Antonio, El Paso, McAllen, and South Padre. I’ve done probably about 10 or 12 cities in Texas. So Texas has been a good market for me.
As dance music began to evolve from the disco era, there was considerable institutional resistance to rhythmic-based urban music. At that point, you were promoting EDM, which larger promoters weren’t interested in.
Yeah, at that point, nobody wanted dance music. It just wasn’t cool at the time.
By 1990, however, huge-scale, one-off raves were transforming house and techno into events full of lights and lasers, fun-fair attractions, and stellar DJ lineups. However, I can’t see Michael Rapino or Louis Messina being Godfathers of Rave in that time.
(Laughing) Maybe. If I went to those guys, and said, “I want to use your venue.” They would say, “Well, of course.” I worked with Louis’ son Jeff when they opened up to program music in the mid-2000s in Houston. They were down to recommend me. It was still a night for them, but it (dance music) really wasn’t on their radar then. There were some people that were into it at Live Nation and AEG, but mostly it wasn’t a cool thing to do.
You bought back your company from LiveStyle in 2020. Robert, X. Sillerman had rebooted SFX Entertainment in 2012 with a focus on the electronic dance music industry.
Defaulting on a $10.8 million loan after missing an interest payment of $3 million in January 2016, SFX Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At the end of the year, the company went private and was renamed LiveStyle, with Sillerman exiting the company.
Under CEO Randy Phillips, LiveStyle emerged as the new corporate umbrella for Disco Donnie Presents, React, Made, and Beatport.
When Sillerman relaunched SFX Entertainment in 2012. Disco Donnie Present was its acquisition after SFX’s revamping.
You then lured (and SFX acquired) EDM promoters such as ID&T, Made Event Totem, React, Flavorus, and Gary Richards’ HARD Events as well as digital music store Beatport. Festivals like TomorrowWorld, and Mysteryland. SFX also acquired the event company Life In Color as well as the Miami Marketing Group which owned 8 nightclubs.
I was there from day one for the second SFX. It was a crazy scenario. I was basically a conduit to bringing in all of these people. I couldn’t tell them who they were meeting with. I paid for them to come to New York, and I didn’t even have a contract or anything like that. I was doing this on a handshake. So I’d pay for them to come to New York. I’d meet with them at a restaurant down the street, and I’d tell them who they were meeting with. Then I would bring them in to meet Bob, and then that meeting would go on. I would then go down and meet with somebody else, and I’d bring that person in as the other meeting was ending. It was a crazy, crazy start from the get-go.
Sillerman founded SFX Broadcasting which came to own more than 70 radio stations in 20 markets which he sold in 1977 to Capstar Broadcasting for $2.1 billion. Then under the SFX Entertainment banner in the late 1990s, Sillerman spent about $2 billion buying promoters and other entertainment properties, including snapping up 11 regional companies and 82 venues.
Sillerman sold SFX Entertainment to Clear Channel Entertainment for an estimated $4 billion in 2005, in hopes of synergizing its live and radio businesses. When that didn’t happen Clear Channel spun off its live entertainment division to form free-standing, publicly traded Live Nation.
Coming from the EDM sector how would they even know about Sillerman who (came from broadcasting, and then the major live music event world?
I had read the book of the first SFX, so I was aware of him. Also because of (being involved with) the State Palace (in New Orleans), I was around that (live music) business and knew what was going on with people getting bought up. So he wasn’t totally off my radar.
But what led to your affiliation with Sillerman who had announced a plan to spend $1 billion on the acquisitions of local and regional dance music promoters?
I had a partnership with Pasquale Rotella, and Insomniac (since 1998) doing (the flagship electronic music festival Electric Daisy Carnival and Nocturnal Wonderland. We did a lot of things (including from 2008-2012, bringing EDC to Dallas, Orlando, Puerto Rico, New York, and Las Vegas, and also bringing Nocturnal Wonderland to Austin, Beyond Wonderland to Seattle, and co-founding Electric Forest in Michigan. We had been working together in some form of fashion since ’98. So it was a good long run
Partnerships are notoriously difficult.
When that went sideways, I bounced out of that and had meetings. I had a debt and I started shopping around this new company with different people who were interested in the project and in financing it. Then I met Bob Sillerman, and he signed off on the whole project, I signed up on the whole roll up right there, and he told me to get to work.
How was Sillerman to deal with?
He was a character, and he took big risks. Some of them worked, and some of them didn’t. He definitely changed my life. I don’t think that anyone would have been able to pull off what he did. I appreciate him, but you didn’t know what you were going to get in these meetings. He would say some stuff that could possibly be offensive to a lot of people. Some people reacted, and got it that he was joking, and others saw him wearing a suit on a Sunday with a fake wig, and a “F— You, You Miserable F—” T-shirt in a meeting, and the reaction was like, “Wow.” You didn’t know what you were going to get or what he was going to say but it definitely kept everyone on their toes.
Gathering that many local and regional dance-music promoters together into a cohesive force would have been a nightmare.
We had meetings with the SFX Entertainment promoters around the world, and you put 20 people in one room with these huge egos, and you ask them to make sacrifices like, “If this guy doesn’t take our offer in Australia, then we aren’t going to book him in New York. We are going to put our foot down.” Then the guy from New York would go, “No I need that guy. I have to protect my business here. I can’t do that.” Putting everybody in a symbiotic room to work together was not as easy a process as we thought it would be.
Who was operating LiveStyle when you bought back your company in 2020?
There was a group of investors that had taken it out of bankruptcy; that had bought I guess the debt. Or whatever was left of the rest of the company, and started running it as LiveStyle,
Why become an independent again?
It was kind of two-fold. I had gotten assurances that I could kind of have first right refusal (on shows). That is I would be able to match any offer that came in for my company. And the time came immediately when everything shut down (with COVID-19). We had a lot of shows on sale, and I had pleaded that everybody would get refunds. And I kind of got called to the principal’s office, and I was told, “Hey you can’t offer everybody refunds.” That was like a red flag to me because my name is on the company, and that was going to be an unacceptable process for me. If we couldn’t give people back their money right now, when could we? That is when they (the fans) needed it (money) most. I was concerned about our fans.
The second part of it was that I saw what happened at Paradigm (Talent) where within a week of closing down (the industry due to COVID-19) people I had been working with for 20 years lost their jobs. I was concerned about the people that I had worked with. Who was expendable? That conversation was already starting to happen two weeks in. So I needed to step in, take control, and make sure that these decisions were made by me.
Paradigm Talent was first to deliver a shock wave throughout the industry when 250 staffers of a work force of 600 were laid off weeks following the President of the United States Donald Trump declaring a National Emergency concerning COVID-19 on Friday, March 13th, 2020, As Paradigm Talent severed its music operation in 2021, Casey Wasserman acquired its North American live music representation business and then launched a new agency Wasserman Music
The unprecedented shutdown/postponement of live entertainment that followed was unanimous, and worldwide, leading to a series of financial moves by others designed to protect their businesses against the closedown as concerts and sporting events were canceled. Everybody was trying to figure out what were the new business dynamics.
Over the years, many promoters that had earlier sold their companies reclaimed them. They found that having an independent niche was the way for them to protect their staff and regional turf and make the most money. Promoters like Danny Zelisko, Louis Messina, Larry Magid, and Michael Cohl.
I’ve heard those stories about people who bought their company back. That was always a goal of mine after I sold it. A lot of people had left. A lot of people went when everything got a little bit tough with the bankruptcy. All of the principals of the SFX 2 company left and I was like, “I’m going to just wait this out because I know I will get it back one day.” So here we are.
Since buying back your company you are among a handful of leading live music independents in the world.
Yeah, there’s a lot of us, and we talk and try to band together a little bit here and see if there’s something that we can protect ourselves from a larger company.
You are from New Orleans.
I was born and raised there. My oldest son Raul just graduated from Tulane, and now he is in Vet school at The Ohio State University. I lived in New Orleans, and I never wanted to leave but I ended up marrying a Puerto Rican. So here we are.
You attended LSU (Louisiana State University) in Baton Rouge. What was your major?
Accounting.
Did you graduate?
Yeah. I was supposed to take over my mother’s CPA firm. I didn’t take a 360-degree or a 180-degree turn. I basically went right down the interstate and got off at an exit.
New Orleans is America’s Party Town, a marvelous place to promote shows.
I was very lucky to be doing shows there. There were so many things going on. There are so many different interesting artists then happening in the city. Nothing to do with the rave scene. I was able to pull them in and expose our crowd to all of these different crazy things. So I was very lucky to be doing shows in New Orleans. Nobody was really paying attention to me.
Easily recognizable by your crazy outfits, you became a key figure of the ecstasy-fueled early 2000s rave scene in the city. Were you a wild character back in the day?
(Laughing) I’ve straddled that line. I can do both. I was a rabble-rouser. I got into some trouble, but I was basically reserved. I was half party man, and half reserved. That is how I was able to work my way through when most of the scene were party people. I was able to do both.
EDM jumped from the underground to the mainstream but when you began it was underground in America. Many DJs didn’t want outsiders to know about it. While the music industry has been too slow to recognize EDM in America, the kids got on board on their own, without radio or TV support.
That was the name of the game back then. I was young and dumb. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
In 1994, you threw your first party, Ultra Phat, in a warehouse space above Café Siam. The following year, you started throwing wildly successful raves at the historic State Palace it would have been like, “Look I’m legit. I have a big theatre here.”
Yeah, that was a game-changer. We were still doing arena stuff, but this was kind of the beginning of seeing how we should be doing things. At the time, they had a lot of concerts going on. Red Hot Chili Peppers and Primus and all of these other shows. I was able to sit in on the settlements and notice the business side of it all. That was something I hadn’t thought of before. This was just a hobby for me. But to be able to look at that from the bird’s eye view of what the music business was and realize how far we were away from that; and realize where we needed to go.
EDM is a fairly new music genre. Just under three decades from throwing parties in warehouses. Just look at its history from DEA surveillance that you endured. Meanwhile, EDM splintered into so many subgroups and reached mainstream status, but the genre hasn’t been that well documented. It really was the wild wild west for promoters like you when you started out in 1994, and it stayed that way for many years.
Yeah, look it was going on before I discovered it; from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. There’s been different iteration to it, but it has morphed into what it is now. In the ‘90s, my original events were in warehouses, and they were all ages with no alcohol. We didn’t have any security. We didn’t have any permits. We didn’t have any insurance.
At the same time around the country, there were other young promoters going through what you were going through. Young Turks working in warehouses and random shows.
There were definitely some big scenes all over the country, and we were watching what they were doing; trying to see what artists they were looking at on their fliers. We would send fliers to the record stores in those cities, and they would send fliers back to us for us to distribute. So we were looking at what they were doing, and they were watching what we were doing. I was communicating with a lot of promoters around the country about doing flier swaps, but also gathering information from each other, and trying to share what was going on, and how things were going, and exchanging information, “This guy is great” or “I’ve got this sound guy that you should use” Or this light designer. We were swapping information earlier on about what was going on around the country.
All of you were also hiring artists that weren’t going to cost an arm and a leg. Most were emerging artists. There were very few real stars in the genre in those days. You and your event peers were building your own star system.
Look, I had the choice when I first got into the scene. It was to be a promoter or a DJ. I remember that I used to pay the artists and they would sleep on my couch, and I would make $1,500. I was like “I’m the big boss. I’m the one making all of the big money.” Now I pay the DJ $500,000 and I still make $1,500.
You are joking of course.
Yes. But it was just different then. A lot of them DJs) didn’t have agents yet. A lot of them worked at record stores, and we would call them where they worked, and book them right then on the phone. They would come down and perform with no contract.
At the same time, audiences were also learning about the music and the emerging DJ acts as well. Initially, audiences were happy with most DJs and then popular DJs emerged and more stars came. But in the early years, you’d go to a rave, and the music was there, and was it a good or bad DJ? That was the sole criterion.
It was pre-internet, so they had maybe a rave dance section at Tower Records. They had some very limited CDs in there. But there were no superstar DJs at the time. Basically, we were just basing bookings on, “Oh, this guy is from New York. I’m going to check him out.” We really didn’t know. There wasn’t a lot of information about what songs they had or even what they even played. There just wasn‘t that knowledge, especially not way down in New Orleans, right? They probably knew a lot more, and were more attuned to it all in L.A., and in New York. The DJs knew because they bought the records, and they played the records. So the local DJs knew but the fans going to the shows weren’t really going to see DJ so and so. They were just going to be DJ so and so from Baltimore or Detroit, anywhere that wasn’t New Orleans people would come out and see the artists. If somebody would come all the way from L.A. it was, “I gotta go and see this guy”, right?
There definitely were different sounds coming out of everywhere. Chicago had a sound. L.A. had a sound. New York had its own sound.
While you have hit a career stride in recent years, you work in a youth culture and business. When you started, you were the kid working alongside older people. At 54, you likely are the oldest person in the room at times. Are you comfortable with that?
I didn’t think I would be doing this for this long. And now I don’t want to stop.
Being older in entertainment can be a significant asset due to having a history of building extensive contacts through contested battles.
Yeah. I feel good. I’m working on new projects too. Not all will happen, but we are getting a few new things launched and then we will be good.
Larry LeBlanc is widely recognized as one of the leading music industry journalists in the world. Before joining CelebrityAccess in 2008 as senior editor, he was the Canadian bureau chief of Billboard from 1991-2007 and Canadian editor of Record World from 1970-80. He was also a co-founder of the late Canadian music trade, The Record.
He has been quoted on music industry issues in hundreds of publications including Time, Forbes, and the London Times. He is co-author of the book “Music From Far And Wide,” and a Lifetime Member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
He is the recipient of the 2013 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, recognizing individuals who have made an impact on the Canadian music industry.
