Good morning. My favorite event of this event-filled week was watching Iggy Pop, Jack White, and Johnny Marr perform at the CBGB Festival on Saturday. Held under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in New York, the crowd featured punks old enough to be grandparents and fans who weren’t even born when the bands they came to see first sang their hits. Goldman Sachs estimates that global music revenue will double to $200 billion over the next decade, with live music doubling to more than $67 billion. And that’s just a subset of live entertainment space.
While CEOs understand the power of entertainment to delight people they’re trying to reach, they might not appreciate the business case—and how it’s shifting. Dave McKay of RBC told me he’s never been more popular than when the bank sponsored Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. It also helped RBC add more than 600,000 clients to its Canadian banking business last year. Here are some insights from CEOs shaping the next wave of live entertainment.
Create a multigenerational experience. It’s not just mother-daughter Swifties. In organizing the CBGB event, entrepreneur Phil Sandhaus created a “Young Punk” category of $73 tickets, along with a separate stage area of younger acts that was buzzing with energy—and the sponsors who wanted to associate with that. He also livestreamed the key mainstage acts.
