I've met plenty of CMOs in life, and I always say that I've never met any that can hold a candle to rock stars, who I truly believe are the greatest brand managers in the world.
— Michael Rapino
House of Blues has soul right down to the chef in the kitchen.
Every city's got a famous rib place or coffeehouse or dessert place.
I'm known for having a very small to-do list and a big don't-do list.
My kids, my health and my job are all equally important.
Rihanna can sell just as many tickets in Cape Town as she can in Detroit.
At a very young age in Canada, I had mapped out that my mission in life and my passion was live events.
To be the music company of the future, you have to figure out a way to be a great business and distribution partner of younger bands, midsized bands, and ones that break out, like Arcade Fire.
Part of calling ourselves Live Nation was about starting to shift the way we think, to be first and foremost fan-focused.
A hit is a hit, and when you have a hit great things happen.
It's a very competitive market. AEG has a ticketing platform, Stubhub has grown their marketshare, Vivid has come out of nowhere. It's not like venues don't have options. If you're a venue you can pick any ticket platform you want, and we have to provide a better product and win that business fair and square.
We do a big business with our midsized-venue model. We don't need bands to be on the top-ten charts to make money.
I probably go to 100 shows a year.
I'm an introvert by nature.
In early days of Live Nation, we really believed it was important to be a direct-to-consumer business, which the labels aren't and no promoter was at the time. By merging with Ticketmaster, we could we give the artist a direct relationship with the fan.
We can't say to a Ticketmaster venue that says they want to use a different ticketing platform, 'If you do that, we won't put shows in your building.'
