Concert venues in mid-sized American cities might be the next big thing in live music
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Concert venues in mid-sized American cities might be the next big thing in live music
2023 marked the all-time high for North American concert ticket sales, owing to the likes of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. 2024 was strong, too. And that’s one reason why concert promoters like AEG Presents and Live Nation are looking to tap into parts of the country long underserved by major touring bands.
Think mid-sized American cities.
Well, there’s a company in Colorado trying to meet that demand and their product is the venue itself.
For a long time in Colorado, to see a big epic concert you had to go to Denver. Maybe to Red Rocks, an outdoor amphitheater surrounded by sandstone cliffs. But last summer, the state’s second-biggest city, Colorado Springs, got its own venue.
Homegrown band OneRepublic was the first to play at the Ford Amphitheater. The outdoor concert space has room for 8,000 and it’s a boutique concept. Concert goers can sit around gas fire pits while big names play, and the sun sets behind the Rocky Mountains.
The Colorado Springs company behind the amphitheater — called VENU — wants to bring basically this exact high-end event space to dozens of mid-sized cities.
“Since there haven’t been new amphitheaters built in quite some time in general, let alone in these areas, the company is being very, very tactical in terms of selecting where to create something new,” said Dean Budnick, who writes about the live music industry for magazines like Billboard and Variety.
VENU’s pitch to cities is that these outdoor amphitheaters can bring millions of dollars in economic activity. The company often gets tax breaks or other incentives. Budnick said it’s a smart model. Big promoters like Notes Live and AEG Presents are building new concert spaces too, but they can’t build everywhere.
“Venues are expensive to build,” Budnick said. “While it might be optimal to own the venue, if one had the resources, there’s a lot of value in just operating the venue.”
That’s the case here. AEG Presents brings in the bands that play the Ford Amphitheater. Colorado Springs was VENU’s first project, but the company has five more under construction in places like Oklahoma and Texas.
But plopping a concert venue in a place that’s not used to concert sound can cause problems.
“My family and I were enjoying our last night of summer with the kids outside, before they started school on Monday,” resident Cheree Hutchison told the Colorado Springs City Council in August. She lives close to the new venue.
“We had to cut our evening short as the band was screaming profanities that were blaring at us at over 70 decibels,” she said.
She’s one of hundreds of neighbors who have protested VENU’s amphitheater. Some residents say they can hear song lyrics loud and clear in their living rooms from miles away. Budnick said this is pretty common with new event spaces, that it can take some time to calibrate the sound levels at an outdoor amphitheater.
Even though the venue’s decibel levels might be legal, he said the sound “still could be just absolutely striking to the folks who live around the venue and never anticipated that and that can become a flashpoint.”
VENU is trying to be a good neighbor. In Colorado Springs, the company plans to spend $3 million dollars on sound mitigation measures like additional walls and speaker system changes. The issue makes headlines in Colorado Springs on the regular, but VENU CEO J.W. Roth said lots of other cities are not so concerned about neighborhood noise.
“They want my business there and they want us there,” Roth said. “So, many of them have gone completely out of their way to make it easier for me, not more difficult.”
He pointed out that two new hotels have sprung up next to the Ford Amphitheater and five new restaurants. He’s hoping residents eventually get used to the sound of the concerts and appreciate the business they bring.
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