Haley McCollister
President, MTG Nashville // Messina Touring Group
Haley McCollister has had a busy spring: Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, two of the flagship artists promoted by AEG Presents affiliate Messina Touring Group, launched stadium tours just seven weeks apart. McCollister, president of Messina’s Nashville office, joined Swift on the road for the opening weeks of her blockbuster The Eras Tour, which began March 17 — as she also readied the May 6 kickoff of the North American leg of Sheeran’s Mathematics Tour.
“The past few weeks have been… wild,” says McCollister, 35, exhaling deeply as she anticipates hopscotching between the two runs. Yet she also points out that because she’s been through this exact daunting scenario before — when Sheeran and Swift had concurrent stadium treks in summer 2018 and finished at Nos. 1 and 2 on that year’s Top 25 Tours tally, respectively, with a combined gross of over $740 million, according to Billboard Boxscore — she feels more prepared for the mega-selling madness. “Every tour is different, every artist is different,” she says, “but knowing how much time management and advanced preparation is needed? That’s really where the experience has played in for me.”
For McCollister, who was promoted to her current role last August, professional longevity has eased the process of setting up the biggest stages in live music. After graduating from Clemson University in 2010, McCollister moved to Texas as a new Messina hire — helping to handle ticket requests for Swift’s 2011 arena tour — and spent five years in Houston before moving to Nashville in 2015 to build up the company’s Music City office. McCollister has only ever worked for founder and CEO Louis Messina and his company, and admits that growing from a college grad to a president role at the same place over the course of 12 years is an industry rarity. “With Louis, he would always say, ‘You’re in charge of your own destiny. What is it you want? I’ll give you the resources to go after it,’ ” McCollister recalls. “And instead of just saying that, he really did it.”
From left: McCollister, Sheeran, Messina and MTG’s Keena Cheatham.
Adam Bettcher
As McCollister kept asking for more responsibilities and taking on more tours, she embraced the quality-over-quantity deal structures of Messina Touring Group, whose heavyweight touring roster also includes George Strait, The Lumineers, Kenny Chesney and Eric Church. By not spreading itself too thin, Messina Touring Group has long promoted VIP artists with long-term goals — and since her promotion, McCollister has been tasked with more overarching growth initiatives for that clientele. “We only work with so many artists, we keep the teams we have on these tours relatively consistent, and when we have conversations, we’re never talking about the next tour — we’re talking about the next 10 years,” McCollister says.
The past three years have been particularly tricky for promoters to navigate due to the pandemic. The sector experienced something of a soft relaunch in late 2021 and 2022 as COVID-19 hesitancies lingered, but now touring has fully roared back; this year, Beyoncé, Metallica, Morgan Wallen and more will pass through the same venues as Swift and Sheeran. “I cannot believe how many stadium tours there are,” McCollister says. “It’s insane to me that we’re in a time where this many artists are headlining 50,000-plus [capacity] venues.” While the stadium circuit might be less crowded in 2024 and beyond, McCollister predicts a trickle-down effect to the festival market, which she believes has been affected by the myriad of headliners routing their own tours this year. “Once everybody gets their own stadium headlining shows done, that’s when I think we’ll see new festivals pop up.”
Swift
Ethan Miller/TAS23/Getty Images
While McCollister is looking forward to a busy summer full of stadium singalongs and strategy sessions, she’s also steeling herself for more external conversations about the live industry’s hot-button issue: ticketing. The mid-November timing of Ticketmaster’s Eras Tour presale fiasco — where the platform’s online infrastructure couldn’t handle the enormous ticket demand and bots, an experience which Swift described as “excruciating” in a letter to fans — resulted in McCollister fielding questions about concert tickets from family members at Thanksgiving.
Ultimately, McCollister believes the current attention on ticketing issues will help push the live industry forward — and she’s excited about the possibility of real progress soon. “It’s a headache now, because it’s what’s loud in terms of the feedback that artists are getting, but it’s something that their fans have been dealing with for [a while],” she says. “So I feel like, while the willingness to pay attention and see what we can do about this is not completely new, there’s more sincerity behind making an effort.” —JASON LIPSHUTZ
