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CTS Eventim’s Quarterly Earnings: Revenue Down 34.7%, Liquidity Looks Good & More Takeaways
Live entertainment revenue at the German event producer fell 40.4% due to the suspension of concerts across Europe. Europe’s coronavirus crisis took a huge toll on German event producer CTS Eventim in the first quarter, leading to a 34.7% decline in revenue to €184.6 million ($202.1 million) and clouding the outlook for the remainder of 2020. Due to countries’ suspensions of concerts and other gatherings due to the coronavirus pandemic, CTS Eventim’s live entertainment revenue fell 40.4% to €108.6 million ($118.9 million) while ticketing revenue fell 24.4% to €79 million ($86.5 million). CTS Eventim had been growing quickly until the pandemic threw the touring industry into disarray. In 2019, revenue rose 16.2%, and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in...
How We Work Now: Duck Club Presents/Treefort Music Festival Co-Founder Eric Gilbert
In a new series amid the coronavirus pandemic, Billboard is asking individuals from all sectors of the music business to share stories of how they work now, with much of the world quarantined at home and unable to take in-person meetings, attend conferences or even go into the office. Submissions for the series can be sent to HowWeWorkNow@Billboard.com. Read the full series here. This installment is with Eric Gilbert, co-founder of Duck Club Presents and Boise, Idaho’s Treefort Music Festival. Eric Gilbert: Treefort was scheduled for March 25-29 and we [initially] postponed it two weeks. At that point, the state nor the city hadn’t really done anything. We made the decision in consultation with them, but we had to take the lead on that. Two weeks after we postponed, the state fully s...
Those Slick Quarantine Band Performances Are Harder to Pull Off Than You Think
From Dua Lipa to Blue Oyster Cult to Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, bands have been figuring out how to perform remotely during the pandemic. Blue Öyster Cult has played its rampaging-beast classic “Godzilla” 2,270 times, in theaters and casinos, at state fairs and festivals — the first time at the Maple Leaf Gardens, in Toronto, on June 21, 1977, and the last time at Robins Theatre, in Warren, Ohio, on March 8. But until late April, the pioneering hard-rock band’s five members had never done it remotely from their homes, during quarantine, mixed together into a YouTube grid of separate rectangular boxes. “We basically treated it like a gig,” says Richie Castellano, the band’s guitarist and keyboardist, who produced the “lock-down” ve...
Ticketmaster President: Reps. Pascrell & Porter Are Wrong, Company Has Processed More Than $600M in Refunds
The following letter was submitted to Billboard by Ticketmaster President Jared Smith in response to a letter posted on Billboard earlier today by U.S. Reps. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) and Katie Porter (D-CA). Last month Ticketmaster revealed its plan to offer refunds for all canceled and postponed Live Nation and AEG shows. Respectfully, Mr. Pascrell and Ms. Porter either misunderstand or elect to misrepresent the realities of our business and refund policies, as we outlined in our April 17 response letter to them. It is entirely disingenuous and flatly wrong to claim that we have “pointed the finger at others.” To reiterate, Ticketmaster is a platform that allows event organizers to sell tickets directly to consumers. The fact is, the money we need to refund fans is held by our clien...
Tencent Music Revenue Hit New Highs in Q1 as Coronavirus Spread Through China
The Chinese music streaming company took a hit, but still grew earnings 27.4% year-over-year. Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), the Chinese music streaming company with 657 million monthly listeners, took a hit from the coronavirus pandemic in the first quarter but was able to grow both music subscribers and revenue. According to the company’s earnings report released Monday, Q1 music revenues leapt 27.4% year over year to $288 million while monthly average users grew 0.5%. Even though the pandemic led people to spend more time with entertainment, TME’s social media revenue rose just 3.3% even though 256 million people, a 13.3% gain, used its social app, WeSing. Still, music is a relatively low earner for TME; social media delivered an average revenue per media revenue per user of $15.65 ...
Event Safety Alliance Releases Reopening Safety Guide for Venues
A month into the pandemic, Steven Adelman and Jacob Worek of the Event Safety Alliance were on the phone, talking about how to reopen the concert business — eventually. “As I looked around the empty streets outside my condo, it became apparent that the small event spaces that were going to get to open first would not have the foggiest idea how to do that safely,” says Adelman, a Scottsdale, Ariz., lawyer who is the ESA’s vice president. So Adelman and Worek, the operations director, spent the past month crowd-sourcing more than 400 tour promoters, managers, Ticketmaster employees, caterers and Irish-fair organizers and released a 29-page guide on Monday. Given contradictory, confusing and evolving state stay-at-home restrictions — bars in Kansas are allowed to...
