Music Business Chair Don Gorder, Gerry Barad, and Jeff Dorenfeld. Photo by Cierra Walker.
By Zac Taylor
Managing Editor
“I always subscribe to the theory that luck is hard work disguised,” Gerry Barad said at David Friend Recital Hall Friday afternoon. As the COO of Live Nation Global Touring, Barad was invited as this year’s Zafris Distinguished Lecturer to talk to a crowd of music business-savvy students. The bulk of the lecture was mediated by Music Business Professor Jeff Dorenfeld, who has been working with Barad in the touring industry since 1978.
“The entertainment field has been very good to me,” Barad said, a Vancouver-native who worked his way up to COO after working in practically every avenue of the industry. He gave anecdotes about booking a show with the Police in the late 1970s in front of 600 people, trying to manage dodgy punk bands, and how the touring industry has changed over the last 30 years from being mainly regional, then to national, and now, global.
Barad oversees the current U2 tour, which is the largest scale live show production to date by a landslide. The gigantic display that careens over Bono’s head weighs over 200 tons, with a single bolt weighing 40 lbs. A single ticket at any seat in the house for this U2 show could have fetched a few hundred bucks (many of them did), but Barad explained the pricing structure and the fan-friendly strategy in rates, as decided by the band. “At the end of the day, the artist controls what the tickets are sold for,” he said.
Joining the entourage of U2, Sting, Peter Gabriel, the Eagles, the latest addition to Barad’s prestigious clientele is Lady Gaga, who is planning a world tour of Madonna-sized proportions. “She’s the best artist I’ve seen in 20 years,” he said. “We need to find more artists like her.”
He also touched on a fairly new concept to live touring called dynamic pricing, which the Eagles are using on their current tour. “I call it ‘Robin Hood scaling’—the rich can pay for the poor,” Barad said of dynamic pricing, which theorizes that the front row should cost more than the second row, and the last row should cost less than the next to last row. Barad also stated that he was a fan of “all-in” pricing, which would make the price of a ticket singular and transparent, without any extra charges after the listed price.
Many of the students inquired as to what they should be focusing on as young artists and entrepreneurs; Barad’s message was simple: “There are no shortcuts. You have to do the work.”
