Russell Wallach of Live Nation
Ricky Tompkins Studio Copyright 2023
Ever dreamed of walking through the artist village at a major festival like Lollapalooza? Or attending a private performance? Maybe a culinary experience with a rock star?
Thanks to a new partnership between Live Nation and Airbnb, beginning with Lollapalooza Berlin in July and expanding after that to Lollapalooza Chicago and other Lollas first, before other festivals and concert tours, you will have the chance to experience life the way a music industry member or band might.
As Airbnb expands further into the experiential market, they have partnered with Liva Nation to make these once in a lifetime experiences available for a fee, which will of course vary based on the experience. I spoke with Russell Wallach, Global President of Live Nation’s Media & Sponsorship Division, about how the partnership came to be, how it will grow and more.
Steve Baltin: Russell, you spoke at the Forbes CMO Summit last year.
Russell Wallach: I did, absolutely. It was incredible. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Baltin: Are you in Berlin for where they launched or are you in New York now?
Wallach: I’m in New York right now so I did not get to go. We actually had one of our festivals, BottleRock, out in Napa Valley this weekend so can’t be everywhere Steve.
Baltin: What did you see there that stood out to you?
Wallach: I caught Benson Boone for the first time, which was great, and the crowd was just [nuts]
. It was interesting that you had Friday night the crowd going crazy for Green Day and then Saturday night, the crowd going crazy for Justin Timberlake.
Baltin: That’s a good segue into the Airbnb deal. You’re starting with Lolla, but BottleRock is one of the most unique places on earth. Will you be bringing these experiences to more festivals or will you be looking at different ways that you can be working with other brands for things like this?
Wallach: The partnership with Airbnb is starting with the Lollapaloozas around the world. Lollapaloozas really being a global brand; we’ve got Lolla’s in Berlin and India and Brazil and obviously Chicago. We’re starting with the Lollapalooza brand around the world and then the hope and plan would be to look and see where it makes sense to continue to grow that over time. It really is one of the few truly global festival brands, being Europe, US, India and South America. So, we really thought as we were working closely with the Airbnb team on this program that was really a great place to start. All of our research said that in general people are traveling to live music events and they’re traveling even more to major music festivals. So, starting with music festivals was really kind of the key in planning this overall program with Airbnb and developing these custom unique experiences. We’re very confident fans are just going to go absolutely crazy over this.
Baltin: I think artists today are much more inclined and understand how to work with the access fans expect. What’s been the artist’s response to this program?
Wallach: Artists understand and are closer to their fans than ever before because they can communicate now directly with their fans across all of their socials. Artists obviously have millions and tens of millions of followers. This is just really an extension of being able to now provide unique experiences while they’re on the road at these festivals. But the experiences will expand beyond just with the artist. And we think that being able to bring fans to a backstage experience and for fans to be able to see the scale and size of the operations behind the scenes, to be able to walk backstage and see what’s happening, we think that all of those types of experiences will be really exciting for fans as well.
Baltin: One of the best experiences I ever had was I did a piece with Questlove and Jamie Oliver for Rolling Stone, where we did a food tour of Lolla. I know you’re starting in Germany with a DJ by the name of BUNT, but it does feel like the possibilities are endless.
Wallach: The possibilities are endless. And I think the scenario here is that we’re going to be working with each festival based on what’s happening with that festival, the marketplace, the local culture. There’s a wide range of things, again, based on what the artists are open to in that market, whether they want to host something, whether the artists’ teams want to host something interesting. I think that’s a great idea, Steve. You could see some tie-ins with culinary and other types of experiences that can happen but again we’re really going to work each festival as every festival is unique, and we want to really create these unique experiences at each festival developed closely with the festival teams in Airbnb. We want to be sure we have the right hosts creating those right experiences that the fans are absolutely going to love. And we know fans are traveling for these events. They’re traveling with their friends. They’re traveling with their families. This just adds to the overall enhancement of what already is an amazing experience for them.
Baltin: Talk about how the partnership with Airbnb came about. Did they approach you or did you approach them? I know that they’ve been talking about wanting to do more experiential things anyway, because I mean the reality is that as fans get more sophisticated they just expect more.
Wallach: I think Airbnb was seeing that more of their travelers were booking Airbnb’s for major cultural events like concerts and festivals. And so it was really mutual. We had been talking for a while. We both had seen all the research and data to know that fans were traveling. We knew the fans were traveling for all of these big events around the world. Airbnb was seeing that they were securing a host of stays as well at Airbnb’s, where all these big cultural moments happen. So, we knew there was something there together. And the best types of partnerships are those that were truly authored together. And we really worked closely with them to build this program from the ground up. Everything is done with this in mind. It’s been in the works for a while. And it’s really been built together from the beginning, which is really the best way to do it.
