Ray Waddell - VenuesNow

Letter from Ray Waddell

Posted by Ray Waddell | Oct 27, 2021 | Industry Events

BACK AND READY: Fans get fired up for Foo Fighters at the first post-shutdown full-attendance show...

Letter From Ray Waddell

Posted by Ray Waddell | Dec 21, 2020 | Front Row

“I have faith that the live industry will return to glory, sooner than we might think is possible. I have faith that we will realize again this Golden Era.” How does one begin to sum up 2020? Lots of folks, particularly media pundits, are going to try, coming at it from whatever lens through which they view the world. My view, as ever, is through the lens of live entertainment, colored by personal experience, flavored by peers I love and admire, colleagues, acquaintances, heroes, legends, and barroom banter, and propped up by hard data, projections, statistics, conjecture, guesses, and no small amount of BS. In the end, I can come up with one word that sums up this year like no other: loss. We lost irreplaceable artists, particularly on the live performance front. I won’t list them all, but from my personal perspective, artists who influenced my own life and… Continue Reading Letter From Ray Waddell

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Letter From the President

Posted by Ray Waddell | Mar 27, 2020 | Front Row, Ops & Security

ON ICE FOR NOW: A lone skater takes to the ice at Capital One Arena, home of the Washington Capitals. The NHL suspended its season March 12. (Getty Images) In what would once have been an unthinkable turn of events, the plug has officially been pulled by the NBA, NHL, March Madness, MLB spring training and virtually all of March for sports and live entertainment events. And travel, so essential to our business, is being heavily curtailed from Europe and elsewhere and discouraged domestically. The ripple effect is stunning. On the music front, not only are artists and their extended teams impacted, but cancellations, postponements, or simply waiting for more news before making a decision impacts vendors like staging, sound, light, transportation and video companies, bus and truck drivers, tour personnel like tour managers and production managers, travel agencies and all the people they do business with. Many venues are… Continue Reading Letter From the President

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Letter From the President

Posted by Ray Waddell | Jan 2, 2020 | Front Row

As we say goodbye to not only a year but also a decade, now is a good time to take stock of where we are as a live entertainment industry. More specifically, December at the end of a decade seems a likely time to pause and examine where we are in this little corner of the live business: OVG Media & Conferences, home of Pollstar and VenuesNow, the only pair of trades dedicated solely to covering the pillars of live entertainment through the respective lenses of content (Pollstar) and the facilities that host that content (VenuesNow). From an industry perspective, we are wrapping up a decade of monumental change, both economically and culturally. In fact, culture and business are intertwined and have a symbiotic relationship here unlike in any other business. On the economy side, we entered this decade in the midst of what I called The Great Slump. Driven… Continue Reading Letter From the President

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