Dr. Stephen Happel, a featured guest in a previous post, alongside Dr. Marianne Jennings, is working on a White Paper regarding ticketing and wants to have NACPA members get an early read:

NACPA Members and newsletter subscribers, This Mental Health Awareness Month, we are highlighting Backline, the music industry’s mental health and wellness resource and last year’s recipient of a $250,000 donation on behalf of NACPA.  NACPA’s support of Backline has laid the foundation for a safer, more supported music industry. With the association’s 2023 operational grant,…

I first had a conversation with Jonathan Gilliam after the Las Vegas shooting. He had an informed opinion on how to make outdoor festivals safer. One of our followup conversations took place when he was hired to run security for Eric Church’s Double Down Tour in 2019 but, being a busy guy, Gilliam could never…

Sometimes we dismiss the familiar in search of the exotic. It was at this point I realized, knowing his background at Bill Graham Presents, as a manger of a baseball stadium, and as a production manager worldwide, I nor anyone else in the media ever asked him his story. Before I became executive director of…

In 2015, when I was the news editor at Pollstar magazine and ticketing issues were in the news, like they seem to be every few years, an Arizona paper interviewed Dr. Stephen Happel for his view on whatever that problem du jour was (Springsteen vs. scalpers). Happel was a champion of free markets who thought…

You think you know someone. We all have those people– not family or BFFs – that we assume we know. That person we see every year at the holiday party, that coworker we talk to in in the breakroom, that friendly volunteer that shows up at every church function. Yet we don’t really know them;…