Live Nation wants to develop a 3,500-capacity venue in Portland’s central eastside.
The company, which also owns Ticketmaster, controls an estimated 60% of concert venues nationwide and serves as one of the nation’s biggest artist management companies. Earlier this summer, the Department of Justice sued Live Nation, seeking to break up their “monopoly and restore competition for the benefit of fans and artists.”
We hear from reporter Katie Thornton, who wrote about Live Nation’s quest to enter Portland for The Guardian. We also hear from Willamette Week reporter Anthony Effinger, who wrote about an alternate effort from local music promoter Monqui Presents to open a mid-sized venue at the Lloyd Center.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with competing plans for a new concert venue in Portland. For a few years now, Live Nation, the largest live entertainment company in the world, has been trying to build a venue that can hold 3,500 people in Portland’s Central Eastside. Many Portlanders have pushed back saying Live Nation and its Ticketmaster arm would throttle the city’s independent music scene. Now there is a competing effort from a local music promoter who’s partnering with another national entertainment company. They want to build a similarly sized venue at the Lloyd Center. We start right now with freelance reporter Katie Thornton, who wrote about Live Nation’s quest to enter Portland for The Guardian, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Katie Thornton: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a joy to be here.
Miller: Can you describe the plan that Live Nation and a local developer, Beam, have put forward?
Thornton: Sure. The proposal as it stands right now is for Live Nation to operate a new venue, as yet to be built, on Portland’s Central Eastside. As you mentioned, it would be just north of the Hawthorne Bridge on the riverfront across from downtown. The plan would be to build a venue that would hold about 3,500 people, mostly standing room. And so this sort of fills a gap in the venue market. Portland doesn’t really have a largely standing room or exclusively standing room venue of this size. And so the proposal would be that two local developers, Beam and Colas, would be responsible for building the site. And it would be built on land that is owned by Prosper Portland, the city’s economic development nonprofit.
Then there’s the part that’s causing the most controversy, which is that Live Nation, as you mentioned, the largest live entertainment company in the world, a multinational behemoth that was recently sued by the Department of Justice, would then run the venue. Things like booking, managing merch sales, selling drinks and concessions, ticketing, things like this.
Miller: There’s a lot to dig into there. But I’m just curious, first, about the size of this. Because we’re talking about, as you said, a venue that could hold about 3,500 people, way bigger than a small club, way smaller than a basketball arena like the Moda Center, let alone a football stadium where Taylor Swift or Beyoncé would go, skipping Portland completely. What have you heard about the draw of, I guess it’s called, a mid-sized venue?
Thornton: Yeah, Portland really does have a need for this size of venue. That’s something that almost everybody I spoke with noted, regardless of if they were in support of the venue or if they were opposed to it being run by Live Nation. People wanted a venue of this size. As you mentioned, it is in between the sort of club or hall sized venue and a really, really large venue like an arena. The closest thing that there is in the area for a venue of this size would be the Bend Amphitheater, which is a Live Nation operated venue. I think the band that has been referenced in a lot of awesome reporting locally in the Willamette Week has been Wilco and some other bands, LCD Soundsystem, 3 Doors Down – these are bands that have skipped Portland because there isn’t really a venue of that size to host those bands.
Miller: Just to be clear, there are venues approximately of that size, like the Keller Auditorium or the Schnitzer, but those are more sit down places that rock acts, pop acts are less interested in going to, or maybe their fans don’t want to sit down?
Thornton: Exactly. They’re fixed seating, they’re beautiful ornate venues. They’re not necessarily places where you’re going to be thrashing into your neighbor and spilling beer on the floor and that wouldn’t be a problem. And sometimes that’s what people need.
Miller: So opponents of this proposal, and they’re relatively numerous and relatively organized, have focused on the business practices of Live Nation. Can you describe Live Nation’s business model?
Thornton: Live Nation has billed themselves as the largest entertainment company in the world. As we mentioned earlier, they are currently under investigation from the Department of Justice who has alleged that they have a harmful monopoly over the live entertainment industry and over the concert industry.
To get into the nitty gritty of how Live Nation works and why people are concerned about them operating a venue in Portland, I think the most important thing to note is that Live Nation is involved at nearly every step of the way in the concert industry at this point. They are one of, if not the largest artist management company in the country. So they promote artists, they book tours for artists. Everyone from U2 to Pitbull has been on their roster. They also own and operate a ton of venues across the country, especially large venues. So it’s easy for them to book their own artists at their own venues and sort of keep that money close.
They also handle concessions at these venues. They take merch cuts and crucially, and perhaps most notoriously for Live Nation, they also are the parent company of Ticketmaster. They merged with Ticketmaster in 2010 so they also control the ticketing component. So really from artist management, to booking, to venue operation, to drinks, to merchant ticketing, often, Live Nation is having a role and extracting a profit at every step of the way. They’re sort of this one-stop shop that makes it really difficult for smaller entities, whether that’s an independent venue, an independent promoter or an independent artist, to break into this sort of world of large concerts.
Miller: What did Live Nation agree to, in a consent decree, when it merged with Ticketmaster in 2010? What did they say they wouldn’t do and what was the government concerned about?
Thornton: Yeah, great question. When Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010, it was very controversial. I mean, already before the merger, Ticketmaster had had claims and allegations of being nearly monopolistic within the ticket market. And Live Nation had broken off, not long before the merger a handful of years, from Clear Channel. They had previously been Clear Channel events. And so they were both major major players in these different sectors of the live entertainment industry.
When the two merged in 2010, it was very controversial. It’s a long sort of drawn out process. They were under review by the Justice Department, making sure that they wouldn’t become a monopolistic entity in the concert industry and end up harming consumer experiences as a result. One of the things that the Department of Justice said was that this newly, sort of, merged conglomerate couldn’t use their promotions arm and their venues arm to sort of strong arm venues into using Ticketmaster. They couldn’t threaten to withhold one of their artists from a venue because the venue wanted to opt to use a different ticketing agent. That was put in place as merger terms, a consent decree from the Department of Justice, back in 2010. But the Department of Justice said that they have repeatedly broken these consent decrees.
There was an instance in which there was a very large concert at the LA Coliseum where people were turned away at the door if they had bought tickets through an entity that wasn’t Ticketmaster. So there’s this sort of backstory that some of the critics of Live Nation call on to say … as somebody who I interviewed in this story said, “if they’re going to be violating consent decrees with the Department of Justice, I don’t think they’ll give a ‘bleep’ about the Portland music scene.”
Miller: Are there specific cities that opponents of Live Nation’s Portland plans have pointed to as cautionary tales?
Thornton: Yeah, certainly. So I want to defer to the expertise of artists and people who work in the music industry in Portland for this because I had the privilege of speaking with a lot of folks for this story. One person who I spoke with, his name is Colescott Rubin. He is a jazz bassist and performer who grew up in Portland, got his start busking on Portland streets. He now spends his time split between Portland and Boston where he teaches at Berkeley College of Music. And when we were talking, he was sharing with me that he’s built a musical career in, what he refers to as, a Live Nation city and a non-Live Nation city. In his experience in Portland, in his words, “Live Nation has a stranglehold on a lot of the mid-size venues, the venues that you kind of upgrade to after you’ve outgrown your local bar or your local small venue.” And he says that’s a really important market for new up and coming artists to be able to access.
With a sort of large multinational corporation, artists have told me that it’s difficult to be able to speak directly with the people who make the decisions at those venues. It’s more difficult to get on to concerts. And so if you’re sort of an up and coming musician, it’s harder to get an opening slot on some of these bigger shows. And he said that was certainly the case in Boston where Live Nation doesn’t just control the big arenas and even the big 3,000- to 4,000-person venues, they control some smaller venues as well. Another city where that was the case also was Austin, another city that people called attention to. Austin is, of course, a thriving music city. But a lot of local artists and local music journalists have lamented the corporatization of the city’s music scene in recent years. Of course, there’s a lot of things that make it challenging for independent venues right now. But it was called to my attention that in a place like Austin, Live Nation does have control over venues of all sizes, from venues that are smaller than a thousand people, up to big amphitheaters and even venues on public university land.
Miller: How has Live Nation, or its Portland-based partners in this, responded to these concerns?
Thornton: I think it’s a great question because Live Nation does have local folks on the ground in every city. And they were generous enough to speak with me for the story that I did for The Guardian. Live Nation has been booking concerts in local venues that come through Portland for many, many years. As one of the biggest artist management companies in the country, you’re hard pressed to find a place that doesn’t have Live Nation tours come through. So Live Nation has been putting up shows at locally owned and operated venues for many years.
A lot of the talking points that have been brought up are valid and important points. This fills a gap in the venue market. It’ll serve as a place where artists of this mid-size venue popularity will be able to play. The idea is that it might bring people into the city for some of these events. That argument has many people in the city on board and many public officials as well.
What you see a lot of people locally in the music and arts community pushing back on is the idea that, yeah, we need a venue of this size. But it doesn’t have to be run by this corporation that is known for having few opportunities for local artists and has a history of opening venues of all sorts of different sizes, to a point where it becomes very difficult for local venues – that might have a similar size capacity room – to compete with a deep-pocketed corporation who has a little bit more resources to weather difficult stretches.
Miller: Katie, thanks very much.
Thornton: Thank you so much for talking with me.
Miller: Katie Thornton is a freelance writer who wrote about the proposed Live Nation venue in The Guardian.
Anthony Effinger joins us now. He’s a reporter for Willamette Week. He’s written in the past about this Live Nation project. He wrote recently about a relatively new competing plan, a proposed concert venue in the old Nordstrom space in the half-empty Lloyd Center. Anthony, welcome back.
Anthony Effinger: Hey. How are ya?
Miller: Doing great. Thanks for your time today.
As I noted, you and Willamette Week, more broadly, have been reporting on this issue for more than two years now, but a competing mid-sized venue project is a relatively new development. The two players behind this idea are Monqui Presents and Anschutz Entertainment Group. Who are they?
Effinger: Monqui is a local promoter here. They’ve been in business in Portland since 1983 and they’ve done all sorts of shows. They book into McMenamins venues and all sorts of places. So if you look at your concert ticket, you’ll probably see that name on there. I certainly have many times.
Anschutz Entertainment is interesting. They are a big global entertainment company. They are a big venue company. They are founded by a guy named Philip Anschutz who made his money in oil in Colorado. And he’s quite the entrepreneur. He went from oil into movie theaters. He developed the Regal chain and sold it just in time because of the pandemic. He sold it well before that, but it was a good move. And then he got really involved, around the same time, in U.S. Soccer and he owned a few of the first teams. He was kind of a visionary there. He bet on soccer before a lot of people did. So yeah, he’s very versatile. He’s gotten older but I actually did a story on him years ago. And he’s the kind of guy who buys his coffee at 7-11, not fancy, not in the public eye, not a showman. But his company puts on a lot of shows and they want to work with Monqui over in the Lloyd Center.
Miller: Can you describe the plan that they’re putting forward?
Effinger: Yeah, so there’s a space in the Lloyd Center in the old Nordstrom there on the west end of the mall. And funny enough, Live Nation leased that space to try to do something years ago and nothing happened. And since then the mall has gone bankrupt and it’s now owned by a unit of KKR. They have a co-manager, which is Urban Renaissance. And what I gather is that Monqui and Anschutz got together and saw more eye to eye with the people at Urban Renaissance, and were able to do a deal in the same space. And what I gather is unlike the earlier deal, they’re going to knock this whole thing down to the basement and start over.
Miller: How far along is this proposal from becoming a reality?
Effinger: Mike Quinn told me he was looking at mid-2026. It’s millions of dollars. You need a huge backer for these things now because these venues have gotten so fancy. It’s not like places where you saw concerts when you’re teenagers, where it’s kind of dank and dirty. I mean, these things are nice. Look at the Sphere in Vegas, right? That’s kind of what you’re up against. It’s gonna take awhile.
Miller: The Lloyd Center, in recent years, is almost like a civic Rorschach test where everybody can look at it and imagine some better future for this space – once a kind of iconic mall, nationally, that has fallen into just weird times. The Willamette Week actually has covered it assiduously for a couple of years now. But I’m wondering if this were to happen, would that foreclose on other dreams of what might happen there, including, for example, the replacement for a Keller Auditorium which is still being talked about?
Effinger: Yeah, no, good question. Let’s take that in pieces. No, it would not foreclose any other plans for the mall. There’s a lot of space there. I can’t remember. What is that place, like 30 acres? It’s huge. And the plan for the mall includes lots of things including housing, retail, reconstructing the city streets through the mall so it’s not just this monolith breaking up Northeast Portland. And one of these kinds of places was kind of always in the cards, right? They’re open to entertainment options. So I think I’ve got to believe that the people at Urban Renaissance are pretty thrilled. I mean, this is an anchor tenant to replace Nordstrom. So that was the first question.
Miller: What about the Keller Auditorium or whatever it might be called, if it were actually to move to the Eastside, which is a huge question. A lot of folks want it to stay where it is. A lot of folks want it to go to PSU.
Effinger: Great question. I do not know how this might affect that. I’ve got to believe that the new Keller, it would not be like a rock venue. This is like a rock venue. This is like a thing where people stand up, drink beer and that sort of thing. And you could also sit down, but it’s designed to be both. And I, for one, see these as two different entities serving different markets.
Miller: What about the Live Nation and Monqui proposals? Those, if I understand correctly, really would be serving the same purpose: rock and pop shows. Could they both happen? Or is this a kind of race for who can get this done first?
Effinger: It’s a race. What I’ve heard from people is it would be very hard for Portland to support two very similar venues – Live Nation over on the east side of the Hawthorne Bridge, and then Anschutz/Monqui, just a little ways away on the Eastside. So I mean it is a race and I actually think that the folks at Monqui may have made this announcement to kind of put a stake in the ground right now because Live Nation is pursuing their plan. They got a few more hoops to jump through down there, by the way. And we can talk about those if you want.
Miller: So I’m curious, in terms of city decision making, who has more hoops at this point?
Effinger: I would say that Live Nation has more hoops because they are near the river. They’re going to be built on land that’s owned by Prosper Portland. I believe they have to make some zoning changes. One thing that they were working on earlier this month was the requirement to have a green roof on the building. And they were trying to appeal that, saying that to put in enough infrastructure to get a green roof up there would take out any advantages you get to absorb carbon through a green roof. So they’re pitching that to the city – “Hey, can we do this without a green roof?” And I’m not sure where that has ended up, but that was one issue there they were trying to work through. Then the other is on the other side. Lloyd Mall is private property. The zoning is in place to do a venue like this, I’m told. And so they can go now.
Miller: Anthony, thanks very much. I appreciate it.
Effinger: Yeah, thanks for having me on. It was a lot of fun.
Miller: Anthony Effinger is a reporter at Willamette Week.
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