Anyone who works in the kind of music festivals that don’t have billion-dollar entities behind them, will tell you how challenging it is to make things financially sustainable right now. Costs for almost everything a festival needs to run have gone up. Trends in ticket sales are still fluctuating since the pandemic, with big-event experiences sucking up audiences over smaller events. Money needs to be found somewhere, and for years, the experience at many large music festivals is akin to being in a mall where the visual noise of brand “activations” is as loud as the main stage.
We are deep in festival and outdoor concert season. This summer, what that means is asking questions about ownership, sponsorship, and line-ups. A rolling wave of artist and cultural boycotts related to Palestinian solidarity is simultaneously exposing the role of private equity in festivals: who owns what, and who funds what.
Some lines of ownership are relatively simple. Coachella, for example, is run by Goldenvoice, which is a branch of AEG Presents, which is the live arm of Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), which is part of the Anschutz Corporation, which began as an oil well drilling company.
The name of Philip Anschutz – the billionaire owner of the entity and son of its founder Fred Anschutz – popped up in the 2017 hearings of the now US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. According to the New York Times, in 2006 Anschutz successfully lobbied a Colorado senator and the White House in George W Bush’s era to nominate Judge Gorsuch to the federal appeals court in Denver. In the 2017 hearings, then-Senator Patrick Leahy noted Anschutz financed uber-conservative groups such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Rock and roll.
Other lines of ownership, and where various parent companies invest their money, are more opaque. Currently under fire is Superstruct Entertainment. Superstruct operates in what it calls “the experiential economy”, and owns multiple festivals including the massive Sónar in Barcelona, which it bought in 2024, and the equally large Hungarian festival, Sziget. Last January, Superstruct bought the hugely popular electronic music brand, Boiler Room, from the ticketing platform Dice. It also owns the UK LGBTQ+ festival Mighty Hoopla, and the Dutch electronic music festival DGTL.
[ How Live Nation calls the tune for the live music industryOpens in new window ]
In June 2024, Superstruct was sold by the private equity firm Providence Equity Partners to another private equity firm, KKR, for €1.3 billion. KKR’s portfolio is worth around €620 billion. Its investments include the Israeli data analytics company Optimal+, and the Israeli data centre company Global Technical Realty. In 2019, KKR bought Novaria Group, a manufacturer of aerospace hardware, an acquisition characterised by the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute as “betting big on the US defence industry and aerospace engineered parts are part of that theme”. In 2023, KKR bought Circor International, described as “one of the world’s leading providers of mission critical flow control products and services for the Industrial and Aerospace & Defense markets”.
Discontent around the KKR-Superstruct relationship has been brewing for some time. Now artists are taking a stand. The London festival, Field Day, bought by Superstruct in 2023, saw 15 artists pull out due to the KKR links. At the time of writing, 28 artists have pulled out of Sónar. Spain’s culture minster, Ernest Urtasun, said that KKR is “not welcome in Spain”, citing policy that companies with alleged economic interests in illegal settlements in Palestine “cannot operate normally in the European Union”.
Superstruct’s sale to KKR was beyond the control of various festivals under this umbrella, and they have said as much. But the lack of autonomy festivals have over whose portfolio they ultimately end up in is a recurring theme. Individual consumers experience the same issue. The difference now is that artists and music fans are becoming more aware of financial flows in the context of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and Palestine solidarity more generally, especially at a moment when artists are core to such activism.
This is before we even get into the US antitrust lawsuit concerning Live Nation (long-merged with Ticketmaster), heading to trial next March. Last month, Live Nation added a new figure to its board of directors, Richard Grenell, Donald Trump’s special presidential envoy for special missions. In Trump’s first term, Grenell was ambassador to Germany, a tenure that led Martin Schultz (the former leader of the Social Democratic Party) to characterise his behaviour as “not like a diplomat, but like a far-right colonial officer”.
The consciousness of artists and fans is being raised. This moment is about many things. It’s about a younger generation and the artists they admire drawing a line. It’s about the claustrophobia of capitalism, a system within which escape from ownership and practices whose values you disagree with often feels stiflingly impossible, rendering consumers inadvertently complicit as their spend downstream filters up to god knows what. It’s about the billionaire class. It’s about shape-shifting conglomerates, private equity, and their Hungry Hippo approach to gobbling up companies and brands digested in heaving portfolios.
But it’s also about a new generation querying financial flows and their beneficiaries. It’s about the BDS movement becoming more and more mainstreamed. And ultimately, it’s about something that has always been the case: big money is rarely clean.
