Are you planning on attending Pollstar Live! 2016 in San Francisco starting tomorrow through Friday? If so, make sure you catch Goldstar CEO Jim McCarthy on the panel, "The Real Live: Music, Money and Power in Silicon Valley," on February 11 at 9:30am. Here's more information about the panel below, including the participants. Join us for this deep dive into Silicon Valley culture and an examination of the tech industry's obsession with disrupting the music industry. Is tech culture changing music,...

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Jump-Start Your Workday With an 8 A.M. Rave, The New York Times headline reported. That's the mission of Daybreaker, a party with all the trimmings you'd expect -- DJ, dance floor, crowds, bar -- except that it runs from 7:00am to 9:00am on a weekday, and the bar is stocked with coffee and fruit-infused water. “You get some exercise in, you feel great physically, and it’s an incredible dance party. Dance culture and underground music tends to be boxed in...

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Last week, Jim wrote about -- and received in the mail -- a Newsies bobblehead, a promotional idea and a Broadway first from the minds of Scott Kane and the folks at Shorenstein Hays Nederlander in San Francisco. It's a bright idea that crosses lines between genres of live entertainment marketing: The San Francisco Giants introduced sports fans to bobblehead giveaways in 1999. The Newsies bobblehead promotion is already seeing success. How much? We got more details on this emerging...

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Happy #TBT. To celebrate, we’re sharing an oldie-but-goodie post from Jim. Earlier this week, Jim talked about Scott Kane and the folks at Shorenstein Hayes Nederlander in San Francisco, who, taking a cue from baseball and other sports marketers, developed the first Broadway bobblehead. Jim wrote: "That’s why I strongly advocate for crossing lines more frequently between genres of live entertainment marketing. If you’re in sports marketing or theater marketing or music marketing, you’re all in very similar roles with a...

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I picked up a habit a long time ago that I want to share with you: I fly a fair amount, and every couple of months when I’m going through an airport, I pick up a magazine that I would never normally read. I look for topics, almost at random, that wouldn’t typically interest me. The reason I do this is because I believe very strongly in learning from people in other fields, even far off fields. I think I...

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A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how, despite the fashion for tech businesses to talk about “disrupting” their industries, that’s never made sense to me. I’ve always felt that our role at Goldstar was to grow, support and improve our industry of live entertainment and the arts. My ears perked up, then, when I saw the coverage that a Brookings Institute paper received about how American businesses are getting older and older, including this write-up by Ben Casselman...

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As the Managing Vice President of Ticket Sales and Services of the San Francisco Giants, Russ Stanley is responsible for selling a lot of baseball tickets each season. And he’s doing remarkably well. The team has sold out 246 games in a row -- that’s 81 games a year and 42,000 tickets per game! Stanley accomplished this thanks to factors like their loyal season-ticket base and a string of fun promotions, like “Elvis Night,” “Yoga Day” and the surprisingly...

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