Live Nation CEO Talks New 6,000-Seat Salt Lake City Venue During Presser: ‘A Rare Opportunity’

“Six thousand seats is the sweet spot for Live Nation right now,” company CEO Michael Rapino said during a press conference in Salt Lake City on Tuesday (Aug. 19) to unveil one of the company’s newest venues, a 6,000-seat concert hall being constructed in partnership with Smith Entertainment Group.

Live Nation is currently on a building spree, developing more than a dozen mid-sized venues across the country as it looks to create new opportunities for artists like Bailey Zimmerman and Goose to connect with fans. Many of the venues, like the downtown Salt Lake City concert hall detailed during the press conference, will anchor mixed-use developments and host an average of 200 events annually, including an estimated 100 concerts, Rapino explained.

The new venue is part of a larger effort to expand Live Nation’s presence in sports districts across North America including MGM Music Hall at Boston’s Fenway Park, Citizens at The Wylie in Pittsburgh, a new concert venue in downtown Indianapolis being built with Boxcar Development and the new Centennial Yards project in downtown Atlanta near Mercedes Benz Stadium, home of the Atlanta Falcons.

The Salt Lake City project is meant to capitalize on the traffic from both the Utah Jazz and Salt Lake’s new National Hockey League franchise, the Utah Mammoth. The Mammoth are set to open their second season in October and draw 1 million people downtown, where the new venue will sit at the heart of the city’s planned Sports, Entertainment, Culture and Convention Center District.  

The two companies didn’t specify how much the venue would cost to build or how long it would take, although Ryan Smith, chairman/CEO of Smith Entertainment Group — which manages the Delta Center, the 20,000-capacity home to the Jazz — did note that the two companies were sharing the project’s costs via what he described as a joint venture.

Rapino said Live Nation wouldn’t likely have built a venue in Salt Lake City without a partner like Smith Entertainment Group, noting, “We would fly over Salt Lake. It wouldn’t be a market we would play, so this can open a great opportunity and we’re thrilled to be part of it.”

“When you’re building 6,000 [capacity venues], it’s a little riskier,” Rapino says. “If you’re in a suburb or the middle of nowhere — because you’re debating what part of the city will drive to that show — it makes it a little harder. That’s where we end up maybe doing 3,000 or 4,000 [capacity], but when you can be in the center of a downtown where you know the nucleus will be, it just opens up rare real estate. So other than Fenway — and probably we’ve got 40 of these on the on the docket that we are exploring — they’re all more mixed use outside of the downtown. So this is a rare opportunity.”