Issu

e 24

:Q2

2009

…Education…Benelux…Barley Arts…Touring Exhibitions…Legal News…Ed

IQ 24 cover and inside front inset 29/6/09 10:41 Page 1

Skilled in the field of promotion, but tired of

promoting concerts? Maybe you’re just

searching for the family market that live

music doesn’t easily reach? Or perhaps

you’re looking for events that bring a

regular, long-term return without the

stresses attached to a one-hit event?

Any promoter who answered yes to one or

more of the questions above will no doubt

already have considered branching out into the

touring exhibitions market, whose big hits

have been so hard to miss in recent years. With

long runs and family appeal, it is a field that

seems to appeal equally to disenchanted

promoters and eagle-eyed opportunists

hoping to spread their bets.

More or less anyone who lives in a major

international city will have seen one or more of

them passing through: Titanic, Tutankhamun,

Body Worlds, Star Wars and Abbaworld, which

lands in Europe later this year.

Clearly, these aren’t your ordinary shows,

but no sensible promoter sniffs at good box

office, which is why the thread that

connects music and touring exhibitions is

increasingly strong.

AEG is somewhere near the centre of

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Q2 2009

21

Q2 2009 exhibitions exhibitions

The Expo ExplosionFirst the industry was shocked by promoters turning tofamily entertainment shows. But now it’s the success ofthe exhibitions market that will raise more than a feweyebrows. Adam Woods reports…

it, bringing Tutankhamun and the Golden Age

of the Pharaohs into London’s The O2 arena

within months of its opening in 2007. That

blockbuster is still making its way around the

world under the auspices of AEG Live, while

The O2 has since opened its doors to the

British Music Experience.

EntertainmentCousins

The fact that exhibitions and gigs can co-exist

in a venue such as the O2 seems to make the

point that live music and permanent

exhibitions are really just different types of

entertainment. In any case, the touring

exhibitions business is suddenly riddled with

names from the live sector. Across Europe,

noted promoters are throwing themselves into

exhibition ventures, alongside or instead of

their old projects.

Live Nation, for instance, has a stake in

Touring Exhibitions, the new company behind

the forthcoming Abbaworld show. Premier

Exhibitions, the Atlanta-based company behind

Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition; Bodies; and

Star Trek: The Exhibition, among others, is run

by former Live Nation executive Bruce

Eskowitz. S2bn, another player in this field,

with a stake in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Annex NYC and connections to Premier, was

founded by one more former Live Nation man,

the veteran promoter Michael Cohl.

So just what is going on here? Are touring

exhibitions the new rock ‘n’ roll tours? And if

so, what exactly are the factors that are

prompting hardened promoters to leave

behind their old lives for a business that, one

might imagine, owes more to the world of

museums than the white-hot excitement of live

music. John Norman, president and CEO of Arts

and Exhibitions International (AEI), the AEG-

owned company behind Tutankhamun and the

Golden Age of the Pharaohs, first

encountered the form when he saw a

Titanic exhibition at the Florida

International Museum in 1998.

“What was interesting

was that the exhibition

had been there six

months and there

were lines of people

queued up through

the museum and

down the block,”

Norman says. “I

talked to the

director of the

museum, who

said, ‘we are going to do 800-and-some-

thousand tickets over the course of the

exhibition’, and I was doing the math in my head

– 800,000 people at $20 a head – and

thinking, ‘this is pretty good…’.”

A touring Titanic exhibition became AEI’s

first project. Over the next five years, the show

span off into five simultaneous touring

exhibitions, each well-stocked with original

artefacts from the vaults of RMS Titanic, the

owner of the wreck and its contents, which has

since been acquired by Premier Exhibitions.

For Norman, a former concert promoter who

has held executive roles at Magicworks, SFX and

Clear Channel Exhibitions, the business had an

immediate appeal.

“Artefacts don’t get sick,” he says. “They are

never late, they don’t complain about the

catering and they don’t lose their voice. There

were just so many benefits.”

Stress Relief

Others who have jumped across certainly don’t

appear to have any regrets. José Araújo,

associate producer at UAU, masterminds the

Star Wars exhibition that has done the rounds

of Lisbon, Porto, London, Brussels,

Örnsköldsvik and Madrid since late 2006, and

his enthusiasm for the exhibition model can

barely be described in words.

“It’s the future,” he says. “It’s a great

business. With concerts, the promoter always

gets the dirty end of the stick and very few

agents treat you ethically. Plus, I was tired of

the same old, same old: here’s the act, sell the

tickets, here’s the contract a week before the

show, do the riders etc. With exhibitions, there

are no major stresses – you plan a year, two

years ahead and you get to help the designers

create what you think will work best.”

In Madrid, Star Wars sold 300,000 tickets

in three months. “How many acts would it have

taken to sell 300,000 tickets?” he asks.

While it doesn’t necessarily apply to all,

there are certainly those, like Araújo, who

see exhibitions as a lucrative, stimulating

new enterprise that offers career

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Q2 2009 exhibitions

Body Worlds

The Partners Leonardo da Vinci poster

R2D2 forms one of UAU's exhibition showpieces

“ I said to myself, this is my 26th year in the business –I don’t need this. Let all thoseother guys kill each other ”– Firat Kasapoglu, The Partners

27

Q2 2009 exhibitions

promoters a dignified escape from concerts

– at least temporarily.

Firat Kasapoglu, of Turkish promoter and

event agency The Partners is another. “I’ve

stopped doing the rock ‘n’ roll stuff for a

while,” he says. “I said to myself, this is my

26th year in the business – I don’t need this.

Let all those other guys kill each other.”

Kasapoglu has been staging exhibitions for

three years. In that time, The Partners has put

on The Genius of Leonardo da Vinci in

Istanbul, Ankara and Cyprus, backed by

sponsor Arçelik, a Turkish household appliance

manufacturer; it has also had success with an

Einstein exhibition in Istanbul for the American

Museum of Natural History.

“Instead of trying to get 5,000 or 10,000

people to a concert on one particular night,

getting 200,000 or 300,000 people to an

exhibition in two or three months is much

better,” Kasapoglu says.

It is a fair point, and the fact that the right

exhibition in the right city can attract those

kinds of numbers is probably the best

indication of why promoters are getting

interested. Even if ticket prices are routinely

rather lower than for a music show, they

nonetheless mount up.

Ancient Treasures

German promoter Semmel Concerts’ ongoing

exhibition, Tutankhamun – His Tomb and Its

Treasures, is a worthwhile case study. It

opened in March 2008 in Zurich, where it

attracted 262,000 visitors in six months. A

joint promotion with Live Nation in the Czech

Republic took the exhibition to Brno, where it

brought in a further 220,000 visitors.

Since 8 April, Tutankhamun has resided at

Munich's Olympic Park, generating a 17-page

cover story in Stern, Germany's weekly news

magazine. More than 300,000 visitors are

expected before the show closes in August

and heads north to Hamburg for a 1

October opening.

In the meantime, a second iteration

of the exhibition opens in Barcelona

on 6 June before heading to

Budapest and Warsaw. Semmel is

currently working on dates for

Berlin, Dublin, Amsterdam,

Brussels, Copenhagen, Korea,

Japan, the US and Canada,

where visitors are expected in

the hundreds of thousands on

every stop.

“Many of the other

exhibitions – Body Worlds,

Titanic, Star Wars – are reaching

numbers in the same region,

sometimes even more,” says Semmel

Concerts project manager Christoph

Scholz. “It depends on the market,

and whether you are in a large or small

city; and whether you’re between

October and April, which is the best

exhibition period.”

The appeal of a long-running

exhibition that prints money for

months on end is obvious, but Scholz

points out that it can cut both ways.

“It is a daily box office and you will surely sell

a few thousand tickets in advance, but you

need to be nervous every day about whether

500 or 1,500 or 2,000 people will come to

buy an exhibition ticket,” he says. “Every single

day, it is a gamble.”

Costs vary, of course. With museums, film

producers and record companies among the

partners for the larger touring exhibitions, no

two are necessarily licensed in exactly the

same way.

As the lead promoter on Star Wars, UAU

pays Lucasfilm for the right to use the brand

and for the loan of vast quantities of

memorabilia. Lucasfilm approved the

exhibition, which was designed and built by

UAU and its own contractors, and both sides

do well from the arrangement.

“For Lucasfilm, it is not totally about money,”

Araújo says. “Part of the thing about this is

the branding; keeping the name out there. But

the exhibition sells well. The ticket price is

€10 – we are not greedy – and everybody still

makes money at the end of the day.”

Costs of Entry

A successful exhibition can be a profitable

thing, but equally the set-up costs are very far

from negligible. Semmel spent €5million on

the set, lighting and multimedia elements for

its Tutankhamun exhibition,

which recreates the Boy

Pharaoh’s burial chamber in

minute detail. Wherever

the exhibition stops,

Scholz says the cost to

the local

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

“They said, ‘it’s a hugeproduction: we have 12 trucks

full of crates’ and I kind oflaughed inside, because I have

done 92 trucks for U2 andfestivals for hundreds ofthousands of people”– José Araújo, UAU

Stormtrooper

promoter generally runs at between €1.5m

and €2.5m.

Stockholm-based Touring Exhibitions,

which plans to launch Abbaworld into the

market at an unspecified moment this

autumn, has not just Live Nation but

Universal’s Polar Music (owner of the ABBA

catalogue) among its shareholders. The

company was effectively created to stage the

exhibition, which means its licensors already

sit on the board, perhaps simplifying the

interaction with what is almost certainly the

world’s biggest all-surviving band.

“The opportunity is huge,” says Touring

Exhibitions president Magnus Danielsson.

“The upside is, it is a fairly

manageable risk. You are not

just doing one-off gigs –

you get quite a

substantial time

to recoup the

investment and

actively work with

it.”

Danielsson, a

former head of

European

operations for Live

Nation Motor Sports

(since sold to Feld

Entertainment) brings

from his former sector

a sense of what makes

a good family-

orientated product.

“When you work with

families, all of a sudden

you can talk to almost

anyone in a way you can’t do

for a specific concert,” he says.

“And in my mind, if you want to

attract a big audience, obviously

you want to talk to as many

people as possible.”

Abbaworld has not met the

eyes of the real world yet, but

by Danielsson’s account, it

may very well set a new

technological standard for

music-related exhibitions, or

even for exhibitions in general.

“I am not saying the other exhibitions aren’t

good, but we have tried to do something more

with this,” he says. “It is more like going to

Mamma Mia! than going to an exhibition – there

is going to be singing and dancing and 25

different rooms telling the story of ABBA. There

will be ABBA holograms, you can go onstage

with them, go in the arrival helicopter, record it

all on an intelligent ticket and take it home.”

Danielsson says Europe should expect a

worldwide premiere to take place later this

year, but that the exhibition will tour the world

in two or three “units” simultaneously – one

for Europe, one for North America, one for

Australia – before a permanent ABBA Museum

opens in Stockholm in 2011 or 2012.

A Perfect Match?

If the appealing factors for promoters include

the scale of the challenge, the access to the

family market, the refreshingly different culture

and the enticing revenue structures, the

reason rights owners are putting their brands

and artefacts in the hands of these road

animals is perhaps even more

straightforward: promoters know how to

get things done, and they live and die by

their marketing.

“We feel that good, experienced,

trustworthy, large-scale rock and pop

promoters have the best

chance of

marketing

these events

successfully,

because marketing is the key to

everything,” says Scholz, whose local

partners on the Tutankhamun exhibition

have included Robert Porkert at Live

Nation Czech Republic and Laszlo Hegedus

at Multimedia in Hungary.

Some exhibitions – even those run by

music promoters – don’t use local partners

at all. UAU, for instance, hires a local PR

company for Star Wars wherever it goes

and does the rest itself. But coming

unheralded out of Portugal to pitch to

Hollywood, Araújo believes it was his

experience with the demands of rock ‘n’ roll

that impressed his prospective partners at

Lucasfilm.

“They said, ‘it’s a huge production: we have

12 trucks full of crates’ and I kind of laughed

inside, because I have done 92 trucks for U2

and festivals for hundreds of thousands of

people. I’m like: ‘you should do Prince – that’s

hard; you should do Michael Jackson – that shit

was hard’. It was supposed to take two-and-a-

half months to build and we did it in 17 days.”

There are also other areas where the

opportunities for music promoters are less

apparent. Body Worlds, Dr Gunther von

Hagens’ ever-controversial exhibition of

plastinated human corpses, has entertained

27 million visitors since its first exhibition in

Tokyo 14 years ago. It has spawned at least 19

imitations, but according to Gail Vida

Hamburg, director of communications for Body

Worlds and von Hagens’ Institute for

Plastination in Heidelberg, rivals are lacking in

crucial details.

“Public anatomical exhibitions are so

different from music events,” Hamburg says.

“The music and the experience of the music

are the main attraction with music events, but

with public anatomical exhibitions, the appeal

and the promotion are multi-layered, more

panoramic. The promotion has to hit

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Q2 2009 exhibitions

Abbaworld poster

Christoph Scholz

“ The promotion has tohit more notes, have moredepth and breadth in order

to have reach””– Gail Vida Hamburg, Body Worlds

Body Worlds

more notes, have more depth and breadth in

order to have reach.”

While any promoter can market and stage a

show, Hamburg adds, the main challenge for a

scientific exhibition such as Body Worlds is in

creating the exhibits in the first place.

“Running the exhibition is easy enough,”

she says. “But the highest quality of

plastination can take up to a year for a whole

body specimen, so we have fewer exhibitions

than our competitors. Copycat exhibitions roll

plastinates off the production line, very

quickly. They are frequently knock-offs of Dr

von Hagens’ work, but they are able to

assemble a lot of specimens.”

United Efforts

Evidently, the entire touring exhibitions

business owes itself to a high-concept fusion

of museum-standard exhibits and blockbuster

marketing. While promoters come easily by the

latter, they are less able to fake the former,

which is why most exhibitions are the product

of several partners.

Some of the most successful exhibitions

draw on the expertise of both the museum

sector and the live music industry. One of the

trailblazers, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age

of the Pharaohs, which ran at London’s O2

from November 2007 and has since visited

Vienna and the US, is a case in point.

The exhibition is the product of the

museum’s curatorship and artefacts, and the

multinational promoter’s logistical clout and

marketing know-how. “Ten years ago, we asked

ourselves what was the best exhibition we

could possibly do, and we agreed it was the

Tutankhamun exhibition, but the Supreme

Council said the artefacts would never tour,”

AEI's Norman says. “Clearly, they have changed

their mindset since then, and now I think we

are at over 6 million visitors. There were 5,000

artefacts found in King Tut’s tomb, which

means we can have two separate exhibitions

on the road.”

There is no tension here, according to

Scholz, as neither museums nor promoters can

truly replace each other in the equation, and

both stand to benefit from the involvement of

the other one.

“We are not in competition with the

museums,” Scholz says. “We highly appreciate

their work, because the basis of a lot of these

exhibitions is the scientific work they have

done. The classic museum with original

artefacts and the big blockbuster exhibitions

have the right to live together – we are just

putting it on a different level.”

The long-term picture is still hard to make

out. Promoters such as Araújo believe they will

never look back; for Semmel, its Tutankhamun

tour may or may not be the first and final foray

into exhibitions. These are major undertakings,

and they require brilliant concepts and

spotless execution if they are to succeed.

“If we find a strong theme to produce an

exhibition; if someone comes with a clever

idea, we are absolutely open to discussion,”

Scholz says.

Ultimately, sustaining a long-term business

in exhibitions could prove to be every bit as

draining as a life in concerts. But there is

already a satellite industry mobilizing around

these events, and given the success they have

seen so far, it is hard to picture the bubble

bursting overnight.

ADAM WOODS

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Q2 2009 exhibitions

“ The classic museumwith original artefacts and the

big blockbuster exhibitionshave the right to live together

– we are just putting it on adifferent level””– Christoph Scholz, Semmel Concerts

Tutankhamun – His Tomb and Its Treasures

UAU's José Araújo meets his new client The Partners' Brain exhibition poster