The HITS Interview: Rich Schaefer

A once-sober jam-band freak amid a sea of stoners and an artist management expert who happens to work at the world’s second largest tour promoter, Rich Schaefer has always let the music guide him towards new and unexpected destinations. Knowing how, and when, to adapt to the live business’ ever-changing tastes has helped AEG’s president of global touring become one of the key figures in the sector over the past half-decade.

Brought into AEG in 2018 by mentor and previous boss Gary Gersh as part of the company’s first global touring team, Schaefer has been instrumental in securing exclusive deals with acts such as Hugh Jackman, Sabrina Carpenter, Carín León, Tame Impala, Kane Brown, Kacey Musgraves and Luke Combs.

Then there’s Zach Bryan. Schaefer has worked closely with the iconoclastic artist’s managers Stefan Max and Danny Kang and WME agents Andrew Colvin, Braeden Rountree, Ron Opaleski and Seth Seigle to free him from the usual album/tour cycles, culminating in Saturday’s debut concert at the University of Michigan’s football stadium, the Big House. The show sold 112,408 tickets, shattering a U.S. mark set by George Strait in 2024.

Schaefer spoke with HITS about how following Phish on tour set the stage for his life in the industry, learning from mentors such as Gersh and Randy Hoffman and AEG’s recent touring success stories in country, K-pop, hip-hop and beyond.

What are some early music memories?

The first show I remember really wanting to see was Poison with Lita Ford and Britny Fox at the Westchester County Center in 1988. Soon after, I discovered Nirvana and Pearl Jam. I was still a little too young to see Nirvana, which, regrettably, I never did.

In 1994, a neighbor played me a Dave Matthews Band tape, which opened the door not only to them but Phish, The Grateful Dead and a million other jam bands. From 1994 until 2000, I saw 101 Phish shows. [Future Bowery Presents buyer] Johnny Beach and my high school friend, Ari, would drive all over the country to see them and sell grilled cheese in the parking lot for gas money.

Most of the time that I saw Phish, I was sober. So for me, it was really about the music and the community and the travel. I met a million friends that I still have today. I only really listened to live music when I was in high school and college. The hook was that most shows weren't the same, musically—they had different teases and different cover songs. I learned so much about music from hearing those covers. Nirvana turned me onto Leadbelly and even David Bowie.

Beach and I met in 1995 and we would go to shows at Irving Plaza and Wetlands in the city. We were always the youngest ones there, but we started meeting a lot of people, like [Bowery Presents co-founder] John Moore, Jeff Webster and [Wetlands owner] Pete Shapiro, who looked after us. Fast forward a bunch of years to when I first met Gary Gersh in 2008. I was like, aaah—Nirvana’s A&R man! That's the coolest thing ever, and I'll take whatever job he offers.

Spreading the jam: left, Schaefer, future Bowery Presents talent buyer Johnny Beach and friend Ari Jaffess at a mid-1990s Phish show; right, with Beach, NBA Hall of Famer Bill Walton and Brooklyn Bowl founder Peter Shapiro at the Grateful Dead's 50th anniversary gigs in Chicago in 2015.

Before that happened, what was your first biz job?

Right out of college, I took a job with Jon Dindas. It was the dot-com boom and he worked at a place called Groove2.com, which had the idea to go to live shows, film them and monetize them. Turns out we were a little ahead of our time. We were in Vegas on a trip and the entire company folded at the blackjack table. Through a fraternity alumnus, I met Bill Carroll, who was a promo guy at London/Sire Records and had a glorified internship/assistant position open. I worked my way up to head of artist development just as the label was launching the girl group Eden's Crush on the WB show Popstars. It felt like I was their day-to-day manager. We did a stadium tour opening for *NSYNC in 2001 and that was completely eye-opening for me.

What eventually brought you fully into management?

I heard that Hoffman Entertainment needed a day-to-day manager for John Mellencamp and Jessica Simpson. I got introduced to Randy Hoffman in the spring of 2001, and after two or three somewhat intimidating meetings, he hired me. I started in August with a Mellencamp amphitheater tour, right before 9/11. I stayed there for seven years.

At one point he said, you have my credit card—go meet every lawyer and A&R person, take them out to lunch and bring in some acts. None of them necessarily amounted to much, but the relationships that I formed, I still have. I worked closely with Rob Light, Mitch Rose and Carole Kinzel at CAA.

But after eight years of John and Randy, I didn't know how else I could grow. This is when I was introduced to Gary. He said, The Artists Organization is about to sign this big artist and I need a day-to-day manager. The artist was John Legend. In the interest of doing something different, I convinced him to create a head of touring position. We signed Lenny Kravitz, who was on tour in Europe with Chris Cornell opening. It turned out that Chris and his wife Vicky also wanted to make a change, so we started managing Chris. Part of the pitch was, Soundgarden is part of your legacy and you shouldn’t ignore it. Eventually, the Soundgarden guys all got in a room for the first time in years, talked through the issues and eventually agreed to get back together.

Throughout that time, we brought on Rich Holtzman, who was managing Portugal. The Man, and Kevin Kocher, who managed Chromeo. We kept growing. At the end of seven or eight years, Gary and I decided to go our separate ways. I started LoyalT Management with Rich Cohen, but in 2017, Chris Cornell died, and that really took a lot out of me professionally and personally.

Zach's the realest artist there is. He has connected with people in a way that is indescribable. I saw him at the Ryman in 2022 and the lightbulb went off—we have to work with this guy forever.

Does this bring us to the doorstep of the AEG era?

Gary and I were talking quite often around this time. He went to AEG straight after The Artists Organization closed and identified that there should be a touring division, because they really only had Concerts West doing touring and Debra Rathwell in New York doing a handful of tours. It wasn't really structured or organized compared to other companies. AEG was focused on the club and theater business, and local shows. The problem was that artists would get bigger, get snapped up into a larger tour and AEG would be out of business with them. We have all these venues, so let’s be able to eventually move artists into an arena or stadiums.

Gary put together a team of people that was built to compete fast. Some of them were AEG lifers, like Debra, Cody [Lauzier] and Adam Weiser, Some, like me and Michael Harrison, were brand new to AEG. Gary and Jay [Marciano] gave us time to grow and we started trying to find wins. We took risks, because we had to.

The first big one was an arena tour with Hugh Jackman, who had just come out of The Greatest Showman. His agent at the time, Brent Smith, asked me, what do you think Hugh Jackman doing The Greatest Showman is? I talked to some people and they were like, theaters. I called Brent and said, arenas! We put together a deal for the U.K., Europe and North America. I was nervous, but I got up super early for the U.K. on-sale and remember [former AEG Live U.K. CEO] Toby Leighton-Pope saying, I think we’re going to get to six O2s. The next morning, the U.S. on-sale was massive. We sold out three MSGs over two days.

When does AEG start to make inroads in Nashville?

After that first Jackman tour, we chased some big things and didn’t get them, and that’s when we really set our sights in Nashville. Adam Weiser was really focused on it and signed Dan + Shay and Luke Combs. I met Kane Brown’s manager, Martha Earls, and his agent, Braeden Rountree, in 2018 or 2019. Martha and I were at a Lakers game and came up with an idea—Kane loves basketball, so what if we play every NBA arena? I went to the NBA with the idea and they loved it, so he did 29 NBA arenas. We were one of the first on-sales after coming out of COVID and it crushed.

Kacey Musgraves also never played arenas before working with AEG.

We had a relationship with Sandbox Management, so we came in aggressively and we won the business. We put her in arenas and we’re going to keep doing them. She recently put out a song with Carín León, who is another artist we really bet big on. He's an arena and stadium headliner in parts of the world and will be the first Latin artist to headline Sphere in 2026. Kane and Carin did a song together too. We’ve been able to bring people together because we’re not out for anything other than wanting the artists to win.

That’s a nice segue into Zach Bryan, because the way that his touring business is evolving seems somewhat without precedent.

Zach's the realest artist there is. He has connected with people in a way that is indescribable. I saw him at the Ryman in 2022 and the lightbulb went off—we have to work with this guy forever. Gary, Adam and I had lunch with Zach the next day and it just all worked. It was competitive, because Live Nation was going after it hard.

At some point in 2022, Zach started publicly going up against Ticketmaster. I woke up one morning and called Weiser and said, what if we put together a tour that is all arenas but non-Ticketmaster venues? We built it, but we didn’t tell anybody. We just sent it into WME. What we later learned is that Zach had never been to an arena show before. They were like, let's do it in the round. It was the first time we did a tour with Fair AXS, which was a real registration/scrubbing process of close to a million registrations for the 20 or 30 shows. We sold out all the shows without ever really going on public on-sale. By the time we got to the shows, we were at 98% drop counts. We created a face value exchange, and we turned off transfer and resale. None of the secondary sites had any tickets.

How did Ticketmaster feel about all of this?

I don't know. Never heard from them.

And now AEG has helped move Zach from arenas to stadiums to venues that have never had a concert before.

He did it. We're just people that help push it up a hill. In 2024, we did the Quittin' Time tour, which was 81 shows. AEG had 76 of them, I think. We did 60 arenas and 16 stadiums, added doubles and triples everywhere and were selling tickets a year out. Clearly, 81 shows in a year is a lot for anybody, so we started to think about what this year could look like. Zach had said, this is my last tour. I’ll never tour again. To us, that didn’t mean he couldn’t do shows, so we really wanted to maximize it.

We sold out three Met Lifes [in New Jersey], he headlined Stagecoach and sold out two Hyde Parks in London. We also added three nights and sold 180k tickets at Phoenix Park in Dublin. In the U.S., we played almost all NFL stadiums, but didn’t want to just do that all over again. We started looking around and discovered that Notre Dame was a possibility. The goal has always been, how do we break records?

In ’24, George Strait played Kyle Field [in College Station, Texas] and sold 111,000 tickets. The biggest stadium in the North Americas is the Big House in Michigan. Everybody kept saying they don't want to do shows, and not only did they not want to do shows, you can't do shows because the one tunnel that goes to the ground is too small. However, NIL has brought a different level of interest from all the colleges, which have begun doing concerts because they need as much income as they can get. It’s expensive to pay athletes to come to your school.

Dennis Dennehy, our chief communications officer and a Michigan alum, said to call this guy Rob Rademacher. I call Rob, who is the executive senior associate AD and COO of Michigan athletics, and he's like, who's Zach Bryan? I love Rob for that because he admitted it up front. I asked if we could send some people up to check out the site, so Jon Baden, our head of production, went to Ann Arbor and said, I think we can do it. They measured it. They brought the crane guy in.

Then, Rob and the Michigan guys came to Zach’s first Met Life show in July and I said, explain to me how this is doable. The idea of 112,000 people being in one stadium doesn’t make sense to me, but Rob said, you’ll see it. We built a small, in-the-round stage and put the tickets up, priced to sell. The student pre-sale sold out the whole upper level back to front. We sold more than 60% of the tickets on the season ticket holder football pre-sale. Also, the bill was amazing, with John Mayer, Ryan Bingham and Josh Slone. Zach has always been really smart about delivering value for his fans.

What’s your role when it comes to AEG festivals such as Coachella?

The first rule of Coachella is not to talk about Coachella. Paul [Tollett] and the Goldenvoice team have run it for years, and my only real role is to say, we're working with these amazing artists and some of them want to play Coachella. They decide the billing, the money and everything about it.

Stacy [Vee], Paul, Jenn [Yacoubian] and Melissa Ormond have created other festivals like Sand in My Boots on the beach in Alabama with Morgan Wallen, so they don’t need our help. We're really proud that two of 2025’s Stagecoach headliners were Zach Bryan and Luke Combs. The other festivals that have been created in recent years, like Buckeye Country Super Fest, are where we can help plug things in as we're routing our tours.

What are some AEG tours from 2025 that have performed exceptionally well?

Tyler, the Creator finished a gigantic worldwide tour and sold more than 1m tickets globally. Sabrina Carpenter starts in late October on the final shows of the Short n’ Sweet tour. Benson Boone is out just slamming arenas right now—he sold out Madison Square Garden and Crypto.com Arena. I could tell that it was many people’s first show ever. The most insane tour that we have right now is the Disney Descendants and Zombies. It came out of the gate really slow and then the movie came out, and it has just flown. Kelsea Ballerini had a massive first arena tour. Laufey’s first arena tour is crushing. Lorde’s tour just started, and that’s crushing too. Megan Moroney has been great. We had the return of Paul Simon. Sleep Token is one of the best stories in music. Zach Top is the next big national artist. Shawn Mendes came back and sold out shows in Europe, and there are sold-out shows coming up in the States. Our K-pop team is firing on all cylinders. G-Dragon, LE SSERAFIM, Tomorrow X Together, Enhyphen and ATEEZ have all just been smashing it.

Are there areas that you think have room for improvement?

Where we get in our own way sometimes is the competition and how insane the deals have gotten because of it. We have to be mindful of ticket prices. We have to be mindful of traffic. We're asking people to go to a ton of shows a year and it has to be affordable, or else they're going to make other choices.

There are a lot of thoughtful managers and agents who view the game and the playing field differently than others. I really enjoy working with those people. People who are just looking for money are not gonna get the most out of any promoter at this point. It needs to be fully collaborative, and those are the kind of artists that we're looking for.

Left, Schaefer and AEG Presents' Adam Weiser, whom he credits with helping propel the company's Nashville business; right, with WME agent Braeden Rountree and Kane Brown manager Martha Earls.