ATLANTA, Georgia (CelebrityAccess) – AEG Presents has taken a stake in the independent Georgia-based concert promoter Zero Mile Presents.
The deal, first reported by Billboard, will see AEG Presents expand its footprint in the market, with Zero Mile Presents retaining an ownership interest in the company.
Zero Mile Presents currently books and operates the Variety Playhouse and Terminal West in Atlanta and the Georgia Theatre in Athens.
As well, the deal will see the partnership launch The Eastern, a new 2,200-capacity venue that is slated to open in the fall of 2020. The Eastern will be located in the Reynoldstown neighborhood of Atlanta and is expected to anchor the Atlanta Dairies, a mixed-use commercial, retail and residential development.
“We’re super excited to put a little more leverage behind what we’ve been doing independently for so long and cement more longevity to what we’ve built to this point,” said Alan Sher, vice president of operations for Zero Mile Presents told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The independent promoter model has been shifting the past few years and we’ve seen that pressure at eye level. We’re excited to get a little more firepower behind us and see what we can do.”
Sher told the AJC that negotiations for the partnership had been underway for more than 2 years and that retaining independence was an important part of the open-ended partnership agreement.
“We’ve been fiercely independent for a long time, and when we started even considering this, everyone in the room was like, ‘Nope. No way.’ But spending time with (AEG North American president) Rick Mueller and other mentors in the industry…we heard from them that (AEG) believed in us, and that was the main thing for us,” Sher told the AJC.
“We were extremely careful to make sure that this is a partnership deal; we’re not losing the ability to run our company the way we want to. I’m sure that there will be people who feel that it’s another indie (promoter) down the drain, but if we didn’t believe what they were saying was true, we wouldn’t do it,” Zero Mile President Scott Orvold added.
