Tour Marketing with Nate Ryan (Live Nation)

Tour Marketing Manager, Nate Ryan, discusses his career journey and the realisation of his aspiration to work in the live scene. Starting his new job at Live Nation on the first day of Melbourne’s lockdown this year has undoubtedly provided challenges, however, with all of his experience and passion, we have no doubt that he will help the live music industry bounce back.

Nate Ryan (front right) with British DJ Joel Corry (front left)

Introduce yourself & tell us a bit about what you do?

My name is Nate Ryan and I am the Tour Marketing Manager for Live Nation Australasia, which is the world’s leading live entertainment company.

My role within Live Nation is to come up with effective marketing plans that will sell the tickets to our shows across Australia and New Zealand. We work with artists, agents, managers and our media agency each day to develop and execute these plans, ideally selling out each of our shows.

Whilst 2020 has devastated our whole industry globally, thankfully the COVID-19 restrictions in New Zealand have now been lifted so we are as busy as ever over there with shows, tours and even festivals starting to take off again.

What has your career journey been like so far?

From a young age I have always been career driven. While I was at school, I had two jobs, at university I had three jobs, and wherever possible I was doing internships to gain experience across various industries to work out exactly what I wanted to do.

One of my jobs while I was at uni, was at Nova 106.9 in Brisbane driving the promo cars. From there I did an internship which then lead into a Promotions Coordinator role. I then moved to Nova Sydney to work with ‘Kate, Tim & Marty’ on a national level, before moving to Melbourne to be Integration and Marketing Manager at Nova 100 in Melbourne.

Nate Ryan with Kate, Tim and Marty in Las Vegas

In 2017 I decided to move to the UK to work at Bauer Media in London, where I was lucky enough to work in the Cross-Media Production team executing campaigns across the UK and Europe, many of which were live events and festivals. In 2019 I moved back to Melbourne to work with Gold FM, working with The Christian O’Connnell Breakfast Show as Brand Activations Manager.

In early 2020 my dream role was going at Live Nation, so I jumped at the opportunity to join my dream company to work for.

What influenced you to work in the music industry?

While I was at university, I was working at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre behind the bar, so was able to pop my head into the shows and have a bit of a peak each night. At the same time, I was working at Nova, and I was a DJ at various clubs around Brisbane and was lucky enough to play at Stereosonic and Future Music Festival for a few years.

It was definitely a combination of the three different roles that made me realise how much I loved music, and it was at this point that I realised my dream job was to be a Marketing Manager for concerts and festivals.

One of my last campaigns while I was working in London was a campaign for The BRIT Awards, YouTube Music and KISS FM. Working across that campaign and going to the actual awards made me realise it was time to pursue that dream to work in LIVE.

Do you remember the first event or tour that you worked on? Tell us a bit about it.

The first event I worked on was actually not related to music but it was at Nova in Brisbane. Our breakfast team were attempting to break the world record for the fastest slip n slide over 100m.

This was my first taste at project management on a big scale, as it was a big stunt which included an activation, a broadcast with listeners as well as various media outlets down there filming.

After an epic day of everyone sliding down our 200m long slip and slide, I had the last slide of the day and managed to get the best time of the day at 9.33 seconds!

What are the different tasks involved with tour marketing? Some things that you are doing from day to day.

When we get word that we are pitching for a tour, we often come up with some creative concepts to help with securing the tour for Live Nation. Once the tour is confirmed, we then receive a budget, routing for the tour and obviously the fun begins here.

My role is to then come up with what we will do with the budget from a marketing perspective, to ensure we are getting the maximum amount of value and ROI for each dollar spent, in order to sell out the tour.

The key things for us to think about in our marketing plan is where are we going to spend our money, and how can we do this in a creative way for our artists. Some of the key areas for us to think about include social medial, digital platforms such as Spotify, YouTube and digital display ads, OOH media, media partnerships including radio and tv, as well as publicity.

We work with our media agency to develop our plan, then work with artists, agents and management to confirm this, before briefing in our designers and getting our campaign live. Throughout the campaign we are continually optimising all platforms, to ensure we are generating as many ticket sales as we can.

The key periods for us in with any tour in terms of marketing, is the announce and on sale period, and then the weeks leading into the tour.

What do you feel is one of your greatest career accomplishments? Or a memorable moment in your career?

My favourite career moment to date would definitely have been when I was working at KISS FM at Bauer Media in the UK. We broadcast from Ibiza for a week and had three separate events with a team of staff, clients and listeners of about forty people. My role was to be the production manager for the whole trip.

Across a long weekend we broadcast a from the iconic sunset venue Mambo, hosted a pool party at one of my favourite places in the world Ocean Beach Ibiza, then broadcast Kygo live from Ushuaia.

Each of the sets from across the weekend were then turned into an on-demand playlist within the KISS FM app, and we integrated the clients into the whole weekend so although I had the time of my life, it was high pressure weekend where a lot of pressure was on me, so I learnt a lot and was a much better operator off the back of it.

The highlight for me was on the Kygo night. I was helping film some of his set when I saw Calvin Harris, Steve Aoki and Swedish House Mafia all watching the gig in the crowd, it was definitely a fan girl moment for me.

Kiss FM Pool Party in Ibiza

What advice would you give to those aspiring to work in tour marketing or the music industry as a whole?

I believe that anyone aspiring to work in any industry, should look at doing internships. For me personally, I learn from actually doing tasks on the job rather than reading.

I was lucky enough to do some amazing internships including Tourism Queensland, Domino’s Pizza Head Office, Nova FM as well as a couple of others which all made me learn the roles firsthand, as well as learning the ins and outs of the company/industry.

When applying for any roles, I feel this really sets you apart from the crowd.