People within the entertainment industry had the chance to join Backstage Productions’ second Live Entertainment Town Hall meeting on Monday.
According to Pollstar, the event brought together a variety of industry executives to discuss where the industry is headed going forward, including several re-openings and drive-in movie theater shows like Panama City Beach’s Gulf Shore Jam. James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, also discussed the government and how media is viewing the current dilemma within the industry.
Several liability questions were also discussed, while venue size and location does not make a difference.
“Seeing how mainly small and experiment spaces, performing spaces, restaurants and so on have been on the frontier of making these towns lively places, they are disproportionally threatened right now,” Fallows said. “To make an appeal for legislation you need people to recognize that these are the places you need to be alive. Trying to be in touch with people to relate that smaller venues are important to the vitality of their towns, and to people across all the normal divides is uniting and that what you are doing is what America needs.”
Live entertainment is slowly on the rise, with the NASCAR race at Darlington and the opening of German soccer. The Gulf Coast Jam Festival is another step in the right direction, as tens of thousands of tickets have been sold for the event Labor Day Weekend.
Event Safety Alliance’s Jim Digby was also in attendance, noting that although he wants to remain optimistic regarding the current state of the industry, he wants to “make sure the optimists willing to move forward have the best information so people don’t make up their own rules and potentially take the rest of the industry down.” Earlier this month, the ESA released a set of guidelines that venues should follow when concerts return.
