Setting the stage for increased growth and scalability
overview
With over 100 venues and 25+ music festivals, AEG Presents is one of the world’s largest live music presenters. By partnering with Slalom, the company modernized its tour scheduling platform while simultaneously scaling its engineering team. Our collaboration has helped AEG Presents learn how to successfully deliver digital products from conception through to deployment, positioning the company for continued growth.
scope
Product Strategy, Experience Design, User Research, Software Engineering, Platform Engineering, Quality Engineering
technology
Azure APIM, Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse, Microsoft Entra ID, AuthZed, Typescript, React, Node.js
The hottest ticket in town
AEG Presents is one of the world’s largest presenters of live music and entertainment events. With 100+ owned, operated, or affiliated venues and over 25 music festivals, the company keeps Swifties, Beliebers, and numerous other performers’ die-hard fans entranced. AEG Presents hosts massive events, including Coachella and Stagecoach. The company:
- sells +50% of all tickets in the top 10 arenas worldwide
- entertains +100 million fans/year
- produces +22,000 shows/year
- promotes +15,000 events/year
Giving the world a reason to cheer
AEG Presents is in the business of creating unforgettable memories. Continually turning it up a notch producing and promoting global tours, concerts, festivals, residencies, and innovative experiences that keep fans coming back for more year after year is a massive undertaking. The live entertainment giant reached a pivotal point of growth with its needs surpassing what its existing processes and technology stack could provide.
That’s when AEG Presents reached out to Slalom to explore how best to achieve its goals. The company sought our help to discover new ways to leverage technology to scale for future business needs. In addition, AEG Presents turned to Slalom for support with upskilling its technical staff and setting the company up to hire additional technologists for continued growth.
Rebuilding “The King of Tour Management”
Slalom began by analyzing the AEG Presents suite of enterprise software tools, learning its business, and securing alignment on which group of users and tools was most in need. Together with AEG Presents, we decided to focus our efforts on the Global Touring user group and the legacy platform they were using for tour and event scheduling, affectionately named Elvis.
Why is Elvis considered “The King of Tour Management?” This software is responsible for one of the largest sources of revenue for AEG Presents and helps manage tours of its highest-profile clients, including Luke Combs, The Rolling Stones, and Sabrina Carpenter. Elvis optimizes operations for the live event business by enabling users to create, track, settle, and report on integrated financial and operational data of live events with accuracy and efficiency.
Global touring has evolved into bigger, more complex tours, and time was taking its toll on the legacy platform. It was outdated, slow, and error-prone, and it didn’t allow for real-time, precise data analysis or transparency. Users were entering their data in multiple locations, losing time duplicating their work between Excel or SharePoint on their desktops and the company’s platform. Modernizing Elvis became necessary to streamline the company’s business and level up its operational efficiency.
“When it comes to running our business, Elvis is the lifeblood. It handles the beginning and end of events from a business perspective, and the technology we were running on before had run its course.”
— Erinne Mejia, VP, Product, AEG Presents
One essential requirement we needed to respect was users’ wish to retain their Excel-based workflow. We found a creative workaround and used React to build an add-in: a web app within Excel that allows for real-time updates to exchange data between the app, Excel, and the company’s back end.
We rebuilt the tour and event scheduling tool to be a modern and scalable platform that allows for future enhancement to meet other core business needs. The solution enables users to keep current core touring workflows in Excel, flowing information into the platform and providing executives with real-time information about every major phase of global touring. Elvis is now considered the industry gold standard for bookers, accountants, marketers, and ticketers to efficiently manage their tours across the globe. This modernized platform enables AEG Presents to effectively scale, significantly expanding the number of tours, shows, and events the company offers world-wide.
“A company like AEG doesn’t typically spend this kind of money in the technology sector. That’s not our core business. We have decided to do this work with Slalom because we believe that technology is going to empower our employees and help us drive our business forward.”
— Brooke Michael Kain, Chief Digital Officer, AEG Presents
Upskilling and hiring for future growth
Modernizing Elvis allowed AEG Presents and Slalom to work closely together, giving their team a taste of our unique culture and passion for co-creation. Throughout our collaboration, AEG Presents’ team learned best practices for research, product definition, and user testing. Our partnership helped the company learn our unique ways of working when developing, iterating, releasing, and testing software. With Slalom’s support, AEG Presents has established its in-house product engineering capability.
“The general sentiment across the team is that Slalom has helped everyone level up. This company is one of the best consulting firms that they’ve worked with in their careers.”
— Erinne Mejia, VP, Product, AEG Presents
Slalom also helped AEG Presents hire high-quality technologists through our Recruiting as a Service (RaaS) offering, Slalom Flex. New employees work side-by-side with Slalom’s experts, learning our ways of working and methodologies, and then become members of AEG Presents’ technology team. Offloading recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding allows AEG Presents to focus on what it does best while its talent pipeline is filled, technology solutions are built, and the company’s tech team is enabled to run efficiently and independently.
“Slalom understood our business needs and culture well enough that they could recommend people from their networks. They understood what kind of spots we needed to fill as we were scaling up around them.”
— Brooke Michael Kain, Chief Digital Officer, AEG Presents
The future looks brighter than stage lights
The reinvented platform helps AEG Presents obtain real-time accurate data for ongoing tours and events. It better responds to user needs with a more streamlined experience that makes their lives easier. The company is fully empowered to achieve strategic, longer-term objectives and drive its business forward with a platform that scales with users’ ideas and current and future business needs. Key results include:
Adoption of the new tool is strong. As of June 2024, four months after launch, AEG has:
AEG Presents is committed to continuous innovation by investing in cutting-edge technologies to improve the lives of everybody across the company. Elvis is maintaining his reign at the top of the charts and rocking out with new features, integrations, and automations. We’re dedicated to helping AEG Presents support and evolve its modernized platform and hire the best technical talent to achieve outstanding and enduring results independently for years to come.
“Slalom has been and will continue to be our first call for almost every strategic tool or structural build as we move to use technology to drive our business forward.”
— Brooke Michael Kain, Chief Digital Officer, AEG Presents