How to succeed at IP live events and other takes on the state of touring
Terrapin Station CEO Jonathan Shank had spent over 15 years working on artist management when the opportunity arose to help some intellectual property (IP) holders create their own tours.
He began licensing content from Nickelodeon and Disney to put on live events around beloved characters like Peppa Pig and the Octonauts, eventually turning that into a full-service business Terrapin Station (Mickey Hart is an influence and mentor).
Today, Terrapin has evolved to include varied productions, from the Bob Marley One Love experience to Deal or No Deal Live. The company also helps professional sports stadiums think more creatively about how they make their space available for live music. He spoke to The Diffraction about his business, how stadiums can make smarter decisions on how the work with tours, and the overall headwinds tours face in an attention-depleted environment.
Operating tours today is a challenge, even if you’re working with well recognized IP. In his line of work, the challenge is finding the right IP that is making a difference in pop culture and can produce ancillary revenue streams beyond the content to make it a viable endeavor.
“A live experience is, in a lot of ways, a trickle-down experience,” Shank says. “It's rarely the first way that you're going to interact with a character or an IP.”
Shank says a consumer’s chain of interest usually starts with the show, then buying a consumer product or downloading a mobile game and then potentially going to a live event.
“It’s means that we're getting the biggest fans of this IP to come to these tours because they've already engaged with the content, they've already bought all of the plush dolls, they've already you know done the bond of the theme park, and you know interacted in that way you know at a theme park or at some other mall activation. And then they're coming to the tour,” Shank says.
“The truth is that, as you said, there's so much content out there you can make an argument to create a tour for just about anything,” Shank says. “That doesn't mean that they'll all be successful.”
I asked Shank if he found any IP holders that were thinking of running their own tours. While he acknowledged some of the largest studios have internal resources to handle tours, most prefer the comfort and security of working with a specialized operator.
“A lot of licensors are keen to have somebody who has experience in the space to build this ancillary businesses around, which can make their portfolio look stronger,” Shank says. “If they work with third-party licensees, that can get them a healthy royalty and the expenses covered. They can basically become cost-free product centers for a whole lot of these studios.”
The challenges all tours face
The cost of producing a tour continues to rise, so do tickets. But if you decided to cut production costs to keep ticket prices at bay, the shows may seem amateur and out of step with what others are offering.
“Technology has driven the production value to an all-time high. And what follows is the cost of having such an amazing presentation,” Shank says. All manner of tour operators are encountering challenges, brought on by the scale of entertainment competition to the cost of production.
The knock on effect is the cost of tickets. In the 90s, as Shank points out, you would not find a ticket approaching $100. Now, you can see average ticket prices for in-demand tours reaching $400. Obviously there’s inflation involved in that, but it’s clear that ticket prices today are more expensive.
Another interesting factor is the lack of surprise when going on a tour. Now, you can catch YouTube clips of any show on tour - and, if that’s enough for a fan, they may not buy a ticket. Or if a particular show looks lackluster, it could depress people’s interest in a future tour date.
“So you have decision makers watching and saying, ‘Oh, this show looks incredible. I've got to buy my ticket right now.’ And/or the flip side, others could be saying, ‘Well, the production looks lackluster and their last tour looked better than this and so I'm going to pass on this one.’”
It’s also an arms race where concerts need to go viral with special guests and surprise songs and other bells and whistles that are hard to keep up.
“People that are making their decisions based on watching clips on TikTok or other platforms are maybe making their decision on whether or not they're going to go to the show based on what they see right there,” Shank says.
On live experiences being a bulwark against AI
“Live experiences have something that is both tangible and intangible about them,” Shank says. “When you go to a live experience, it's tangible and right in front of you. But it's also very fleeting. As soon as you leave that experience, it just becomes a core memory. It becomes intangible again.”
He adds: “And that's the part that AI will never be able to capture. In addition to the connection that humans feel to their favorite artists, to their favorite characters, to their favorite places.”
Shank draws parallels between AI in music and Napster. When Napster took the world by storm, the infrastructure to legally buy digital music was not yet fully developed.
“If you remember, there was a large-scale panic that we would not be able to survive Napster because all music would then be accessible and free,” Shank says. “We're going to have to figure out how to harness that energy in the same way that we harness the technology from Napster and developed that into Pandora and Spotify.”
Stadiums getting creative
The other part of Terrapin Station’s business is helping several professional sports teams to better utilize their spaces - including opportunities beyond actual “stadium tours” - for live music. They sit in between the stadiums and band managers of touring festival bookers to identify win-win opportunities.
“All of our stadium partners are ambitious in terms of wanting to have more content and show engagement,” Shank says. “They don't always have to be a 40,000 person stadium show.”
As an example, Terrapin Station recently represented Allianz Field, home of MLS team Minnesota United, which brought 20,000 fans to the Breakaway Festival to Minneapolis.This particular event took place on the arena’s plaza.
As you may remember, 2024 was the year of abandoned tours by bands who overestimated the demand for tickets. So it’s an interesting play for stadiums to get creative in how they use their spaces.
“We found that these plaza festivals are great places to host these one-day or two-day events. And you can have multiple stages, and you're not necessarily affecting the surface of the field,” Shank says.
“There's only a certain number of artists that can fill these stadiums,” Shank says, naming Kenny Chesney, Luke Combs, and Billy Joel, as a sampling of artists his company brought for successful full-capacity stadium shows.
2026 promises to be a brighter time
Shank says that while touring in general in 2025 has seen a decrease in overall ticket volumes due to economic uncertainty or other factors, “it seems like there's going to be some great touring packages and artists out there next year.” Shank adds: “Of course, you can point to a handful of genres that always seem to be strong out on the road: pop and country, but they’re all artist-dependent.”
The biggest challenges, he says, will remain ticket prices and “the sheer amount of content out there.”