Why Live Nation is going all-in on designing its own concert venues

FastCompany: The entertainment company Live Nation has been promoting and running concerts in venues around the world for decades, bringing touring acts to whatever concert hall or amphitheater an artist could fill. Now, the company is focusing specifically on designing and building its own concert halls to fill holes in the market, making what the company calls a “meaningful, long term investment” in projects to rethink the experience of seeing live music. Since its merger with Ticketmaster in 2010, a deal then estimated at $2.5 billion , the company has grown to become one of the biggest players in the global live entertainment market.

Quietly, the company now known as Live Nation Entertainment has also been steadily developing a wide-ranging portfolio of concert venues. These include 713 Music Hall , opened in 2021 in Houston, a purpose-built 1,500-capacity venue in Hong Kong called Tides , and renovations like the 2024 revamp of Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater . The venues are styled to embrace their locales while using Live Nation’s experience serving audiences and artists to inform their design. For a company that promotes concerts, sells their tickets, and now hosts the events in its own venues, it’s about as vertically integrated as live entertainment can get.

And the upside is substantial. For venues it owns, the company can take a much larger share of ticket sales, which are on track for more than 10% growth year-over-year, according to the company. In the second quarter of 2026 alone, concerts brought in $6.4 billion in revenue from 49 million fans worldwide. “As demand for live music continues to grow globally, venue infrastructure hasn’t always kept pace,” says Jordan Zachary, global president of venues at Live Nation.

“We’re focused on expanding in key markets where artists want to play and fan demand is strong, but the right venues don’t yet exist.” Miranda Lambert preforms at the opening of The Truth venue, 2026. [Photo: Alive Coverage] This effort is kicking into high gear. Live Nation has opened several new venues so far in 2026, including the Truth , a 4,400-capacity concert hall that opened in Nashville in October.

Designed by Blueprint Studio , Live Nation’s in-house development and design operation, the Truth is sized to fill a missing middle in Nashville, which has no shortage of music venues, but few that float between the size of a theater and a major arena. “You could go through almost any market in the country and even internationally, and there’s gaps in it,” says David Codiga, president of Blueprint Studio. “We’re not trying to solve every one of them.

But that’s where it starts.” Named for a famous quote from prolific Nashville country songwriter Harlan Howard (“All you need to write a country song is three chords and the truth”), the venue was designed to embrace Nashville’s songwriting legacy. Mietra Beyer, head of brand and experience development at Blueprint Studio, says the design of the Truth was intended to create a closeness between performers and audience members. Howard’s songwriting quote became the project’s conceptual framework. [Photo: Alive Coverage] Good sightlines and good sound are table stakes for this kind of venue, Beyer says.

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This article discusses a significant strategic shift by Live Nation that could reshape the live music industry, offering actionable insights for brand strategists on community integration and venue design.