Two of independent music’s most respected booking agencies, North America-based Arrival Artists and U.K.-based ATC Live, have merged to form ROAM, a new global booking agency with offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris and Glasgow, Scotland. The combined agency represents more than 800 artists, making it the largest independent and fifth-largest music booking agency worldwide (behind WME, CAA, Wasserman Music and UTA).
According to ATC Live co-founder Alex Bruford, ROAM will “provide a genuine alternative in the global booking agency landscape.”
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Bruford founded ATC Live 15 years ago with a small roster of six artists and grew it to more than 400 artists and 40 staff. When Arrival Artists first launched during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the company already had a relationship with ATC Live and saw the potential for a “strategic partnership” with a “similar mindset,” explains ATC’s Ethan Berlin. “This initial collaboration was rooted in a commitment to developing artists, and the shared vision for growth solidified during the pandemic,” he adds.
Arrival co-founder Ali Hedrick adds that early on, the two companies had twice-weekly talks and realized they had a “shared identity, a shared culture.”
The business structure of ROAM is a 50/50 ownership between the two former agencies. Hedrick says this was a deliberate choice: “Neither one of us wanted to own each other. We wanted to be a true partnership.” This structure allows the agency to remain partner-owned, which Berlin says offers “a sense of pride in being able to run our own company that bleeds into the work that we do every day.”
The name ROAM was chosen to reflect the agency’s mission, explains Bruford, noting that it “gravitated towards the meaning of traveling with curiosity and purpose,” while foreshadowing “how we wanted to work with our artists and build road maps with them exploring opportunities and making journeys together.”
ROAM’s strategy is to offer a high-touch, artist-centric approach to global representation, where agents maintain their primary territories and “collaborate on the rest of the world” to find the best opportunities for their clients. Bruford adds that the goal is to offer “global representation to the artists who want it” with “agents on the ground representing artists in a global manner.”
“We have a proven track record of developing artists from small venues to major stages,” says Bruford, who pointed to his work taking Fontaines D.C. from the 150-capacity shows in 2018 to a 45,000-capacity sellout concert in London’s Finsbury Park earlier this summer. Arrival also booked The Lumineers in 2012 to play a small venue in the U.K.; this year, the band booked the O2 Arena for the third time.
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Bruford also notes the work Arrival has done with established artists like Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, who joined ATC Live in 2018 as an arena headliner and saw a “50% increase in ticket sales” on the band’s most recent tour. He emphasizes that “growing artists from day one is such an important part of our business, but also adding value to established artists is key as well.”
Sarah Joy, who started as a coordinator at ATC Live and worked her way up to partner, says the company is “keen to champion homegrown agent talent” and is putting “a lot of energy into nurturing diversity across the workforce”. She proudly notes that ROAM has a gender split of “59% female and 41% male across its workforce,” bucking the male-dominated agency business.
Beyond concert and appearance booking, ROAM provides a range of services including digital marketing, brand partnerships and philanthropic activations. Both companies also jointly invested in a third-party company called Company X to serve as a branding and sponsorship division. Hedrick described having more branding opportunities at Arrival than at any other agency she’s worked for, citing a two-and-a-half-year sponsorship deal between Mt. Joy and Coors that was involved in the band’s sold-out Madison Square Garden show.
“Their approach is incredibly artist-focused and tailored to each artist,” says Joy.
The goal of combining resources into a unified company means “creating an agency where artists can grow careers without compromise, uniting scale with agility and execution with creativity,” Bruford tells Billboard.
“Any artist that’s looking for some strong global representation but with that high-touch artist-centric approach should come and talk to us,” he adds.
