Live Company Group PLC (LON:LVCG) Executive Chairman David Ciclitira caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their joint venture with Three Six Zero.
Q1: Live Company Group made an RNS Reach Announcement about a new relationship with Three Six Zero, what can you tell us about that agreement?
A1: Well, I think it’s probably the most important agreement that we will sign this year. It’s quite a long story but I’ll try and get it through in as quicker time as possible.
Three Six Zero is a Los Angeles based company headed up by an extremely bright British guy called Mark Gillespie. Probably the most famous thing they’re known for is that Mark and Three Six Zero have been, for a very long time, the managing agents for Calvin Harris who, for your listeners if they don’t know, is British & is the world’s number one DJ and they also managed a lot of other great artists.
They have fantastic relationships in the world of content, music, film etc. down in Los Angeles, they’ve a particularly good relationship with Live Nation. Live Nation is the world’s number one event company promoting most of the events here in the UK, festivals, in the United States and all over the world. They also own Ticketmaster which, if you live in America, is the number one ticket company in the US.
So, we now have a relationship, a joint venture company, called Parallel Three Six Zero which will manage our BRICKLIVE brand in the United States. The first contract that the company has signed is with Live Nation for Live Nation to promote the BRICKLIVE show across the United States, North America so United States and Canada.
To kick this off, we are promoting a show in Dallas in the last week of January, that show is actually with Live Nations actually in partnership with the owners of the Dallas Cowboys, Dallas Cowboys for those British that don’t know is the number one sports franchise in the world and obviously has tremendous links across the whole of North America. For us to launch BRICKLIVE, working with them and with Live Nation, frankly speaking, it can’t get better.
So, the show we’re going to put on a 5,000 square metre show in a place called The Star. The Star is in North Dallas and again, that’s quite an extraordinary place, it’s like an indoor football pitch with every facility you can think of, hotel next door, a huge attraction in Dallas and as I said, it’s going to be a great location.
Q2: Will the American and Canadian show operate in the same way as shows that have so far been running throughout the rest of these territories?
A2: Well, this is a first and I guess if you read the RNS Reach, technically it’s a test show but everybody is confident that this agreement, especially with Live Nation, is working on the fact that this is the first of many and we’ve already started to look at other venues across North America.
It’s quite interesting because the joint venture, Parallel Three Six Zero, gets paid a licence fee, gets paid a percentage of merchandising fees, actually very high percentage of 90%, and we at BRICKLIVE get a content fee. The content fee is again something that we’ve done in other territories, it’s all paid for the content that we deliver and obviously it ensures that the margins remain high in terms of licence fees. So, I guess it’s a strange deal because we have a partner, although the contract fee gets paid directly back to us, we’re also working very closely with a promotor.
In terms of our partnership, there’s no risk, only upside but like every other partner that we have in the world, it’s in our interest that our partners make money and do well. I think the US market to me is the most interesting to act in because it’s most mature and the interesting thing is why Three Six Zero were interested in us and why we were interested in them?
I’ve known Mark for a long time, but I think the thing that really has gelled is the fact that if you’ve got music artists which are easy to understand, the entry point for artists in 14/15-year-old children, maybe even slightly younger. What we’ve got here is 7 to 10-year olds or 5 to 10 years old, basically it’s kids entertainment and it’s a fantastic step to gain data, to build, relationships at an early age and I think it’s just everybody is just seeing it as ‘this could be huge’.
Q3: You’ve just explained why it’s going to be beneficial together with Three Six Zero but how did you first get in contact with them?
A3: Well, I’ve known them for quite some time. A few years ago, I got involved in setting up an electric/dance music festival in Japan and their artist is by far the number one artist in that genre. They’re actually British people, they have an office in London, but they live in the United States and they are really smart people in terms of they’re involved in new technology, new things, and I think it’s great that we’ve found somebody who really understands my vision of, basically, BRICKLIVE.
Q4: What can visitors expect from this show then?
A4: I think they will expect a fantastically-run show, Live Nation obviously promote amazing shows. Our content is going to be quite diverse, there will be an addition of Animal Paradise, BRICKLIVE Animal Paradise which, as you know, we launched in Beijing last Friday.
We didn’t talk about that actually because for various reasons, connections are bad in Beijing, but it was, again, an amazing show. We launched it in Beijing, the first of 20 shows going to a million people over 3 years and it was opened by Prince Albert. It’s been a dramatic week actually, just to fill you in, on Sunday we launched our first position of BRICKLIVE kids in a mall in North Beijing, so it’s been amazing week really.
The content, going back to your original question, there’ll be a very special focus on Star Wars. It’s Star Wars’ 20th anniversary in 2019 of LEGO® tie up with the Star Wars brand and we’ll be focussing on that as well plus everything we do. They’ll be Minecraft, digital stuff, probably the most sophisticated show we’ve ever launched really.
Q5: What can we expect to see for BRICKLIVE in America in the future?
A5: As I said, this is the first show, we’re working with an amazing creative team, both from Three Six Zero and Live Nation, when you sit in a meeting, and I’ve had several meetings with the team, they are ticket launching major artists everyday around the world.
So, the sophistication of working with somebody who is that big is just exciting, special commercials are being made, it’s just taken us to a completely different level and I am extremely confident that it’ll mean that we will end up doing 20 shows a year in the United States. So, I’m really really excited about this.
As I said, I’ve always talked about what I wanted to achieve this summer, China was one thing and boy, to launch at the Bird’s Nest with Prince Albert, with senior Chinese people, that was amazing. To be able to pull this really really exciting deal together, that was the second and I’ll keep them guessing, there’s a third one to finish before the end of the month.
Live Company Group PLC (LON:LVCG) operates as a live events and entertainment company. The Company offers sports marketing, media, and management services. Brick Live is a network of partner-driven fan-based shows using BRICKLIVE-created content worldwide. Brick Live Group is not associated with the LEGO® Group and is an independent producer of BRICKLIVE.
