Harvey Goldsmith

Why organisations work with Harvey Goldsmith

• He has produced two of the largest broadcast events in history, Live Aid in 1985 and Live 8 in 2005, and can speak first-hand to how they were assembled, funded and delivered.
• He built the UK’s leading concert promotion business from a student club in Brighton to a company working with most of the major global artists of the past five decades.
• He continues to start and chair new ventures, including the British Music Experience museum, the OnBlackheath Festival and Hans Zimmer’s first live concert tour, so the material is current rather than retrospective.
• His CBE, Music Industry Trust Award and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres are recognition from named bodies that he treats live performance as a serious commercial and cultural discipline.

Biography highlights

• CBE for services to the entertainment industry, 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
• Co-organiser of Live Aid (1985) with Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, raising approximately £140 million.
• Worldwide producer of Live 8 (2005), with 225 artists across multiple international locations.
• Producer of the Led Zeppelin reunion at the O2 Arena (2007) in tribute to Ahmet Ertegun.
• Chairman of the British Music Experience, the UK’s museum of popular music.
• Music Industry Trust Award (2006); Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (2006); Freedom of the City of London (2011).

Biography

Live Aid was assembled in roughly ten weeks. Two stadiums, a global satellite broadcast and an artist roster that had never been gathered before, with no precedent for the funding model, the rights model or the production model. The producer who solved those problems alongside Bob Geldof was Harvey Goldsmith.

That work is the most visible expression of a longer story. Goldsmith began promoting concerts as a pharmacy student in Brighton in the 1960s, founded Artiste Management Productions in 1973 and Harvey Goldsmith Entertainments in 1976, and built the leading UK concert promotion business of the era. Across that period he worked with the artists who defined modern live music, including Bruce Springsteen, Queen, The Who, Paul McCartney and Luciano Pavarotti.

The pattern of the work is entrepreneurial rather than custodial. Live 8 in 2005 used the Live Aid model and rebuilt it for a different media environment. The Led Zeppelin reunion at the O2 in 2007 was a single-night production at the scale of a tour. He produced Hans Zimmer’s first live concerts in 2014 and turned them into a European touring property, and he founded the OnBlackheath Festival the same year.

He continues to chair the British Music Experience and to invest in and advise newer ventures across experiential marketing and immersive entertainment. The CBE, the Music Industry Trust Award and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres are the formal markers. The substantive credential is a sixty-year track record of starting things, financing them, and getting them on stage on the date promised.

Key speaking topics

• Live event production at global scale
• Entrepreneurship across long careers
• Building creative businesses
• The economics of live music and broadcast
• Leadership under hard deadlines
• Charitable and philanthropic event delivery

Ideal for

• CEOs and founders responsible for ventures with fixed launch dates
• Marketing and brand leaders building experiential platforms
• Boards and investors evaluating creative and entertainment businesses
• Audiences in the events, media, music and live entertainment industries

Audience outcomes

• A first-hand account of how Live Aid and Live 8 were actually built, financed and delivered.
• A working view of how an entrepreneur sustains a creative business across five decades and multiple media cycles.
• Specific lessons in negotiating with talent, broadcasters and sponsors when the date will not move.
• A grounded perspective on what philanthropy looks like when it has to clear its costs and reach an audience.