Tommy Dorfman

Tommy Dorfman built one of the largest concert promotion businesses on the East Coast, then spent sixteen years fighting the company that took it apart.

His publicist reached out to SALTYmf, and Dorfman came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast at a point when Brad Banyas was a year or two into learning how the live music business actually pays people. Banyas said on air that his crew had heard the complaints about ticket prices and knew nothing about the rest of it. Dorfman had been living the rest of it since 2011, and he had the trial records to go with it.

He started at sixteen. He promoted house music before anybody called it EDM and grew into one of the biggest promoters on the East Coast. The photographs with Snoop Dogg, Charlie Sheen, Chris Brown, Tiesto and Good Charlotte hide the actual job, which was twenty hours a day, seven days a week. Booking talent, finding the venue, setting security, cutting deals with liquor companies, organizing street teams to hand out flyers on college campuses and outside other clubs. Richard Grant, who owned the Sound Factory in New York, taught him how to build a theme party, and a single one could take Dorfman a month to produce. In 2011 he signed a ten year deal with the State Fair Meadowlands to produce concerts and festivals there. The talent was booked, the staging was set, and he says he had never had that much support behind him in his career.

Live Nation found out. The owner of the State Fair Meadowlands told Dorfman that Live Nation had met with him about blocking the festival, blocking the talent, blocking the tickets. Dorfman took the meeting with their New York president and never got through the introduction. He was told there were loopholes in his contract, that every talent agency was being blocked, that the Meadowlands was theirs and that he could partner with them or be finished. He is from New Jersey and had fended off the mob for fifteen years, and his point about that meeting is that the mob at least lets a man say his name first. Years later his expert report alleging Live Nation runs a criminal enterprise went to Congress through Congressman Pascrell, and the Department of Justice filed within a month. DOJ then settled for $260 million, which Dorfman puts at four days of operating revenue. State attorneys general carried the case to a jury, which found the company guilty on every count.

The night before this episode, Portland, Maine packed its city council meetings and voted the lobbying money down, which leaves it the only place in the country Live Nation has no foothold. Dorfman gave the credit to the Maine Music Alliance. He keeps the case alive because artists who never get developed by an independent promoter never get seen at all, and because a corporation has no face and a person does. He says he would rather it were not him. As he puts it, Live Nation spends a lot on lobbyists, and lobbyists do not vote.