👋 Welcome to The Mail Cart.

My boots are finally dry from ACL but my eyes are not after watching my interview with BUNT. and his 2 cameramen. My favorite series we’ve ever launched is Unsung Hero, and we got to sit down with the head of Merch, Food, and some more rolling out this week.

⭐️ This series is a great reminder that there are THOUSANDS of people behind the scenes who help make every concert, premier, show and event happen.

🎙️ We are putting on a panel + networking event geared towards early career professionals and students. 10/18 in LA. Panelists include a scripted agent at CAA, who rep writers, directors, and producers behind hit series including Shogun & Ozark, WME’s recruiting lead and the CMO who led Sinners’ Awards campaign. RSVP here.

‘Avengers: Endgame’ became the highest grossing movie ever (again), Zach Bryan delivered Gillette Stadium a strong dose of irony, Netflix and Ben Affleck’s AI partnership is officially being put to use, Versant pens a distribution deal with Verizon, the Producers Guild of America gets a new pair of Presidents after 4 years, and AMC tries something new in the world of TV.

💼 Looking for open Entertainment jobs? Today we highlight jobs from UTA, DreamWorks, Venue Coalition & IMAX. Scroll to the bottom of this email, or visit our Job Board, which now has 205+ early career Entertainment roles.

Connect with me here + follow our IG page for daily resources.

BREAKING: WME just won Agency of The Year. How did we decide? We didn’t.. they did by winning our first annual Battle of The Mailrooms.

The.Team took home 2nd place, with Buchwald scooping up 3rd. Congrats to all 9 teams who played, and thanks to everyone for coming out. Pictures here.

AvA LIVE will be on TUESDAY this week, returning to Wednesday next week

On tomorrow's show:

The founders of Creator Nation, Live Nation's new creator business. They're hiring, and they'll break down the roles live.
Jeanell English, Head of Community & Impact at WME
Scott Helman, singer-songwriter whose viral track “Mr. Record Label” calls out the industry for profiting off emerging artists
Serena Kerrigan, founder of Let's F*cking Date, author and creator, who turned a Covid Instagram dating show into a Peacock series and a book

🎥 ‘Avengers: Endgame’ officially became the highest grossing film ever once again after re-releasing prior to the next ‘Avengers’ movie coming out.

🎸 Zach Bryan broke Gillette Stadium’s attendance record while wearing a ‘Free Palestine’ shirt.

The audience reached 73,538 at Robert Kraft’s stadium just weeks after he refused to have Macklemore open for sharing the same message.

🖥️ Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI film startup ‘InterPositive’ for $600 million and the pair are using it for the first time in the movie ‘Animals.’

I used AI for lots of things in that movie. I thought it was a good example of how to use AI ethically because it’s a very human movie

— Ben Affleck

☎️ Versant and Verizon signed a multi-year distribution deal that brings sports, music, and news programming straight to the phone company’s users.

Quick Background: Versant used to be owned by Comcast, and in their first year since separating with both them and NBC, they have officially renewed all their deals that were set to expire in 2026.

🤳 WME is launching Creator Labs, a new in-house team that helps clients build and grow their own media businesses across YouTube and other platforms. Early users include Erling Haaland and Julian Shapiro-Barnum.

This marks the latest move in the agency battle to fully ramp up their creator business and differentiate themselves. CAA has a 250 million dollar fund (who we interviewed on AvA Live), UTA raced to sign a slate of scaled influencers and now WME pushes hard into the services lane.

🎬 The Producers Guild of America elected Donna Gigliotti and Mike Farah as the Guild’s new Co-Presidents with the previous pair serving since 2022.

🍿 AMC is producing their first ever multicamera comedy that is set to come out in 2027 starring Charlie Sheen and his father.

Inside the Festival & Live Events Business

Two companies are rewriting how live events make money. Rolling Loud scaled a single-genre hip-hop festival from 5,000 fans to more than 100,000 and is now chasing film and TV. Medium Rare puts on events for everyone from Gronk to John Summit to Guy Fieri and flipped the economics of live events by selling sponsors before it sells a single ticket. We sat down with all 3 on AvA LIVE.

Condensed and edited for length.

Rolling Loud: Matt Zingler

Rolling Loud went from 5,000 people to more than 100,000. Why has it hit so hard culturally?

Matt: It started organic, with passion and young hip-hop talent, and it scaled on reliability. You can't snap your fingers and make a festival. We built the on-site experience: roller coasters, activations, multiple stages, 120 to 140 artists. And we stay single-genre. Most festivals go multi-genre. We don't. If you go to Nike, you want Nike, not a hamburger. We give you exactly what you want, and that built the following.

What's next for Rolling Loud?

Matt: Global first. We have Mumbai in December, our second year there, bringing the festival to places that have never had urban music at this scale. And film and TV is a real focus now. Most of these artists are performers every single day. There's a lane for us to become the modern-day MTV.

Medium Rare: Adam Richman and Joe Silberzweig

You work with Shaq, Travis Kelce, Guy Fieri, Dave Portnoy, John Summit. How do you decide who to build with?

Adam: Brand-friendliness is the barometer. Turn on the TV and you'll see Shaq, Guy Fieri, Kelce. If brands already work with someone, great. We don't have magic pixie dust to create sponsorships that weren't there. John Summit was the exception. He sold out Madison Square Garden in a record 30 seconds, so the ticket demand was obvious, and we built Experts Only around that instead of leaning on sponsorship.

Festivals are getting canceled and costs are climbing. How do you not lose money?

Adam: At SFX, Joe and I watched a billion-dollar IPO go bankrupt in under 18 months. We learned everything not to do. A normal promoter books the show, pays the expenses, announces it, and hopes tickets sell. We were running festivals with 100,000 people and still losing money. So we flipped it. We pitch concepts to brands first. If the sponsorship comes in, then we commit capital. That takes the revenue risk off the table before we spend a dollar.

You turned the Roommates Show with Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart into something other than a live podcast. What was the idea?

Joe: Most live pods are boring. You sit in an auditorium and listen. We turned it into a block party on Randall's Island. We had Jimmy Fallon, Spike Lee, four Knicks players, Fabolous performing, brand activations, and 15 sponsors integrated into the event. We think creative first, amplification second. The brands get Shaq or Gronk actually stopping by the activation, not just a logo on a bar.

What are you building around next?

Adam: College Football Championship in Vegas, the Olympics, and Coachella, which has become the Super Bowl of culture. We like popping up at the big cultural weekends with smaller, more intimate VIP events, 3,000 to 10,000 people, instead of risking $40 to $60 million on a mega-festival.

Watch Now