Fancy a private Beyonce show? Meet the fixers behind the world’s most exclusive gigs
Celine Dion does it, so does Chris Martin – but not Taylor Swift or U2. How do you get a megastar to play your front room?
Not long before she sang Edith Piaf’s Hymne a l’amour on the Eiffel Tower before an estimated global audience of a billion to kick off the Paris Olympics, Celine Dion performed for a rather smaller crowd in Las Vegas.
The group of about 100 salespeople had arrived at the top floor of the Delano Hotel for what they thought was a company mixer. Then Dion came on.
“People were truly shocked. It’s such a rare thing to experience, the impact of having a massive global superstar in a tiny room,” says Jay Siegan, whose company, Jay Siegan Presents, specialises in organising private gigs by big names.
Dion sang five songs including My Heart Will Go On and Beauty and the Beast in a show that was “intentionally brief to leave the audience wowed”, Siegan says. “To put it plainly, it was f..king amazing.” It certainly beats the last Times office party.
Fans can get unforgettable shows, if they can afford them, to mark weddings, anniversaries and birthdays – Drake rapped at one lucky girl’s bat mitzvah – while companies get to bask in the word-of-mouth publicity of having a star among them.
Siegan has arranged for Andrea Bocelli to sing for 300 at a hilltop villa in Rome as well as private concerts by the Killers and Chris Martin of Coldplay.
In March Rihanna – the queen of diversification, with a fashion empire worth more than $US1bn ($1.5bn) – was paid a reported $US7m to play her first full live show in eight years at a pre-wedding party to mark the nuptials of Anant Ambani, youngest son of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, and his fiancee Radhika Merchant. A second Ambani bash in May featured performances by Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys and Pitbull, while the wedding proper, in July, had Justin Bieber.
Fees for Bieber and co have not been disclosed but all would have been paid “handsomely”, I am assured by Steve Einzig. His Booking Entertainment agency in New York has been putting on private shows for almost 30 years, once hiding Seal in a hotel room to play a surprise show for a rabid fan, who was satisfyingly blown away. After playing several songs for the man and his wife, the Kiss from a Rose troubadour “ended up hanging out with them for two hours afterwards, drinking wine and talking”.
The $US24m that Beyonce reportedly received for an event in Dubai last year to open a hotel is, Einzig says, probably the most an artist has received for a single show. “But sometimes you have these ridiculous parties where they’ll hire 20 acts over the course of a four or five-day period and collectively that number can be far more than $US20m.” It’s not just superstars; private parties are “a very real way to bring in serious money for young artists who may struggle to monetise their careers in other ways”, Siegan says.
“Artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX and Teddy Swims have all taken offers for exclusive private parties.”
There are a string of acts who are known for embracing this kind of thing, a slightly motley crew that includes Pitbull, OneRepublic, Maroon 5, Kelly Clarkson, Usher and Fall Out Boy. Flo Rida, the Miami rapper, may be a critics’ whipping boy but bookers love him for his amenability, broad appeal and happiness to pose for selfies. “He’s really the best. We work with him a whole lot because you can fit him into lots of different types of demographics,” Einzig says.
On the flipside there are the people who never do private shows: Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC, Taylor Swift, U2, Depeche Mode and the Cure, all of whom, bar Swift, are over 60 and none of whom is short of a few bob.
“We recently made an offer to U2 of $US10m to perform on an island in the Caribbean for a private client. They quickly declined,” Siegan says. “As a kid who grew up on their music, it’s a goal for me to get Depeche Mode or the Cure to do one for a client. So far that doesn’t look terribly possible – but goddammit, I’m going to keep trying.”
Private gigs are not renowned for being artistically satisfying. Last year Noel Gallagher played on a yacht on the Thames for Pakistani-American billionaire Shad Khan and “a load of people who weren’t remotely interested”, aka the Jacksonville Jaguars, the American football team that Khan owns. Meghan Trainor, the Grammy-winning American pop star, told me about playing corporate shows to “older gentlemen in suits and they’ll have their phone up and be like, ‘My daughter is on FaceTime.’ ”
There are advantages, though. “They’re not relying on selling tickets so there’s less pressure,” Einzig says. “Plus they’re making more money.” Yes, there is that. As a rule of thumb, Einzig says, “These dates tend to pay sometimes twice what these artists would get for a public show. If they’re playing in front of 15,000 people at an average ticket of $US100 that’s $US1.5m (gross). In a situation like that (after paying a venue and an agent) an act might walk away with $US700-$US800,000 – so they might charge around $US1.3m for a corporate show.”
Rihanna can fill a stadium four or five times the size of a 15,000-seater arena, hence her reported fee of $US7m for the Ambani party, while I Am Kloot, the Mercury prize-nominated Manchester indie band, charged a more manageable £500 ($970) for a private show, plus free booze, food and a bed for the night. Well within the means of Cate Blanchett, who asked them to perform at her 50th birthday party. Sadly it was a no because by then they had split up.
Einzig specialises in offering a “turnkey” service, taking care of staging, transport and accommodation and acting as the bridge between client and artist. He has described his company as “the pilot fish on the bottom of the shark; the shark can eat us at any time but they need us to help them”. Sometimes there may be special requirements, such as childcare provision. Trainor told me about playing a private show in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her children. “We had a blow-up bed for my toddler with a tent and a blow-up bathtub for the baby. It was chaos.”
Some artists, though, have perfected the art of the quick turnaround. “If they’re going on at nine o’clock, they land at 7.30 in a private plane, get over to the venue, maybe there’s a meet and greet, they do the show, towel off and 10 minutes later they’re in the car going back to the airport,” Einzig says. And there are plenty of people with the money to do this kind of thing. “A lot of them are really just looking for something fun to do,” Einzig says. “They have the wherewithal to do it and it’s nothing to them, a new Lamborghini.”
It’s hard to blame artists for taking such easy cash, although less hard when it comes from a country where homosexuality is illegal, as was the case with Beyonce’s show in the United Arab Emirates. Mariah Carey is among a clutch of artists who sang for Libyan tyrant Muammar Gaddafi, while in 2010 Sting accepted more than $US1m to play for the daughter of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, who boiled his enemies alive.
Such problematic optics could be one reason some artists and clients get guests to sign nondisclosure agreements and ban phones, although Einzig says the latter is often “about the fact that the artists have no control over the quality of the images” being put on social media. That may be why Swift and the like decline such offers: for a singer on her level, image is sacrosanct, and plenty of videos of Beyonce’s Dubai show leaked out despite a ban on filming.
Some, though, see private gigs as something to be proud of. In 2022 American rapper Cardi B boasted on social media: “I got 1 million dollars to perform at this elite bankers’ private event for 400 people and only for 35 minutes.”
Einzig’s clients have been known to hire publicists to promote their events despite them being private, he says. Sometimes it’s more about saying Rihanna has played your party than actually watching her play.
Has Paul McCartney ever done a private show? Siegan and Einzig don’t think so, though he has hired people to perform for him, including DJ and producer Mark Ronson, who performed at McCartney’s house in St John’s Wood, London, to celebrate his wedding in 2011 to Nancy Shevell. When McCartney asked what he should pay him, Ronson replied, “I can’t possibly charge you, but maybe one day down the road you could come and bless some song I have with an amazing bass part.” They ended up working together on three songs for McCartney’s 2013 album, New.
So, Macca, Taylor, Springsteen and a few others aside, pretty much everyone has a price. Even Gallagher, who had said that he originally declined the offer to play on Khan’s yacht. “Then he told me how much he’d pay me and I said, ‘What time do you want me?’ ”
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