Sometimes statistics do tell the whole story. In 2014, The O2 sold more than two million tickets to all events (1.82m for music concerts - over 800k more than its closest rival, Glasgow’s The SSE Hydro) to retain its status as the world’s most popular venue - a title it has held every year since it opened with Bon Jovi on June 24, 2007.
The year also saw no less than 280,462 pints of beer, 104,624 pints of cider and 6,380 bottles of champagne served at the London site. Who consumed the most wine you ask? Dolly Parton fans, responsible for guzzling 830 bottles in two nights.
Music events account for roughly 60% of shows at the venue and in 2015 it was the first and so far only arena in the world to top the million ticket sales barrier, capping a remarkable turnaround for a building that began life as the derided Millennium Dome, a £789 million project best remembered for popularising the term “white elephant”.
Instrumental in its continuing success are The O2’s general manager Rebecca Kane Burton, who crossed the north-south (London) divide from Alexandra Palace in 2012, arena programming director Emma Bownes, commercial services director Steve Sayer and operations director Steve Gotkine, who has been with the venue since day one and personally manages the BRITs and the tennis ATP World Tour.
“On one level we’re incredibly fortunate we’re in London,” Kane Burton tells Music Week. “We’re also lucky because of the AEG network we sit within, in terms of the contacts we have, whether that be on the promoting side, the strength and the ability and the skills that we have as a facility management team.
“It can sometimes be a struggle for venues to get money invested back into where it’s needed, but AEG understands investment and this enables us to carry on being No.1 and pull in the right level of acts, global talent and big blockbuster shows.”
As well as the 20,000-capacity arena, The O2 complex also houses 2,750-capacity club Indigo At The O2, nightclub Building Six and the 800-capacity Brooklyn Bowl along with a cinema and 24 bars and restaurants. An Intercontinental hotel will also open shortly.
The full site has been utilised for festivals such as Country To Country, while BluesFest debuts at the venue next month, headlined by Tom Jones and Van Morrison, following a three-year deal with Live Nation.
The closure of Earls Court last year left The O2 as comfortably the capital’s biggest indoor performance space, although it had long since surpassed it as a concert destination. “Earls Court was just a big exhibition hall, it only ever worked when groups of promoters got together and booked out a week or two because of the costs of the infrastructure, whereas [The O2] is purpose-built, ready to play,” points out Gotkine.
“The O2 was a real game-changer for the London music scene; it needed a venue like this,” suggests Kane Burton. “There is no rival in London. Of course, there are rivals elsewhere in the UK, and we watch and monitor that very closely, but I think we can hold our own from a London perspective.”
AEG stable-mate The SSE Arena, Wembley, is now London’s second biggest arena, able to accommodate 12,500, while the all-standing Alexandra Palace can house 10,250.
While The O2’s southeast location on the Greenwich peninsula might once have been considered a hindrance, excellent transport links helped overcome any negative perceptions. Around 65% of visitors arrive via Tube and an increasing number by boat.
“There were a few concerns from the promoters in the early days, but we were always quite confident,” says Gotkine. “The Jubilee line is probably the best line on the network in terms of connectivity. It’s the only train line where every other train line joins at some point as well, so we’re only 15 minutes or so from central London.”
Prince famously played a 21-show run at the venue in 2007, piloting a residency model that enables artists to play to as many fans as possible while minimising their time on the road. The Spice Girls played 14 nights in 2008, Rihanna and Michael Bublé each headlined 10 shows in 2011 and 2013 respectively. Beyoncé performed six concerts in both 2013 and 2014, and Taylor Swift appeared for five nights last year.
Earlier this year, Take That played 10 nights and One Direction and Fleetwood Mac six each, while a six-night stand by U2 is still to come. It’s a trend the team is more than happy to encourage.
“It’s great for the venue – it means we can work a bit harder with the artists and the record labels and the promoters because we can activate the venue over eight or 10 days, whether that’s with fan-generated content or on the merchandise side of things,” explains Sayer, who joined from Manchester City Football Club, where he had been operations director, last year.
“Fleetwood Mac actually produced exclusive The O2 London merchandise specifically for that tour because they had six dates. It’s difficult to do that sort of stuff if you’ve got a one-off, but we really go to town on the big residencies and we hopefully support the artist in what they’re trying to do.”
Take That and One Direction jointly hold the record for the most performances by an act at The O2, with 23. Artists booked to play the venue in 2016 include Muse, Janet Jackson, Bryan Adams, The Libertines, Ellie Goulding, Barry Manilow, The Corrs, Jason Derulo and Rudimental.
In recent times The O2 has begun curating its own content, starting with the London edition of the Sundance film festival in 2012. The following year it co-promoted the first Country To Country (C2C) festival alongside SJM Concerts, in association with the Country Music Association. The event is expanding to three nights in 2016.
One of the team’s most ambitious projects so far was staging a one-off concert by Indian singer, composer and producer A. R. Rahman, who scored Slumdog Millionaire, in August.
“We’re keen to progress on from the success of Country To Country and develop shows that can sit in the diary and come back every year,” says Bownes, who also oversees the diary at SSE Arena, Wembley.
“With A. R. Rahman, we looked at an Asian festival concept because August is usually a tricky month for music programming due to the outdoor festival season,” she explains. “We have a strong Asian market around here so we just thought, Let’s give it a go.
“We did a lot of festival-type programming around the arena shows such as free Bollywood dance lessons, film screenings and a food fair on London Piazza. It turned into an all-day experience and what we hope to do next year is expand that to two days, but also look at other music genres where hopefully we can create our own content and it can come back year-on-year, as C2C does.”
What are the main challenges of running the busiest venue in the world?
Steve Sayer: Trying to reinvent ourselves to stay ahead of the competition on the customer services side. The O2 has been No.1 since it opened in 2007 and the world has moved on since then. We face increasing demand from a consumer point of view over where they spend their money.
We’ve reinvested in the facility to provide a much better customer experience. We’ve installed a high-density mobile network across the whole of The O2 arena - 15,000 concurrent users - and it’s already made a massive difference to the fan experience, enabling fans to use social media to share the experience of their memories from The O2.
Rebecca Kane Burton: It helps having the partners that we have. We provide special offers for O2 customers and that works as well for O2 as it does for us. We also have partners like Sky and Barclays that do things on site. They’re good partnerships, they’re well thought through and they’re sensible partners for us to work with.
The other challenge that always comes to mind is optimising the diary. The arena is the anchor that drives a lot of the visitation to this building and one of the biggest challenges is juggling our diary to make sure we can bring in the best talent for as many days as possible. There is nothing worse than a six or 10-night run that you can’t accommodate.
So how do you juggle that diary?
RKB: Wizardry!
Emma Bownes: We prioritise getting in the biggest names we can as early as we can. It also helps that we have great relationships with the promoters we deal with regularly - whether that’s Live Nation, AEG, SJM Concerts or whoever - they understand that they can be flexible with us. If we ask them to return dates and they don’t need them then they’ll do it because they understand that it works both ways and, if they need us to clear them a date quickly, we can get it back. It definitely helps having good relationships with promoters.
Steve Gotkine: The venue’s flexibility is also a massive bonus. The way we maximise our diary is, we can do a 10-night residency but they don’t play every night for 10 nights, they take breaks in the middle, and that enables us to programme those dark days because of the flexibility of the building.
Given the level of the venue’s success, how can you continue to grow in the future?
RKB: By looking at ourselves differently. We weren’t short on content - if someone’s touring they’ll want to play London, so they’ll either start their European tour here, or they’ll end it here. The O2 sits at either end, and that’s fantastic.
[But] touring is a cyclical business and therefore we know that when you’ve had a great year, the next year might drop off slightly. So the question for us was, Do we need to be a receiving house? If you looked at the Southbank Centre or the Royal Albert Hall, they curate, produce and co-create, they had a multi-layered way of driving content into the building.
Sundance was our real first big step in the water, and Country To Country has been our biggest success. Our in-house team promoted A. R. Rahman - the first time we had ever been the actual promoter of a show, as they are typically co-promotions. It was a big risk, and it wasn’t what the venue would normally be doing, but the guys spotted a gap. There’s risk-taking element within AEG, it’s entrepreneurial enough to go, The guys have an idea, let’s go with it. And, thank god it worked! We’re going to do more of it; it’s good fun.
SS: We’ve always tried to look for times in the diary when the arena’s relatively quiet. Early September and August, in particular, are typically good periods to stage non-traditional events.
The Salvation Army came here for their 150th anniversary event Boundless in July this year. They took over every single venue at The O2 and programmed across five days. O2 Telefonica did something a couple of years ago with their campus party, again, where they took over the venue for a week.
So we’re looking for opportunities that are a bit more entrepreneurial and not the norm for an arena in the UK. We think it’s a big opportunity for us: that vision as an entertainment complex rather than just a music arena. I think we’re much bigger than that now.
What have been your personal highlights?
SS: The BRITs: from being a small part of it all coming together to actually being at the event, it is the Champions League final for this venue.
SG: For me, it was just getting the place open to start with. We were so focused on making it a success, getting people in the building and getting Bon Jovi on stage after a year’s hard work. That was a personal highlight, as was Prince - [Prince] kick-started the residency model.
EB: Mine was probably Monty Python, because it was a world exclusive and a really great show. Also A. R. Rahman, because it was such a risk. It was the first in-house promoted show, so it was a gamble. Not many companies would necessarily have signed that off, but it worked and hopefully we’ll be able to expand on it next year. It’s given us a chance to learn about a whole new market.
RKB: Monty Python was a great one. Emma didn’t tell me about it until the day before it was announced in the press because the promoter knew what a golden egg they were sitting on, and what a gem it was.
The 2012 London Olympics was another highlight, seeing the venue come into its own as a London landmark. That was an incredible year because there was quite a shift of emphasis going east. As much as the Olympic Stadium and village was the clear centre point, it encouraged people to realise it’s not that hard to get here and there’s loads going on. For The O2 to take its place on that stage was great.
How is 2016 shaping up?
EB: What’s really stood out this year is the rock shows and heritage acts, but it’s cyclical. We’ve got a lot of pop shows coming in for next year and a couple of big residencies that we’re hoping to announce soon. It’s looking like we’re going to be busy.