By Joe Vickrey
Photos Courtesy of Live Nation/SEG
Smith Entertainment Group (SEG), the owners of both the Utah Jazz and the Utah Mammoth, have announced they will be building a new concert venue in downtown Salt Lake City. The venue will be the first of their “three anchors in Salt Lake’s entertainment district” to attract new business to Utah. The venue will have a whopping 6,000 seats available per event. A venue this big is not only proof of the growth of Utah in general, but it’s likely to perpetuate that growth while bringing more large acts closer to home.
To put the venue size in perspective, The Eccles Theater has a 2,500 person capacity, The Complex and Red Butte Amphitheater have about a 3,000 person capacity, The Union is approximately a 3,500 capacity venue, and The Great Saltair can hold 4,000 people for their indoor shows.
While a 6,000 seat venue sounds like a great thing on paper for concertgoers and music fanatics alike… I have to ask, will there be a catch? Maybe. SEG is invested in this new venue with the universally hated Live Nation Entertainment. Live Nation is the parent company of Ticketmaster (for those who haven’t had to pay $80 in fees for a concert ticket recently. Ick). The partnership raises questions for me. Primarily, will Live Nation help shape the nation’s perception of Utah as the music hub it deserves to be known as? Or will the corporate-level sponsors damage our blossoming local-run industry?
The established venues in SLC I previously mentioned are who I would say are responsible for a majority of the big-name artists that come to Utah currently, and they are who I could see being most affected by this new super venue. An argument could be made that artists playing 6,000 seat venues shouldn’t affect venues with 3,000 seat capacities – and Live Nation already operates Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre (formerly USANA) and The Depot. But I have a natural apprehension towards anything that might drive business away from our locally-owned venues that I’ve come to love since moving to Utah.
From The State Room to Kilby Block Party and back, I’ve felt like Salt Lake’s venues tend to invest in our community. I think the charm of SLC’s more established venues comes from how wonderful they’ve been to our local talent. For example, Utah bands have almost exclusively opened for major artists at the Twilight Concert Series. Personally speaking, these venues have always felt like they’ve kept an open line of communication for our musicians as well.
On the other hand, SEG has been very focused on building up Utah’s entertainment scene. Even in November’s Provo Music Town Hall it was brought up that SEG CEO Ryan Smith was in the process of writing a check to host a new recurring concert series in Provo. I’ll be honest, I know nothing about sports, but sponsoring both of Utah’s major league sports teams makes me think I could probably stand to hear them out. Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall also spoke quite highly about SEG’s project as she felt it would bring a lot of great opportunities to Salt Lake City.
SEG is promising this will be “a world-class venue” that will fill a gap in the index of our existing concert halls rather than being duplicative. They’re also confident in the project’s ability to bring in more major artists and visitors to SLC. We all love to see our favorite artists have a Utah date on their tour announcements, and for most people that will be reason enough to justify a new concert hall.
Currently, the plan is to demolish the existing buildings on the future location of this venue in early 2027, so we still have some time to speculate. In SEG’s initial announcement they also shared that this event center would be hosting 200 events annually with 80-100 of those being concerts.
This announcement has already brought more attention to Salt Lake City as a growing hub, and has helped paint the portrait of Utah as a great place to visit. With all that in mind, what do you think? Will you plan on attending a show at this venue if the lineup is right? Is this exciting news for our music industry or will this just be an event center for overpriced corporate artists that your coworkers ramble on about?
Time will tell, but as always, the best thing we can do is support the people we want to succeed. Going to your favorite venues will ensure they have a bright future in our communities regardless of any other circumstances.
You can follow Smith Entertainment Group on Instagram for more announcements. Listen to the Deseret Vibe Rock playlist – featuring great artists from Utah – below!