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Arthur Fogel Chairman of global music/president of global touring Live Nation As tens of thousands of fans arrived at Toronto’s Rogers Stadium on Aug. 24, their bucket hats — worn in homage to the night’s headliner, Oasis — protected them from the sun that hung above in the azure sky. The atmosphere at this, the band’s first North American show of its zeitgeist-shaking reunion tour, was convivial, communal, basically euphoric. But inside the venue, Arthur Fogel sat in front of a weather radar and watched as a storm approached. The meteorologists gathered around him offered guidance: “It’s moving at this speed. It has lightning in it. If it gets this close to the stadium, everyone inside has to go.” “So you’re sitting there and you’re stressing,” Fogel says. “Like, ‘Aw, f–k. They’re saying it’s going to come right over the top of the place.’ ” Navigating dilemmas — at times as uncontrollable as the weather — has been part of Fogel’s repertoire for roughly four decades, as he has helped guide some of the biggest musical superstars in history through major, and majorly lucrative, world tours. Read the full profile on Executive of the Year Arthur Fogel here. With headliners Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Doechii and Gracie Abrams, Lollapalooza’s 2025 edition in Chicago sold out at on-sale. “Everything seemed to click this year,” Powell says. Still, the longtime C3 promoter considers Lollapalooza India’s sold-out third edition — headlined by Green Day, Shawn Mendes, Louis Tomlinson and Glass Animals — to be the Austin-based company’s biggest highlight this year. C3, whose festival properties also include Austin City Limits, Governors Ball and Bonnaroo, promoted the two-day March event in Mumbai alongside Lolla founder Perry Farrell and India-based promoter Book My Show. Over the last decade-plus, Lollapalooza has expanded to Europe and South America with events from Buenos Aires to Berlin. But India, “which is not a place that’s as heavily trafficked as any of the other markets we’re in, has a lot of challenges with building the site and breaking into the market,” Powell says. Most of the bands on the Lolla India lineup have never played in the country, he explains, and even headliners like Green Day had to make routing adjustments out of Australia to accommodate the booking. “It is expensive to get around. So to some extent, the band’s got to want to do it,” Powell says. “There’s an emotional energy at the show because these fans, you can sense that they’re looking at this as probably the one and only time they’ll ever get to see Green Day.” But for the nation of nearly 1.5 billion, that may be changing — with Lollapalooza at the forefront. “It’s been an untapped market,” says Powell, who sees it becoming “a more viable touring market five, 10, 15 years down the road.” —Taylor Mims Kevin Lyman remembers the strong pushback he got in the 1980s from local politicians when he would attempt to host punk shows in Long Beach, Calif., which then (like now) drew mischievous teens and young adults from all around Southern California with its notorious skate and punk culture. So naturally, over 40 years later, Lyman chose the beachside city as one of three sites to host the 30th-anniversary edition of his Vans Warped Tour — the famed touring punk rock festival he founded — this year. “We outlasted them all,” Lyman says two months after the two-day Long Beach festival sold out 80,000 tickets with performances from Pennywise, Less Than Jake, The Vandals and the city’s own Sublime. Today, Warped has the local buy-in it once lacked. In June, Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson celebrated Warped’s return at an event honoring a new street named Sublime Way. “He goes, ‘I’m so excited to bring you the biggest punk rock show ever to Long Beach,’ ” Lyman recalls. “I was with Joe [Escalante] from The Vandals and a few other band people, and we all looked at each other. I go, ‘Remember when the politicians used to run on how they were going to get rid of punk in Long Beach?’ ” Alongside Long Beach, Washington, D.C., and Orlando, Fla., were named as host cities for the anniversary events, which according to Warped sold a combined 240,000 tickets — making Warped one of the most successful festival runs of the year. (After summer plays in D.C. and Long Beach, the fest will stage its Orlando shows on Nov. 15 and 16.) And Warped, which took a break between 2019 and 2025, already has tickets on sale for its 2026 editions in D.C. and Long Beach, with Lyman hinting that international dates are also in the works. According to him, roughly 80% of next year’s acts have already been booked. Read the full profile on Billboard‘s 2025 Visionary, Kevin Lyman, here.
