By Greg Doherty,Senior Contributor,Steve Baltin
Copyright forbes
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – NOVEMBER 15: Steve Aoki performs at the ‘One Night For One Drop’ charity event on November 15, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Greg Doherty/Getty Images for One Night for One Drop)
Getty Images for One Night for One Drop
This weekend saw the launch of the remodeled Marquee New York with an A-list lineup of DJs – Diplo, Steve Aoki and Zedd – christening the reopening of the venerable NY location, which opened 22 years ago.
Its sister location, in Las Vegas, will celebrate its remodeling the weekend of October 10, October 10, 11 and 13 specifically, with Loud Luxury, Fisher and Aoki doing the honors this time.
It’s the first major renovation for the Vegas location after its opening 15 years ago. For both locations they brought in the most up to date technology to make sure Marquee remains one of the elite names worldwide in the club scene.
I spoke with co-CEOs of Tao Group Hospitality, Noah Tepperberg and Jason Strauss, about the changes in each location, why now, and much more.
Steve Baltin: You were saying that you guys have been partners for 32 years.
Noah Tepperberg: Yeah, we’ve been partners for 32 years. I just turned 50 last month and we were 18 when we started. We’ve been with Tao from the beginning in Vegas, now 20 years since we opened. Marquee is our other flagship brand, which we originally opened in New York 22 years ago. Then we brought it to Vegas 15 years ago. It’s been quite a journey, besides Tao and Marquee in New York and Vegas, we’ve opened probably 80 venues in our life. We have 60 of them open now, been all over the world, Singapore, Australia, obviously in America, New York, Vegas, Chicago, LA, Miami, most of the major markets. We’ve been doing this our whole lives, met in high school, and here we are, we’re both over 50 now still going strong, opening up places left and right.
Baltin: What made this the right time to redesign and relaunch?
Tepperberg: I think every venue has a sort of natural progression in its technology in nightlife. Now more than ever, technology has become really important. The audio, visual, sound, lighting. And that technology is changing and it’s getting better and better, but they’re also coming out with new things faster and faster. So, it used to be maybe every 10 or so years, we could do a renovation. Now it’s starting to happen sooner, every five to seven years. So first and foremost, it was time to update the technology. And that’s a big part of what we did in both Marquee New York and Marquee Vegas. We’ve put in the latest and greatest AV systems you can get for that type of immersive nightlife. We’ve got just the best highest resolution screens, lights, moving lights, intelligent lights, sound, amplifiers, etc. So that was the driving factor behind the renovation and doing it now. It just so happens that both venues lined up to do them at the same time. There’s no magic around one being 22 years old and one being 15 years old. I will say that the last time we did a major renovation was we opened Marquee New York, and then it was quite some time before we opened Las Vegas. Then once we opened Las Vegas, we had to go back and renovate New York because Las Vegas was just so much more advanced in its design. So that was the last, we had just renovated New York, I’d say 13 years ago, about two years after Vegas opened. Now they’ve both been running at the same rate. So, it made sense to do both at the same time. We did open an amazing Marquee in Singapore six and a half years ago that upped the game on the AV and the sound. But because it was in Singapore, we were able to hold off on renovating and the pandemic came shortly after and here we are. Timing wise that’s your answer and I would mention that Marquee Vegas hasn’t had any renovation other than doing great upkeep for 15 years. This is our first real big one where Marquee New York has had one and now this will be their second. So, this is Marquee 2.0 for Vegas and 3.0 for New York is how we’re referring to it internally.
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Baltin: For both of you, just the fact that you guys are looking at 20 and 15 years is insane because usually the shelf life for clubs is much shorter than that.
Tepperberg: Yeah, that’s something I think Jason and I take a lot of pride in. I believe where we’ve been able to set ourselves apart and time and time again open venues that really would stand the test of time and have lasted way beyond the average shelf life and not only lasted but stayed relevant, comes down to he and I being so intimately involved and staying present, we still go to the venues a lot. We’re very in the mix on the programming and constantly just trying to keep these places on top of not just our minds, but all of our guests’ minds. We really market these venues like their own brands. We treat Marquee not like a venue, but like a brand, like a luxury brand. And we constantly invest in the brand, not just the venues. So, while we may only do a major renovation every 10 years or seven years, we are constantly putting money into the brand and making sure Marquee is great. And we do that by taking the brand on the road, putting great offsite activations together around the Marquee brand. Like we do an annual partnership with EDC where we take the Marquee brand and brand their big VIP section, the Marquee Sky Deck. We just did one in New York over the summer. Even while the venue was under renovation, we opened a temporary Marquee on the hundredth floor of Hudson Yards and did a summertime activation that put a whole new glisten on the Marquee brand with new guests and people who hadn’t heard of it. And the beauty of our business is while there’s guys like us, I will say, in a positive way that may get older and aren’t your typical sort of Marquee guest, there’s new people turning 21 every day and they can’t wait to go to Marquee. They’ve been hearing about it their whole life, they’ve been reading about it their whole life. We are very aware of that and constantly do things to keep top of mind, not just for people of our generation, but for the people who, as we say, turn 21 every day and want to go and dance and be in these great environments that we create.
Baltin: It’s interesting that you’re able to bring in the new 21-year-olds, because a lot of times they want their own legacy. Why do you think Marquee is able to be this place that people want to go, even though they’re at this point like their parents went there?
Tepperberg: I think for certain guests, there’s a nostalgia factor. Marquee was the place their parents met. Marquee was the place that their big brother had a birthday. And then for others they never heard of it before. People have no idea that their parents might have gone there. They had no idea 20 years ago that this was a place. They’re just hearing about it because their favorite DJ is talking about it on a podcast or because they’re here and they’re seeing people that they know post about it on social media. They don’t associate it with nightlife of the early 2000s because A, they weren’t around and B, it’s not like we sit there and average. We’re not an Italian restaurant that has pictures of what happened 20 years ago on the wall. You’re walking in and all you’re seeing is a giant high-resolution screen that’s blowing your mind away, hearing some great music. So, it’s a little bit of both. But I can just tell you like recently, I was talking with Benson Boone. He’s in his early 20s, huge star, up and coming. We’re talking about nightlife and we’re in one of our venues. And I was telling him how cool it was that my 10-year-old son came home from camp this summer with Benson Boone on his playlist. He was excited to know that Benson comes to our places and has played in our places and then a week later I had the same conversation with David Bryan from Bon Jovi this past weekend in one of our places talking to him about hey how cool it was that he’s still hanging out right in our places. But my 10-year-old son came home with a Bon Jovi song also on his playlist. These days, age and music aren’t necessarily aligned. When a song comes out, it doesn’t mean that that’s when the people who are going to find it like it. I think the same thing happens with nightlife and clubs. There is no longer a set age group. It’s wild, we have, as I said, 21-year-olds and people in their 50s every night hanging out at Marquee together.
Jason Strauss: I would think also another secret sauce that we’ve been very lucky and pretty thoughtful about is always building a team underneath us of young-minded, really smart people that we take our cues from that will help us with the latest in marketing, the latest in trends, the latest in programming, what kinds of partnerships to do, what kind of DJs are going to be up and coming. And Noah and I have always dove into that brain trust to keep us on that cusp of trend. We spent a lot of time working with those groups and making sure that’s part of the whole DNA of the club every single week.
Tepperberg: that’s a really good point, Jason. We have about 10 people who work with us just on the programming side, on the talent, buying shows, programming shows, figuring out. The age range of that team literally is with us at the top in our fifties to people just out of college. So, we work with a team of people largely a lot younger than us who we listen to. I think we’re lucky that we’ve been able to find good people that have a totally different perspective on music than we do. And we have a phenomenal team.
Baltin: How do you feel the dance music audience has changed in the years you’ve been doing Marquee?
Strauss: One thing is the emotion, people being much more tied to the emotion. Now people can pick these songs, as Noah said, and put it on their social media, on their post, on their reels, on their TikToks and now they feel like they’ve curated a song with that artist, and it really is personal to them. It really translates a lot more if they find a random song, but it speaks to some social media posts that they did. As small or as big as it is they’re really tied in and they’re emotionally vested. So, it’s really our job to stay attuned with what’s trending and what songs are really being pulled, and we can tell early if there’s a new artist or new song or new sound trending. So, that’s part of that young group and us paying attention to what’s going on.
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