Meet The Company Amplifying The Social Impact Activism Of The Lumineers, Dead & Co., Other Clients

When The Lumineers pull into Chicago this weekend for their their sold-out show at Wrigley Field, they’ll be bringing more than their rollicking stage act to the audience.

Also in the spotlight will be REVERB, a national organization that catalyzes music fans to help solve for environmental and social issues. So will voter registration organization HeadCount and local nonprofit Almost Home Chicago, which serves housing and food insecure individuals. These organizations will be front and center both on the ground in an area dubbed the “Action Village” and through video footage on the big screens.

It’s all part of the touring ecosystem at Activist Artists Management, a management firm that intentionally and rigorously supports social impact initiatives of importance to its clients, which also include Dead & Company, the Grateful Dead, Michael Franti, Alec Benjamin and Dwight Yoakam.

“It’s very typically an extraction model for these music tours for the most part. You come into a market, sell a bunch of tickets, do a show and then you leave and go to the next market and you repeat that cycle over again,” says Activist founding partner Bernie Cahill.

“Something that’s really important to us and our clients is to make sure we aren’t just an extraction model, to make sure we’re engaging with that market before we get there in a meaningful way and then… what are we leaving behind? What kind of story are we telling?

“It’s not like we’re putting together a campaign and a tour and then at the very end when we really have the concept together it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, we should add a charity component,’ It’s not like that at all. And I think sometimes in our old business it was like that. These are priorities, so we treat them as such,” says Cahill, who previously ran management firm ROAR and founded Activist in 2018 with partners Greg Suess, Matt Maher and Tony Khan, whom Cahill helped launch AEW, a competitor to the WWE.

Amplifying clients’ activism in tandem with supporting their artistic and business needs is baked into Activist’s ethos—and name. But the company isn’t the only game in town. A steadily rising number of management firms, agencies and promoters from small-scale shops to Live Nation and AEG have divisions devoted to supporting clients’ social impact work. And that’s just fine with Cahill.

“It’s a big tent. While we are called Activist, for sure we aren’t the first to recognize this as a big priority. Look at artists like Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews. Those guys were prioritizing this and creating best practices along the way for years. There are other management companies, and every big agency has a division now to focus on this. And they’re making big progress,” he says.

“There’s no purity test over here; we’re not interested in that. We’re interested in people and artists that are authentic, that have an important voice we’re supporting. Everything we do is open-sourced. We share with other managers. We are trying to figure out how we can make a difference and are just excited to be a part of it.”

For his part, Cahill plans keep Activist as what he calls “a major boutique.” The company has about 3o employees and nine artists clients. It may look to add a few more, but only if the team is moved to do so. “We still haven’t signed anyone we haven’t seen [perform] in person,” Cahill says.

Remaining smaller enables the company to be more agile and engage deeply with partners, even as it forges new paths like hiring a head of Asia.

“We don’t want to get into a world where we aren’t actively involved in the careers and in some cases the minutia of our clients’ lives. We are very focused on making sure we have a long-term strategy that will sustain artists through album and tour cycles,” Cahill says. “What managers do is we find out what’s authentic and great about an artist, and we amplify that. We have a real streaming success story for the Grateful Dead, for example, and this is a band that hasn’t put out new music in decades.”

It’s also about pushing forward conversation and actions around sustainability, mental health, addiction recovery and more. The Lumineers’ September 3 show at Wrigley will be livestreamed and is also being filmed for release at a later date through a streaming service. The Reverb and other activism content will travel with all music programming.

“We engage with these nonprofits well after the fact. We stay in touch with them, we host them at shows, we use our platforms where we can to give them continued visibility,” Cahill says. “It’s a good model. It’s working, and it’s evolving.”