Original Link: http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/global/6251385/sfx-buys-brazilian-agency-promoter-plus-talent

SFX, the largest EDM festival management company has recently purchased Brazilian talent agency Plus Talent and has in turn planted the viral seed of the electronic music industry into a new market: South America. Up until now, SFX has been responsible for organizing some of the largest EDM festivals across the globe. From Tomorrow Land to Lollapalooza, SFX is close to running a monopoly on the fastest growing musical genre in the past decade. However, most of these events have taken place in central Europe or the southern side of the USA where most EDM enthusiasts reside. With this recent acquisition, SFX is able to put their incredibly large marketing budget into an entirely new market.

It is interesting to see from the article that SFX has acquired the Rock and Rio Festival as part of the company. This sort of deal may lead SFX to purchasing other assets outside of the EDM realm. Furthermore, with this acquisition, SFX now holds all of Plus Talent’s clients, most of which aren’t likely EDM artists. What SFX does with Plus Talent or even why they bought it in the first place is still slightly vague. Apart from attracting the south american demo to the bass heavy profitability of the EDM industry, there isn’t too much to gain. I’ll have to keep a close eye on this and see if this leads in to anything in the coming months.”

Response:

A good read considering I was just at the concert, Life in Color over the weekend. Do you feel the demand for EDM music and concerts is high in Latin America?

I found a good link and quote to relate to this:
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jun/19/latin-america-music-industry-new-frontier

“The statistics are staggering: last year, a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers concluded that Latin America was set to become the fastest-growing region in the world in terms of spending for media and entertainment over the next five years.”

SFX definitely picked the right emerging market to expand its entertainment business but I’m not sure it can do this with the EDM genre. In my opinion I reckon they will just expand on what Plus Talent already has, improving the concerts and maybe offering more of what they already have set up.

The demand for music concerts in Latin America will be high, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the EDM genre. It will be interesting to see how much SFX will influence Plus Talents style and targeted consumers.

 A major problem that SFX will face though is reaching consumers in rural areas. Much of Latin America still reside in the rural areas making them inaccessible. Also the rate of poverty is relatively high in Latin America, and concerts being a luxury good means it can easily be given up. To raise popularity of concerts they must first implement low-cost concerts unlike the $100+ ones they have in North America and Europe to gain popularity before charging higher prices to consumers.