The Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment (BSE) Advisory Board has expanded to include a London chapter, comprising of a host of top UK executives, to help bring marquee events to BSE venues.
BSE, which is on the lookout for small venues in London to acquire or partner in, oversees programming, marketing, sales and operations for buildings including Brooklyn's Barclays Center, LIU Brooklyn Paramount Theatre and Webster Hall. It also manages and controls the NBA's Brooklyn Nets.
Founding members of its new London board are First Access Entertainment CEO and Music Week Awards Strat winner Sarah Stennett, Island Records' head of A&R Louis Bloom, Red Light Management's James Sandom, Barclays head of sponsorships and media Tom Corbett, Leaders founder and CEO James Worrall and Mumford & Sons' Ben Lovett, who will co-chair the UK group with BSE CEO Brett Yormark (pictured).
“It has been a true pleasure working alongside Brett and his team in recent years,” said Lovett. “There are very few companies that can combine ambition and vision with flawless execution in the way that BSE does. This expansion of their advisory board overseas is simply the latest statement of intent and things to come.”
Yormark told Music Week: "Through a combination of doing some event branding, having our Brooklyn Nets team play [at The O2], having commercial partners located in the UK including Barclays, and working with different promoters and artists, the UK has become a very important market to us.
"The smaller venues that are complementing our portfolio act as a bit of a feeder system so that we can connect with artists early and often to get them to play Barclays Center. The UK is the next market that we want to get into. We're not thinking about big venues, we're thinking about smaller venues and how we can tap into that emerging music scene in London so that when artists are breaking into North America, they're thinking Barclays Center.
"So because of all of that activity and all of that vision, we decided to extend our advisory board. I started our US chapter almost three years ago and it has about 40 members that are truly leaders in the sports and entertainment field. They guide us when it comes to content and programming and it's been extremely helpful to us."
The US chapter meets formally three times a year, explained Yormark.
"Ben Lovett is on our advisory board here in the US and he offered to be my co-chair to establish the advisory board in the UK," said Yormark. "We're starting small and we have great collection of great executives and the goal here is for those executives to help us further root ourselves in the marketplace, to guide us and help us connect with all the right people in all the right places as hopefully we emerge as a viable business in the UK.
"Our hope is that we can bring the advisory board in the UK to Barclays and to New York once a year so they can experience what we're dong here live so I think we'll be interfacing with the advisory board quite often."
He added: "We're having conversations with a couple of venues right now both either to make investments or to be strategic partners, and these are small venues - anywhere between 1,500 and 3,000 in size - so we have a lot of ongoing situations but nothing to report at this point in time.
"The UK has an incredible music community. It's a market that we'd love to embrace and we're very excited about the future."
