BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) – Not many weekends go by where there isn’t something going on in Birmingham. From concerts to comedy shows to live theatre, the Magic City is expanding its footprint in the arts and entertainment world.
“Birmingham has always benefited from having a lot of headlining and major artists come through town. The investment in venues and having more options now, having the amphitheater downtown, the modernization of Legacy Arena has made us more attractive to promoters as well,” said Tad Snider, the executive director of the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex. “Those investments are paying benefits in more regular, recurring kind of traffic we’re seeing and some of it is just the strength of the market too. ”
Since 2015, the city says it’s taken a different approach to organizing large events.
“We’ve kind of come up with a little bit of a dream team when it comes to tourism and economic development. That is the Convention and Visitors Bureau, BJCC, the city of Birmingham and Jefferson County, and a lot of times the state of Alabama as well, Department of Tourism, coming in,” said Birmingham City Councilor Hunter Williams. “That team always is able to do a lot more that what we had traditionally done 10 years ago, where each group tried to do something in a silo. And since then, you see the results.”
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Ann Gray-Huey has lived in Gadsden for 50 years but frequently makes the trip to Birmingham, especially for concerts like Chris Brown at Protective Stadium.
“Birmingham is it. It’s the place to be,” Huey said. “It’s amazing. Uptown is amazing. Topgolf is amazing. The Protective Stadium is amazing, the Coca-Cola Amphitheater. I mean, the whole area where it’s got all this entertainment.”
Many of the “amazing” features Huey talks about are additions that have come since 2015. 10 years ago, Topgolf, Protective Stadium and the Coca-Cola Amphitheater were nothing more than aspirations for the city.
“It’s taken a lot of parties coalescing around an idea, a plan and a vision ten years ago to get us to where we are now. So, it didn’t happen overnight, but all those parties working together to grow and expand what Birmingham can be, and now we’re beginning to reap some of the benefits,” Snider said.
Those benefits are showing up in the form of booked and busy downtown hotels.
“When we benchmark ourselves against other municipalities that we consider competitors, and that’s everything from Charlotte, Atlanta, Nashville to Jackson, Mississippi, when we look at how they are trending, typically in the summertime, those hotel night stays are down. That’s traditional in all of those markets, including the city of Birmingham,” said Williams. “But we’re seeing an anomaly now where we have, we are up 12.5% just in the city of Birmingham.”
Within the last ten years came the COVID-19 pandemic, which created drastic changes in the way many people travel and enjoy entertainment. Williams says while Birmingham’s business travel numbers declined, another form of travel ticked up.
“What we have seen take off in the city of Birmingham is leisure travel, which I think is very important to note is that we were able to replace and then add some to the amount of travelers coming into the city of Birmingham with the amount of business travel we had lost after COVID,” he said. “That is due to our investment into all of these different capital projects as well as putting on events and shows and bringing people into the city of Birmingham.”
Booked hotel rooms signal high demand to promoters and booking agents, which helps the city in attracting more big-name artists and events.
“We’ve pointed back to the beginning of this year when Pink went on sale. That was the first concert we’d had in a while that had over a $4 million gross,” said Snider. “Being able to put shows on sale like a Nate Bargatze show where we put it was going to be a single show, sold out so quickly, added a second show that same day. Luke Bryan ended up being a two-day engagement. When we can start getting into that where we’re having multi-day engagements of artists, that puts us on a different tier than we’ve been historically.”
However, CBS 42 Entertainment Reporter Jimmy Carter says competing cities in this region draw a lot of acts away from Birmingham.
“For the acts, it’s all about routing. You know, we’re three hours from Nashville, where Huntsville’s like 90 minutes away from Nashville. That’s almost too close. You know, if you’re going to do that, you’ve just got to work the certain markets,” Carter said. “Certain acts can draw 5,000 people, certain acts can draw 10,000 people. Some acts can draw unlimited like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, and that would require almost like a Legion Field. And Legion Field used to get this, but they’re not capable of doing that, and I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. So, we’ve got venues for the medium to the medium-large acts, and that’s kind of where we are.”
So, where does the Magic City’s art and entertainment go by 2035?
“Who knows what 10 years is going to look like? Who knows what 20 years is going to look like? But if we can keep the same rhythm and togetherness of having different governmental entities speaking and working together for the one common individual, which to me is the taxpayer,” Williams said. “Then we can get more wins.”
“The BJCC is now 50 years old. We need to work on the convention center component of what we got and do some updating there so the rest of the facilities and kind of views of the venue are more modern and contemporary,” Snider said. “We’ve got some investment in our hotels to do. We hope to take what is around Coca-Cola Amphitheater, that mixed use development, that that fills in and kind of connects us up that way. So, if we can look back 10 years from now and there’s kind of a more seamless campus footprint taking us all the way up to Coca-Cola Amphitheater, and then maybe another hotel or two, I think then we’re all pretty successful.”
Snider hopes in the next ten years, some older acts come through Birmingham on their farewell tours, like Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones.
“Promoters look at the strength of the Birmingham market and the buying power in the market and so they say, ‘we can place those artists here because the tickets will sell,’” he said. “Sellouts lead to more options, and hopefully more sellouts and more options and then more frequency of artists coming through the market and being able to get on that tour routing.”
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