The Next 10 Years: The future of business in Birmingham <\/a><\/p>\nAnn 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBirmingham is it. It\u2019s the place to be,\u201d Huey said. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing. Uptown is amazing. Topgolf is amazing. The Protective Stadium is amazing, the Coca-Cola Amphitheater. I mean, the whole area where it\u2019s got all this entertainment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many of the \u201camazing\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019t happen overnight, but all those parties working together to grow and expand what Birmingham can be, and now we\u2019re beginning to reap some of the benefits,\u201d Snider said.<\/p>\n
Those benefits are showing up in the form of booked and busy downtown hotels.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we benchmark ourselves against other municipalities that we consider competitors, and that\u2019s 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\u2019s traditional in all of those markets, including the city of Birmingham,\u201d said Williams. \u201cBut we\u2019re seeing an anomaly now where we have, we are up 12.5% just in the city of Birmingham.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s business travel numbers declined, another form of travel ticked up.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat 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,\u201d he said. \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Booked hotel rooms signal high demand to promoters and booking agents, which helps the city in attracting more big-name artists and events.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve pointed back to the beginning of this year when Pink went on sale. That was the first concert we\u2019d had in a while that had over a $4 million gross,\u201d said Snider. \u201cBeing 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\u2019re having multi-day engagements of artists, that puts us on a different tier than we\u2019ve been historically.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, CBS 42 Entertainment Reporter Jimmy Carter says competing cities in this region draw a lot of acts away from Birmingham.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the acts, it\u2019s all about routing. You know, we\u2019re three hours from Nashville, where Huntsville\u2019s like 90 minutes away from Nashville. That\u2019s almost too close. You know, if you\u2019re going to do that, you\u2019ve just got to work the certain markets,\u201d Carter said. \u201cCertain 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\u2019re not capable of doing that, and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s ever going to happen. So, we\u2019ve got venues for the medium to the medium-large acts, and that\u2019s kind of where we are.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, where does the Magic City\u2019s art and entertainment go by 2035?<\/p>\n
\u201cWho 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,\u201d Williams said. \u201cThen we can get more wins.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d Snider said. \u201cWe\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019re all pretty successful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Snider hopes in the next ten years, some older acts come through Birmingham on their farewell tours, like Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones.<\/p>\n
\u201cPromoters look at the strength of the Birmingham market and the buying power in the market and so they say, \u2018we can place those artists here because the tickets will sell,’\u201d he said. \u201cSellouts 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.<\/i><\/p>\n
For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to CBS 42. <\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) \u2013 Not many weekends go by where there isn\u2019t 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. \u201cBirmingham has always benefited from having a lot of headlining and major artists come through town. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2140400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[308509,408282,408284,21741,408283,408285],"class_list":["post-2140399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-birmingham","tag-birmingham-city","tag-city-of-birmingham","tag-entertainment","tag-tad-snider","tag-the-magic-city"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/new-venues-add-to-Magic-Citys-draw-for-arts-entertainment.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2140399"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2140401,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140399\/revisions\/2140401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2140400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2140399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2140399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2140399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}