Walker Beard has been on most sides of the live music business. He played in a well-regarded Athens band while getting a law degree, helped build the group that ran the Georgia Theatre, Variety Playhouse, Terminal West and the Eastern, spent four years in Los Angeles running business and legal affairs for Netflix's Experiences team, and is now CEO of Super Canoe, an Athens and Atlanta company doing media production, artist management and live events at once.
Which makes him unusually well placed to explain something most people in music only feel: why the numbers don't work, at almost every level, and what the people still doing it are actually up against.
Jeff Perkins talks to Walker about the band name everyone assumed was a bad lawyer joke, the moment at South by Southwest that changed his odds from one in 25 to one in a thousand, why a venue can run 300 shows a year and still not make money, what a startup inside a 15,000 person company feels like, and the docuseries he is making about the 98 percent of musicians nobody makes documentaries about.
Key takeaways
- Bands don't fail because they're not good. He watched a thousand bands at his level at South by Southwest and realized the odds he thought he was playing were off by a factor of 40.
- Making the music is the first mountain. Distribution is the second one, and it now requires a skill set most bands don't have and don't enjoy.
- Ticket revenue mostly goes to the artist. Venues survive on alcohol, which means every single show is a bet that can lose.
- Live music had no half measure during COVID. Restaurants could do takeout. A venue could only issue refunds and then reschedule the same shows three times.
- Netflix Experiences started as five people with a remit that wasn't profit. It was to prove the concept.
- The one thing that actually moved his career was leaving a safe corporate job for a music venue nobody wanted to run.
Listen to the episode
The band name was not a law school joke
Jeff: Take us back. Tell us a bit about your origin story. Where did you grow up?
Walker: I grew up here in Atlanta. My wife and I just lived in LA for the last four years when I was working at Netflix, and then recently this year moved back. But she and I are both from here. Our parents are here, high school friends. This is home base for us. So I grew up in Atlanta and then went to University of Richmond for undergrad, and then came back to Georgia for law school. Since then, other than the LA stint, it's been mostly Atlanta based.
Jeff: And I assume the District Attorneys band name was you and your law school friends, right?
Walker: Exactly incorrect. Which I like to remind people, because one of my biggest pet peeves in law school was that the name existed before I joined the band. It's a reference to the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues," where he says orders from the DA.
Walker: When I was in law school and in that band, everybody thought it was like a bad lawyer pun, even though I had nothing to do with it and I was the only person in law school that was in the band. I got very used to telling people the name of the band in law school and then them sort of laughing in my face and me having to be like, no, I'm sorry, it's not just a cringy joke.
One in a thousand, not one in 25
Jeff: But the band was actually pretty popular. When I've talked to you in the past, you guys were right there on the precipice. You almost made it a full-time career.
Walker: In retrospect it's hard to say how close we were really. I think at some point we definitely had the decision to make, are we going to make this our thing or are we going to part ways and do different stuff. But we were a popular Athens band. We were Flagpole artist of the year in 2011 or 2012, I believe. We played South by Southwest a couple of times in official showcases. We did a tour up to New York and back and a tour out to Boston and back. So we made a go of it.
Walker: And at that time, we released our album right before Spotify came out. So we were in this odd in between time where we released CDs. I still have a bunch of CDs in my shed somewhere that never got sold.
Walker: But it was a decision to make at the end of it that we're seeing with a lot of the bands we work with now, where it's really an existential thing. Can we do this as musicians and make this a middle class life, even? And a lot of times now the decision is unfortunately no. The economics don't work. No matter how good you are, no matter how much you like doing it, you kind of have to go find something else that's going to pay the bills.
Jeff: Was there one moment when you were just like, this isn't going to work? Or did it slowly phase out?
Walker: I remember more times where I remember thinking, this is going to work, or this is great. We had the opportunity to open for all these bands we were huge fans of. As crazy as this sounds, we opened a show for Jason Isbell. We opened a show for Chris Stapleton. It wasn't his solo stuff, it was his band, the Jompson Brothers. Well before either of them were anywhere close to the fame they have now. We opened for a band called Deer Tick at the 40 Watt, a band I loved at the time, an iconic venue in Athens. And I remember thinking, if we're getting these gigs, if we're getting this momentum, all of this is going to go great.
Walker: That was around the time we released our album too, so we had all that momentum. It was probably the 2012 era. And then I graduated from law school in 2013, and by that time a lot of that momentum felt like it had died down, and I had spent all this money and all this time getting this law degree. That was really the time where I remember thinking, it would be very hard for me to justify, just from a life financial level, to say screw it, I don't need this law degree, I'm going to get in a van and go on tour for three weeks and come home with $150 in my pocket. At some point the rationality of it just didn't make sense.
Jeff: You opened for some very big acts. So you'd play your set and then presumably watch the headliner. Did you ever watch them and think, oh, we can totally be that guy? Or were you seeing a big difference between your act and the headliner?
Walker: When we were watching somebody like Chris Stapleton, who I knew from the band the SteelDrivers, he has such an otherworldly voice. There's nobody who could recreate that. So when you're watching him it is kind of like, oh, this guy has something that not only do we not currently have, under no circumstances will we ever have it. Nobody can recreate that kind of voice, that kind of magic that can pull people to it.
Walker: The other thing I remember is when we were at South by Southwest, realizing the scope and the volume of bands that existed in the world that were all out there and were all approximately at the same level of quote unquote success, mostly meaning weren't successful but were very, very good.
Walker: Before we went to South by Southwest I was like, oh, we're one of 25 bands in the country that are really good and we're all competing for this one or two spots to make it to the next level. And then at South by Southwest I realized that number was more like a thousand. There's a thousand bands that are as good as us around the country doing exactly the same thing. And that luck of the draw that I thought was one in 25 is actually one in a thousand.
Walker: That was probably a demoralizing thing, where we all looked at each other and we're like, the risk that we thought we were taking, the roulette board that we thought we had a one in 25 chance on, the odds are much worse. And that was around the time we were thinking about going and doing other things.
Law school with a band on the side
Jeff: So you're in law school, gigging on the side and traveling to South by Southwest at the same time.
Walker: Yes. Which I would not say was great for my law school grades. And it also made me stand out, not necessarily in a good way, with my peers. I think I was known throughout law school as the guy who was playing shows on the weekend and might be missing Fridays because he was out at shows. I'm not sure how much teachers knew that as much as my peers, but it was definitely the kind of thing where it's like, oh, that's the band guy. He's a little separate from what we're doing.
Jeff: Law school's hard. I went to business school at Emory, which is hard too, but Emory business school didn't have a library and the law school did, so I'd study in the law school library. I'd go in and read my accounting chapter or a case study, and marketing textbooks are giant picture books, charts and graphs, very easy to read. And then I'd see all these law students who just looked miserable reading case law in these enormous books with six-point font, having to go through every single page. I was like, man, that doesn't look fun.
Walker: Law school reading is very, I would describe it as very unpleasant. I was a very big reader for pleasure. Before law school I would love to read novels and non-fiction, kind of everything. And post law school I read much less. I think my joy for it got destroyed by that six-point font you're talking about.
Walker: But the good thing about the band stuff is that how hard law school is correlates very much to the first year, and then it kind of eases. By the end you're taking more electives, a lot of people have gotten the hardest classes out of the way. And the busyness of the band was much more in 2012 and 2013, which were my last two years. So my first year I was that person in the library pouring over those books. I probably eased up on it a little bit more than I should have because of the band stuff, but at least I had that first year of really having that experience like everybody else in law school, just grinding it out for better or worse.
The second mountain
Jeff: Even one in a thousand is probably generous. There's so much talent out there that it becomes a supply and demand thing. You can be an elite musician and it's just so hard to break through. We did a podcast with Matt Wigton, one of our staff composers. Matt went to University of North Texas, which has an elite jazz program, and he was the best bass player there. And that's saying a lot. Then he goes to New York City and he made this point. He said, I wasn't even the best bass player on my block. There were 10 other guys living around me who were much better than me.
Jeff: In doing this podcast and talking to a lot of artists and people who manage them, I think your word magic is right. Some people just have this magic, and then the other part is just blind luck. Why one act hits and another doesn't. Sometimes it's right place, right time and who you know. There's no rhyme or reason to it.
Walker: We saw that recently. A lot of what we're doing at Super Canoe is media production, but there's a part of our business where we're managing artists. We have about eight artists right now that we're managing. I'm not sure how much you know about the Athens historic music scene, but it's a lot of indie rock, a lot of stuff in the vein of jangly guitars and pop rock, and there are a lot of bands doing it.
Walker: Recently this artist that we don't manage but that we're aware of, who's in the same ecosystem, played a show at Virginia-Highland Porchfest, which over the last few years has grown a lot in popularity. It's a really fun festival, there's a ton of people out there, it's very visually impressive. And they put up this video of them playing on the porch and you can see all the people out in the crowd. And SZA reposted their video for no reason. It just came across her algorithm. Complete blind luck. She thought, hey, this is a cool looking video. I don't think there was even a caption. I don't think she even said anything, just reposted it.
Walker: And that transformed their ability to grow, their ability to get new shows, their follower count. Everything about it boosted them above their peers, above their competition. And there's no other way to say it other than just blind luck. You couldn't recreate it. You couldn't plan for it.
Walker: And I think in the back of all these artists' heads, everyone's kind of hoping for that. Everyone's hoping some video they put up will go viral, some song will get placed on a TV show and be this viral moment that'll boost everything. But in a lot of cases people are also spending four or five years thinking, okay, this moment is around the corner, it's going to happen. And sometimes you can do it 20 times and it doesn't hit. That can be really demoralizing. We're seeing that with some of our artists where they look around and say, hey, we love our music, our music is good, we're positive about the quality of what we're putting out, but it's not hitting, and we're doing everything we can and we don't know why. That can really be a psyche killer.
Jeff: There's a guy named Scott Welch who's an adviser to Soundstripe. He's also the guy who discovered Alanis Morissette and No Doubt, so he's kind of a big deal music manager. One of the things he said that I thought was really interesting is that it's not just being a great band and a great musician. It's actually being someone who knows how to build an audience and sustain a community around your band, because the labels don't really do it for you anymore, especially if you're an up and coming artist. So that ability to be good on social media and create really compelling content, which is really hard and not a lot of artists can do well, that's becoming the new thing. You almost have to be an influencer as an artist.
Jeff: We have another artist we work with, Dea McBride. She has some new songs in our catalog. She's a rapper from Nashville, and she was in LA and randomly reached out to this band Crash Adams, who do these things on the sidewalk where they play their song and bring in people to rap over it. And they said, well, if you can be on Sunset Boulevard in 10 minutes, you can rap in our song, because we're doing it right now. She showed up, wrote a quick rap, and they made it look improvised. It was actually written beforehand. And it was like 40 million views on TikTok. But even with that, she's still not a star. It helped propel her, but you need not just one of those. You need that to happen every month.
Walker: Yeah, it's a volume game. Even if you get one that pops off, you've got to keep the train rolling. We've been talking to one of our artists, a fantastic band called Hefner, based out of Athens. They just released their fourth album, which I love. I'm biased, but it's objectively a great album. It sounds like a mix of Crosby, Stills and Nash with their harmonies and their incredible guitars. It sounds like 70s T-Rex kind of stuff. It's just great.
Walker: And one of the guys in the band used this great analogy that I thought was awesome. He was like, the first mountain is making the music. And we love that mountain. We love that challenge. We love writing the songs, we love going into the studio, we love being together as a band, we love performing them. We love all of it that has to do with the music.
Walker: And then there's the second mountain, which to condense it into one word is essentially the distribution of it. But what that means now is, yes, you can pop it on Spotify, the easiest thing in the world. But then it's breaking through the noise. It's competing against everybody else, both on the DSPs and on TikTok and Instagram, and doing this sort of influencer role.
Walker: This is a band of six guys, and kind of like the lottery, it'd be great if one of the six both loved doing that and was great at it. And for whatever reason, none of the six of them, that's not where their passion lies. They really like making the music, and they can force themselves to do the social media stuff because they know they have to, but there's nobody who has an innate joy around it.
Walker: So getting over the second mountain is so disappointing for them, because they feel like the only one that should matter is the first mountain. We've already made the great music, it's there, please just come listen to it. But there's this whole other thing that for whatever reason is the actual challenge part of it, and that's the one that we can't get over. Whereas if you compare it to somebody who literally is an influencer, or at least has those innate skills and interests where they like creating that content and have a really good innate sense for what's going to resonate and what could go viral, those people in this modern era have a massive advantage, because that's really how you break through the noise.
Why Noah Kahan and not somebody else
Jeff: I saw Noah Kahan in concert a couple of weeks ago. I've been a fan for a couple of years. I saw him a couple of years ago at a pretty small venue, maybe 5,000 people, and I thought he was great. And then the last time I saw him he played Truist Park, where the Braves play, and it was sold out. The ticket prices were embarrassing, but my kids had to be there. In three years he's gone from 5,000 person venues to mega stardom. And you look at that and think, he's good, he's talented, he's a good singer songwriter, but how does that happen?
Walker: He's a crazy example. In three years he went from playing to five or 10 people at an open mic to growing that fast. That's sort of the ultimate of every single thing that could go right. That's the SZA repost times 100. Every piece of magic just happened to hit all at the same time.
Walker: Because I agree with you, I'm a fan of Noah Kahan. It's not that different from the Lumineers. It's not that different from Mumford and Sons. A lot of these artists, a generation ago when I was playing music in the early 2010s, kind of that cringey hipster era, a lot of these artists were successful in the same way then. And he's building on something that feels like there's a lot of deep competition for that genre right now. There are a lot of white dudes with beards playing acoustic guitar putting up a lot of Instagram videos. And for whatever reason he broke through.
Walker: It's hard to look at him and be like, oh damn, it worked for him, because that's literally what everyone's looking around asking. How can it work for me? And I'm not sure there's anything necessarily repeatable about what he did. The massive growth happened so quick that there isn't even really one thing you can point to, other than I think he got a big boost because of the specificity of some of his lyrics.
Walker: Like that song "Stick Season," the original one that blew up. I had never heard that phrase before, and then looked into it, and apparently stick season is this very specific northeastern phenomenon where there's a time of year when the leaves are down. We in the southeast, I had never heard of that term. But I think a lot of people who heard that, who were from there and knew that personally in their lives, were like, oh, this is something I can grab on to. This is something that means something specifically to me.
Walker: Who knows if that's the reason, but that kind of thing where you're speaking to somebody in a non-generic way. I think AI would be the worst version of that, where AI is just going to put together some platitudes that appeal to everybody. But I do think there needs to be something that breaks you through and says, oh, this is a human who has had similar experiences to me, and thus I'm going to be a huge fan.
Jeff: That's pretty insightful, because he talks a lot about his own mental health struggles. He's medicated and he talks about that. I'm probably on the older end of the fan base. My kids really vibe with him, and it seemed like it was tons of college kids and 20 year olds. During the show he does talk about his mental health challenges. At one point he asks, who here is medicated? It's a generation of kids that have grown up with mental health challenges. And I did notice, my kids don't know a lot of words to every song from most artists, but they do know his words. So there's something about his lyrics that connects.
Home Depot to the Georgia Theatre
Jeff: You didn't go a traditional route into King and Spalding. You obviously had a passion for entertainment and live experiences, and then you go work for companies like AEG and Zero Mile. Tell me about that transition out of law school.
Walker: There was a first job in there before I got into live event stuff. When I graduated from law school I went and worked at Home Depot in their corporate office. That was the first two years I had out of law school, and honestly that was a job much more correlated with my undergraduate business degree.
Walker: It was the time that I graduated, 2013. It was a terrible legal job market. The reason everyone sort of landed on for that bad of a market was that when the recession hit in 08, 09, a ton of people went to school rather than find a job. So when I was graduating, the anecdotal statement everyone said is that for every one law job available there were two people graduating from law school in that era. And I was spending too much time in bands to be in the top 10 percent of the class. I was right in the middle. And if you weren't in the top 10 percent, you weren't getting those King and Spalding jobs. Not that I think I would have been a very good fit for those anyway.
Walker: What we were doing at Home Depot was a lot of making sure of the business health of the individual stores. That's what we were monitoring, the metrics for success, revenues, P&Ls, everything about these little mini businesses within Home Depot and how each one was doing. Which ended up being hugely valuable for the music venue side of my career later, because it was almost exactly the same skills. All right, here is this individual piece of property where there is revenue coming in, there are expenses going out, there are staff members to keep happy, there is turnover, there are hirings, there are firings. All of the micro elements of running a small business started with that Home Depot job.
Walker: But after a couple of years I realized I didn't want to keep climbing that corporate ladder. There's no shade against it, but it's very much a corporate environment where you've got eight bosses and everybody has a different idea about what you're supposed to do and you're moving teams.
Walker: And I had the opportunity to come and work with a guy who I didn't actually know very well. He was an acquaintance, a friend's dad who had just purchased the Georgia Theatre in Athens. He purchased it, I think in some ways, as kind of a real estate play. The building was there and I think he thought the operations of it would be fairly easy and breezy, and that is not the case for a music venue in any way.
Walker: So I went to him and said, hey, I have a business degree, I have a law degree, and I used to play at these venues. I used to literally be on the stage at this venue. So I know all the people there. I know the talent buyer, I know the sound guy, I know the bartenders. I can help you run these venues with a little bit of a sheen of authenticity that maybe somebody else with the same academic qualifications wouldn't be able to talk the talk in the same way.
Walker: And I kind of had to twist his arm to do it. I was like, I promise you don't want to deal with this, I promise you don't want to run this music venue. Which he later realized very quickly. But that was basically the start of it all, me jumping off of a cliff from a really cushy, or if not cushy at least safe, corporate job, to saying, hey, this is what I really want to do. I'm going to join this essentially startup with a guy brand new to running a music venue, and I'm going to say, what can I do to help you?
Building Zero Mile
Walker: From there, over the next five years, we essentially built Zero Mile. So it went from one music venue in the Georgia Theatre to that group purchasing Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points here in Atlanta. Then we partnered with Terminal West, who came under the Zero Mile umbrella. So between those three, that's two 1,100 capacity venues and one 600 capacity venue. And then we started making the plans to build the Eastern in Reynoldstown, which is like a 2,200 capacity venue.
Walker: A lot of what I learned in all those things was just on the job experience. I certainly didn't learn how to do any of that in law school, nor did I really learn how to do it in undergrad business school. It was throwing myself into a situation where I had a little bit more of an ability to speak both languages and bridge some gaps, and just say, to some extent I believe in myself that I can do this. I'm not sure if I was positive that I could do it, but just putting myself in that situation and then letting it grow is kind of how that happened.
Jeff: Those are all very famous venues. What was good about running them, and what were the hard things?
Walker: The good thing was I had married my personal and business interests for the first time in my life. This is actually what I like doing as a civilian, going and seeing live shows, interacting with musicians, helping to foster the overall environment for the growth of artists.
Walker: What I really liked about working at the club level, where we weren't working at State Farm Arena and we weren't working with Justin Bieber, is that a lot of who we were working with were artists hoping to sell out Terminal West, hoping to sell 600 tickets, and if they sold 400 they'd be pretty happy. These are bands on the ascent, trying to make it, trying to make this work in the same way that I did in 2012. I love that. And our office was also in the parking lot of Terminal West, so after work I would walk over to the show four nights a week. I was seeing a ton of music, interacting with a ton of people. I was in my late 20s at the time, so it was a good time to be doing that.
Walker: The downside, and this is the downside you could apply to anything in the music industry, is that it was so much work for so little return. And I don't even mean personal return to myself. I mean the P&Ls of the venues at the end of the year.
Walker: I would talk to people at the Georgia Theatre, up on the roof on a game day, and people would look around like, oh, this is packed, there are so many people, you guys must be rolling in it. And what they didn't realize is they didn't see it on July 15th when the students aren't in session and that thing's sitting empty. There's absolutely no business. So we had the seasonality, which was a killer, especially for a college town.
Walker: Terminal West, one year we did 300 shows in a year. Three hundred out of 365 days. And at the end of the year the P&L did not reflect the effort that had been put in, let's just say it that way. It became a disappointing effort to realize how many people were putting in so much effort for the overall financial health of these venues. It was almost like running a public benefit. It certainly wasn't a charity, but it was a ton of work to offer 300 shows at Terminal West where nobody involved with Terminal West was walking away with essentially anything.
Why 300 shows a year doesn't make money
Jeff: It's wild to think about. I know some of the guys at Eddie's Attic in Atlanta and I think it's the same thing. They were almost out of business and then someone came in, and it's essentially running as almost a nonprofit for performances at this point. Talk about the economics. With 300 shows, I'm guessing the average ticket price is somewhere around 50 bucks. How can you not make money? I know the artists take some, but between selling food and drink, how do you not make money on that?
Walker: The basic economics, and this is simplistic, but the way it works is that the tickets you sell, the vast majority of that goes to the artist. The artist is offered a guarantee at the beginning. Say it's Terminal West and they're guaranteed 15 grand. Even if you sell it out they'll get a little bit of a bonus, but the artist usually gets 85 to 95 percent of whatever ticket sales are. That's just how it works. There's no shade against it. That's the economics of building a show, that most of that ticket revenue goes to paying the artist.
Walker: And then the venue generally benefits on alcohol sales. If they offer food then you have a margin on food too. Food's worse than alcohol. Really, selling alcohol is how these venues historically have made any of their margin. And that's a dicey business, because younger generations don't drink nearly as much as they used to, and certain genres are completely different in terms of their drinking crowd compared to others.
Walker: So you'll have these shows where the artist gets a guarantee, but because of that you're literally rolling the dice every single show. If nobody shows up, say you've guaranteed an artist 15 grand and the show tanks and 50 people show up, that means you've made about two grand in ticket sales and you're still paying that artist 15 grand. So there's plenty of those shows out of the 300 a year I'm talking about. You want to minimize them as much as possible, but it's impossible to completely derisk. You're going to have shows where you're deeply in the red for the night, where you look around and say, all of these people were in this room, we were all working, and we lost 10 grand.
Walker: Hopefully over the full year that's not the case and it all balances out. But we encounter that right now in our business, where we consult with venues that are trying to add music. There are breweries who want to add music and say, I want to do a ticketed thing. And I've said to them, you can't derisk it. You can do everything you can to make sure the artist is big enough and that you're pretty confident in their ticket sales ability, but at the end of the day you could always lose money. That's a little bit different than a lot of other businesses, where you're not going into each and every night saying, hope this one works.
AEG, and then no half measure
Jeff: Challenging business, but it sounds like you're having a lot of fun. Then you make the move out to LA to work at Netflix. What drove that?
Walker: That's a simple answer. The answer is COVID. We ended up doing a deal with AEG. And not to jump back into the previous conversation, but another piece of the financial issue is that these big companies, Live Nation and AEG, have every ability to swoop into markets and say, hey, we know how hard you're struggling, we can offer a lifeline. If we partner with you or purchase you, we'll give you a financial backstop and you don't have to worry about rolling the dice every single night.
Walker: So that's essentially what happened with us. We were planning to build the Eastern and we needed money to build it, and AEG didn't have a presence in the southeastern region at the time. So a marriage was born where we became partners, we became AEG's southeastern regional office, and in return got all of the benefit of a large corporation backing us, and then they helped fund the Eastern, which ended up being a fantastic success. It's a wonderful venue. At the end of the day I think that deal made sense. Both sides to some extent got what they wanted out of it.
Walker: And then a year and a half later COVID hit. Unlike a lot of businesses, and I use this analogy with people, if you ran a restaurant you kind of had a half measure during COVID. You could do takeout. You probably weren't making as much as you were before, but there was something else you could do to partially bridge the gap. And with live music there was no half measure.
Walker: We had about three months of work, from around March 2020 until June, where our work was figuring out how to refund everybody's money for all of the shows in the future that people had paid for. And what is so funny in retrospect is that we worked so hard to reschedule every show for that fall, for fall 2020, assuming that it would all be over then. And so those two months of work were just repeated again the next fall. I think they ended up doing it three times, because nobody knew when it was going to end.
Walker: By midsummer 2020 I remember having a meeting where everybody was looking around. It was a recurring meeting that was supposed to happen every week, and somebody was like, okay, we'll see you next week. And everyone was like, are we doing next week? Is there anything else to do? At that point there were furloughs. Most people in that situation were assured, hey, if you wait around your job will still be here when it comes back, but we have no idea when that is or if that is.
The job posting that could not have been more specific
Walker: That was the time that I took some time off. My wife and I traveled, and like a lot of people just hung out at the house during COVID. But then started looking for new jobs. And the Netflix job was one that I literally found on LinkedIn, or somebody sent it to me. I found a job posting that said, looking for a lawyer who has experience doing in-person live ticketed venue related work. I don't even know if they used the word experiential. But it was basically, if you work with ticketed events, if you've done production deals, if you have a business mindset about P&Ls and that sort of stuff.
Walker: And I remember reading the bullet points of this and thinking, if I don't get this job I'm not getting any job, because this could not possibly be more niche for the weird background that I've had. Applied for it. It took three months. I had like nine interviews, which is standard for them, which is crazy. But ended up getting the job.
Walker: So my wife and I picked up and moved to LA and really didn't know too much about LA. Didn't know very many people there, and just decided, hey, we'll see how this goes, we'll see if this is an adventure we can go on. My first day there was January 1st, 2022. So we were there from 22 to 26. That was another kind of jump off the cliff moment, where we probably never would have done it if not for COVID, but the opportunity arose and we jumped on it.
Five people inside a 15,000 person company
Jeff: Talk about some of the things you did there. In the intro I mentioned the Stranger Things Experience, which my daughter dragged me to twice when it was here in Atlanta. Talk about that work and the live experiences you were putting together using pretty incredible IP that Netflix owned.
Walker: It was a really interesting thing to jump into at the beginning. In 2022 I was the first lawyer hired to directly support Experiences, which is the name of the team. And at that time I supported, I believe it was four people. Four was the entirety of the Experiences team within Netflix. And Netflix is a 15,000 person company. So if you're talking about literally five people working on experiences, it was a startup within the company.
Walker: It was essentially an experiment where they were saying, hey, you group of people, we see Disney, we see Universal doing some version of this where people can go and experience the IP in person. Let's find out if Netflix can do a version of that. And from the beginning nobody wanted to do a theme park. That was ruled out, in kind of classic Netflix fashion. Netflix likes to say, we'll never do something. And then a couple of years later, ah, I guess we'll release the movies in theaters. So at the time they said, we're not going to do a theme park, and still haven't, to their credit.
Walker: But at the beginning it was an extremely well-funded, well-supported startup where our remit was not even really profit. It wasn't, hey, these experiences we do have to make a ton of money. It was basically, can we prove the concept. Can we make something that people will come to, that they like, that they tell their friends about, that they give a good review on Google, and that supports the thesis that building out this team and making it bigger makes sense.
Walker: We were also under the marketing org. So there was some credence given to the fact that these experiences, if they worked, would essentially be marketing for the shows themselves. If you love Stranger Things and you went to the Stranger Things Experience, you'd be more likely to watch the next season. That was essentially the thesis.
Walker: So at the beginning we did a few different versions of the Stranger Things Experience, and that was the biggest show both then and now. That was Netflix's biggest IP. We did the Bridgerton Experience, which I was surprised to find out is another one of, if not the number two, at least in the top five of Netflix IP as far as viewership.
Walker: Those were standalone things, similar to like a Cirque du Soleil model, where essentially it would sit in one city for two or three months, or four or five, and then pick up and literally put it all on trucks, uninstall it, move it to another city and reinstall it. That worked pretty well on the revenue side, and it was very tough on the expense side, because breaking it down and rebuilding it. All of that was just learnings. It was learnings about how to do any of this stuff, how to make it work.
Walker: And then from that the team realized that to avoid all of those expenses, what if you made a permanent location? What if you made it so you weren't breaking it down, packing it up and shipping it to the next city? What if it just sat there? And that's when they started working on Netflix House, of which they have now released two. There's one in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and one in Dallas. Those are brick and mortar. They stay there essentially forever. There's a big Netflix logo on the front of the door, so it's not a Stranger Things Experience, it's a Netflix House. And once you go in there's food and beverage, there's retail, and then there's experiential within. So the Stranger Things Experience and the Squid Game experience live in Netflix House along with anything from arcades to retail to mini golf.
Walker: Similar to Dave and Buster's, similar to going to the Georgia Aquarium here. Something you can do with your family, with your friends, and spend the day. I think if you go to Disney World at this point with your family, you're not leaving for under 10 grand if you're staying for three days and going to all the parks. So this was supposed to be, hey, you can do this with Netflix stuff, and it's much more of a financially reasonable afternoon kind of experience, as opposed to a fly to Orlando four-day experience.
Only so many Vegases
Jeff: It probably gives you more control too. One of the things I noticed at the Stranger Things Experience is you could tell it was not a permanent installation. You had to sacrifice on a lot of the quality, because you're basically in a tent. Whereas if you build it in a house and it's a permanent structure, you could spend a little bit more to make it nicer.
Walker: Yes. But then if you're spending more and making it nicer, that's even more revenue you need to make on the flip side to balance the P&L. And I'm not at Netflix anymore. I certainly don't have any proprietary information about how those things are doing or how the numbers look.
Walker: But I do think there was a decision they had to make. Should these live in suburban markets, where what we're relying on is the same kind of people here in Atlanta who would go to the aquarium on the weekend? There are families that go to the aquarium two or three times a year and it's available as a weekend activity. I think there was a thesis that if you put these Netflix Houses in suburban markets, this would be repeat visitation. This would be people who live in the community going, hey, we need something to do on Friday night, let's go to Netflix House. Whether that has borne out is not for me to say.
Walker: The other model, and I know the next one they're releasing is in Vegas, is a little bit different of an expectation of visitorship. Because Vegas has such a tourist market, with people constantly flying in and flying back out, you wouldn't expect to rely there on locals. You'd essentially be relying on people who are there for the weekend, or there on a corporate event, or there with their families looking for something more wholesome than sitting in a casino to do with their kids.
Walker: The problem with Vegas, which is the exact problem the Sphere ran into, is that there's only so many Vegases in the world. There's only so many places that want a giant sphere, and only so many places that constantly have tourist markets like that coming in and out. You could do Dubai, you could do a few other of these heavily transient, heavily tourist markets. But they tried to do a Sphere in London and the Londoners said, hey, we don't want that on our landscape, it's not appropriate for the city. So similarly, you just only have so many different types of markets you can put a Netflix House in.
Walker: And if the suburban market doesn't work quite as well, this may be the kind of thing where they look at examples like Topgolf. Topgolf was a comp we used when we were at Netflix. And if you look at Topgolf now compared to the last five years, it was hyped for a while, it was doing really well, and then a lot of that revenue has fallen off. A lot of this post-COVID bump where everyone was super excited in 23 and 24 about going and doing in-person stuff again, that's flattened out. We see that on the music venue side too, very much, where tickets are not selling nearly as much as they did the last couple of years.
Walker: So it's an interesting and tough business, to try to attract people to spend their hard-earned dollars when everything is more expensive every day, and spend their time, and say, hey, on this day I'm going to get in my car, I'm going to spend my money, and I'm going to do it at this location. More and more it's hard to capture people's attention.
Super Canoe
Jeff: You're at Netflix for a good run and then you come back to Atlanta and you start Super Canoe. Talk about that transition back home.
Walker: Well, I didn't start Super Canoe. Super Canoe started in 2020 by my partners Drew Beskin, Stephen Payne, and our partner at that time, Tim Very. Tim was the drummer for the band Manchester Orchestra, and unfortunately passed away a few months ago, but continues to be our spiritual guide. Wonderful guy.
Tim Very died on 14 February 2026, at 42. He had been Manchester Orchestra's drummer since 2011, their longest-tenured, and played on Cope, A Black Mile to the Surface and The Million Masks of God.
Walker: From 2020 until I came in 2026, it was pretty solely a media production company. Stephen is an extremely talented videographer and photographer. So what they were doing at that time was a lot of music focused media production. Anything from filming a live performance, to an in-studio really well produced performance, to a stylized music video, the kind of thing you'd see on MTV back in the day. And some brand stuff, some non-music stuff, but it was pretty narrowly focused on music media production.
Walker: And when I was at Netflix I had been developing, on the side, solely on my own time, a docuseries concept which was also music focused. So when I had the conversation with Drew and Stephen about potentially coming back and joining Super Canoe full-time, the conversation was basically, okay, you're officially doing music media production, and I'm hoping to bring the docuseries I'm working on and slot that under that category.
Walker: But then separately, Drew managed a number of artists. He still does. He manages a bunch of artists in the Athens area. And then from our background, we all did a bunch of live event stuff. So my pitch to them was basically, I'll come back, I'll do all of the business side, unsexy nuts and bolts admin stuff that nobody else wants to do, just because that's kind of what I've made a niche of my career out of doing. Being in a creative lane but doing all the stuff the creatives don't want to do.
Walker: And then we can carve out these verticals within the company. So it's not just media production. It's Super Canoe over the top, and we have the media arm, the artist management arm, and the live events arm. Relaunch the website, reach back out to everyone that we know and say, hey, we're doing all of this, we package it under this thing.
Walker: Basically make a go of it and say, let's throw all of this stuff at the wall. Let's give it this year of 2026 and really try on all three of these sides. And I think it will reveal itself to us which of these things needs to become the main revenue driver as opposed to the side thing, or which is going to be the most profitable versus the most relationship value. Treat this year as kind of a test year.
Walker: It's been great. It's been crazy. It's very different certainly than sitting in my cubicle at Netflix and getting my bi-weekly paycheck. It's a lot more fun. It's a lot less lucrative for now. It's a lot more entrepreneurial and we're figuring it all out. But it's been exactly what I was hoping for. That was my favorite part of Netflix, when it felt like a startup. My favorite part of Zero Mile back in the day was the early days when we were just throwing everything at the wall. So I'm sort of back full circle again with another version of that.
The 98 percent nobody makes documentaries about
Jeff: You told me in a previous conversation about the documentary, which I thought was a really cool idea. Talk a little bit about what you're putting together.
Walker: We're putting together a docuseries that we hope will represent the 98 percent of the music industry that is not currently represented by anything you see on a streaming service or elsewhere. What I realized when I was at Netflix is that the vast majority of what is being made these days is either a Beyoncé documentary, or Taylor Swift, or Ed Sheeran. They do documentaries about whoever is the absolute top of the heap currently. And then they do a lot of documentaries about Led Zeppelin or the Who, legacy artists who are the biggest in the world. And to me neither of those categories represents 98 percent of the artists out there.
Walker: I've always been around a lot of developing bands. Club level, grinded out, touring, ticketing kind of folks who for the most part don't live a glamorous life but are putting it out there to get their music out there.
Walker: So this docuseries concept is, every episode focuses on one of these developing bands that are not going to be household names. It's not Noah, it's not Taylor Swift, it's Hefner, who I mentioned before, based out of Athens. And these guys are objectively great at music. They're figuring out this weird music industry. They're figuring out the economics of it. They're approaching age 30 and trying to make that same decision that I did back in the day about, is this something I can keep doing, or do I need to pivot to something that's more financially stable? And can my relationship survive this if I go on tour? And will I keep my day job?
Walker: Each episode will essentially be that artist and then the community they're from. So episode one, which we've produced ourselves and are finishing up editing now, is the band Hefner and Athens, Georgia. You see the modern music industry through the lens of these people who are really doing it and really trying to make a go of it. And then after that, the next episode might be a great artist from Charleston, or a great artist from Nashville. You can see the juxtaposition of small markets versus big markets. You could do a great artist in LA, a great artist in New York. But you could also do a great artist in Omaha, Nebraska. All these places that have music scenes but that your average music fan doesn't know anything about.
Walker: With the hope that in success this could be really repeatable. You do one season with eight artists, people really like the concept and they like learning about these new people, they like learning about new music, they like learning about new places, they like learning about the nuances of the weird music industry. There would be no reason why you couldn't do a season two and find eight more great artists. The one thing you're never going to run out of is these excellent new artists who are growing up now with GarageBand on their MacBooks from the day they can talk.
Walker: And the hope is that this is a relatively cost-effective production. You don't need much more than just meeting these people, doing some interviews, seeing them in their day in the life. And hopefully a repeatable concept that this could be the source people use to find new music.
Jeff: What's the show called?
Walker: Headliners.
Jeff: Nice. And can we see it? Is there a place you're going to stream it, or is it a YouTube show, or are you trying to do deals with cable channels or networks?
Walker: I think we're going to try it all. By the end of this month we should have our pilot episode done and ready, and it'll probably be a 30 to 40 minute episode. We've got a great pitch deck, we've got the whole thing, to see how we can fund the rest of the season. I think it could be anything from the traditional cable networks, it could be a streaming service thing, or it could be a YouTube show.
Walker: Which in this day and age, the way people are consuming media, especially younger generations, YouTube is, from when I was in high school, YouTube was this place with weird random videos. I've had to realign my understanding of the overall ecosystem to understand that YouTube is a very valid place, and if anything you have more creative control, you can monetize it more directly, and there's so many people using YouTube as their sole or main source of content. It's a great option and one we're definitely pursuing. But the hope would be that in some way, shape or form this thing would be out, at least episode one, by fall of this year, and then seeing what it looks like to produce the rest of the season.
Advice for young Walker
Jeff: Last question. What piece of advice would you give to young Walker Beard, maybe 15 to 18 years old, coming up trying to figure out life?
Walker: Even though I did make some somewhat bold moves in my career, leaving Home Depot in order to jump off the cliff and take a risk with the Georgia Theatre, I think was the most transformative thing I did in my career. Making that move brought me through Zero Mile. It brought me through AEG. It allowed me to get that Netflix job. That Netflix job allowed me to do what I'm doing now. And none of that would have happened had I not taken a pretty big risk leaving that Home Depot job.
Walker: But even still, it took me a while to make myself do that. I think there was a lot of expectation, having come from law school, that the correct path forward, the standard path that everyone follows, is that you finish law school, you go to a law firm, you're at the law firm for seven years, and then you make partner and then you're at the law firm for the rest of your life. And even though I knew that wasn't what I was going to do, there was still a lot of expectation that I felt. There was a lot of pressure, whether it was self-imposed or not, to hew to this path that is expected of you.
Walker: And the only way that I've had success is by not doing that. The only way I've been able to carve out this career is by allowing myself to resist that societal thing where it's like, you've got to do it this way, you've got to do it the same way as everybody else.
Walker: It was hard, especially before college, especially when I was 17 or 18. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I was very willing to just follow down the path of what was expected of me. So that would be the advice I'd give myself even back then. As soon as you can, as early as you can, just start listening to your own internal voice and resist whatever else is expected of you. Because the way to be happy in a career, and the way to have success in a career, is to do things that truly speak to you, as opposed to this thing you're begrudgingly doing because it's what whoever else is putting that impression on you.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Walker Beard?
Walker Beard is the CEO of Super Canoe, an Athens and Atlanta based company working across media production, artist management and live event production. He played in the Athens band the District Attorneys, holds a law degree from the University of Georgia, and helped build Zero Mile, the group behind the Georgia Theatre, Variety Playhouse, Terminal West and the Eastern, which later became AEG's southeastern regional office. He then spent four years in Los Angeles leading business and legal affairs for Netflix's Experiences team before returning to Georgia.
Why don't music venues make money?
Because most ticket revenue goes to the artist. Venues typically guarantee an artist a fee up front, and the artist generally receives 85 to 95 percent of ticket sales. The venue's margin comes mainly from alcohol, with a thinner margin on food. That means every show is a bet: if a guaranteed artist doesn't sell, the venue pays the guarantee anyway and loses money on the night. Walker Beard's point is that this cannot be fully derisked, which makes live music unusual among businesses.
What is the second mountain for musicians?
An analogy Walker Beard credits to a member of the Athens band Hefner. The first mountain is making the music, which is the part bands love. The second mountain is distribution: getting heard once the song is on streaming, which now means competing on TikTok and Instagram and effectively performing an influencer role. Many bands have the skills for the first mountain and neither the aptitude nor the appetite for the second.
How hard is it to break through as a band?
Harder than most artists assume. Walker Beard's experience at South by Southwest was that the number of bands at his level, meaning very good but not commercially successful, was closer to a thousand than the 25 he had imagined. He also points to genuine luck as a factor, citing an Athens-area band whose reach changed after SZA reposted a festival video with no caption and no prior connection.
What was the Netflix Experiences team?
A small internal group, four people when Walker Beard joined as its first dedicated lawyer in 2022, inside a company of roughly 15,000. Its remit was to prove the concept rather than to turn a profit, and it sat under the marketing organization on the thesis that in-person experiences would drive viewership. A theme park was ruled out from the start. The team produced the Stranger Things Experience and the Bridgerton Experience as touring installations before moving to permanent venues.
What is Netflix House?
Netflix's permanent brick and mortar entertainment venues, built to avoid the cost of repeatedly dismantling and shipping touring installations. Two have opened, in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and in Dallas. Each combines food and beverage, retail and experiential attractions, including the Stranger Things and Squid Game experiences, under Netflix branding rather than a single show's branding.
What is Headliners?
A docuseries in production at Super Canoe, built around developing artists rather than superstars or legacy acts. Each episode covers one band and the music community it comes from, with the pilot focused on the Athens band Hefner. Walker Beard's framing is that streaming documentaries cover the very top of the industry and its history, and almost nothing in between, which is where most working musicians actually are.
