Satellite of Love

Locals have noted for years that, when it comes to nationally touring bands, Memphis seems to be a kind of Bermuda Triangle. That storied oceanic region and its innumerable plane and boat disappearances is the closest analogy to the relative dearth of popular acts performing here. Somehow, they just disappear. 

Citizens supporting the Mid-South Coliseum sometimes claim that shuttering the landmark removed our most viable venue for big bands. And only last year, Jake Sanders, writing for the Flyer, asked it point-blank in his music feature, “Why Aren’t Big-Time Acts Coming to Memphis?”

Sherman Willmott, founder of Shangri-La Records, told Sanders that there is “a big empty hole that started with the death of Bob Kelley. Over that time period of the last 25 to 30 years, there’s been no full-service promotion in town.” The booking world here, Willmott added, is “monopolistic. There are very few providers.” And Willmott is not alone in mourning the loss of Kelley, who died in 1998. There’s a whole Facebook page dedicated to his former company called “Mid-South Concerts, when Memphis rocked,” which describes itself as “dedicated to all the Memphis & Mid-South area concert fans, local & touring musicians & artists, workers, producers, roadies, riggers, runners, groupies and most of all Bob Kelley.”

As it turns out, some of the people who felt the sting of the “big empty hole” found they had the means to do something about it. Now, on September 4th, the mid-sized venue they envisioned years ago, dubbed the Satellite Music Hall, will bring their dreams to fruition, and the slate of both local and national acts appearing there next month suggests that the booking void created by Bob Kelley’s passing may soon evaporate. 

Todd and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Todd Richardson, who co-founded and co-directed Crosstown Arts before becoming president and CEO of Crosstown Concourse in 2019, and the rest of the Crosstown Concourse leadership had had the Memphis music scene on their minds a long time. Of course, the concourse itself, with The Green Room at Crosstown Arts and the Crosstown Theater, was proof positive of that, having already made a significant impact on the depth and breadth of live music available here. Yet soon after the theater opened, they began imagining what an even larger venue in Crosstown’s orbit might look like. 

Soon, they began discussing the nuts and bolts of that vision with Ted Heinig, a longtime promoter based in Knoxville, Tennessee, who by then had become vice president of Live Nation Southeast. That group, led by the seemingly omnipresent Memphis philanthropist Staley Cates, began to see that bringing larger shows to the city might just be achievable. As Heinig recalls, “I’ve known Todd for a long time through friends in Memphis, and I think it was in 2019 that Staley and I had a conversation about the theater at Crosstown that they had built. He called me and we started talking about ways for the theater to continue to grow and be successful, and out of those conversations came the idea of building an additional venue to enhance the incredible spaces that the concourse already had.”

After that, Richardson began doing his homework. “Given everything we knew in terms of Memphis falling off the tour map,” he says, “I did kind of a back-of-the-napkin research project where I looked at Louisville, Raleigh, and Nashville, then looked at venues of around 1,500 in those cities, then looked at the bands that had played there over the previous year, and then looked at the tour schedules of all of those bands, and there were 220 unique artists and bands that played in those three venues in those three peer cities. Guess how many of those bands played in Memphis: 19 of 220.”

With that statistic on hand, the question soon became how to increase the numbers. “Part of getting Memphis back on the map is the number of shows,” Richardson says. And soon the goal became bringing 100 new performances a year, not just to Memphis, but to Crosstown specifically. “100 shows a year, high quality, state-of-the-art, where artists and bands remember their experience here. Not just because it’s Memphis with all our music history, but because of the facilities, the audience. You know, being across from Crosstown, imagine arriving where you’re going to play and being able to go to the Memphis Listening Lab, being able to play or do an interview on a radio station like WYXR beforehand, and being able to eat at a restaurant like Global Cafe before your show, then walk across the street to an apartment that’s dedicated to live musicians playing in the city. That’s a crazy unique experience, right?

“It was really about that programming and about a desire to put Memphis back on the map,” Richardson emphasizes. “And Ted informed us that a 1,500-capacity venue is about what you need for that many shows, to produce that kind of activity. We also wanted it to be a venue that local musicians could aspire to. Ted uses the word ‘cadence,’ and I really like that: a cadence of venues. The Green Room is 150-capacity, Crosstown Theater is 420 seats, and then Satellite Music Hall is a 1,300-capacity venue. And we can’t forget that down the street just two blocks is the Hi-Tone, and so between these four venues you’re almost getting live music every night in Crosstown and in the neighborhood, which is the ecosystem, right?” 

The vision of a band working its way through that ecosystem, starting at The Green Room, then eventually playing Crosstown Theater, the Hi-Tone, and Satellite Music Hall, is the vision of someone close to the local music scene, with that scene’s interests at heart. Yet that vision is in stark contrast to how most people think of Live Nation Entertainment.

The (Loaded) Elephant in the Room

When news of Satellite Music Hall was first announced, it inspired some skeptical comments from the city’s indie music world, as it became clear that Live Nation Entertainment would be operating the venue. That corporate juggernaut, which owns and operates Ticketmaster, among other things, would seem to be anathema to local bands, smaller venues, and scrappy little nonprofits like Crosstown Arts. After all, this is the company that only this April inspired the NBC News headline, “Documents reveal how Live Nation muscled venues, artists and rivals — even while under government scrutiny,” as the story’s lede assured readers “Facing antitrust allegation in a New York City courtroom this month, Live Nation has argued it is not a monopoly and does not strong-arm venues and artists.”

All ticketing policies aside, most of the outcry over Satellite (even before ground was broken on the site) centered on the simple fact of adding yet another venue to the city. As folk musician and promoter (and attorney/CPA) Bruce Newman puts it, “What I get concerned about is, we have our homegrown venues. We have GPAC and BPACC and the Orpheum, and we have our local theaters here, and the FedExForum, and you just wonder about splitting the pie. That’s my issue. And you look at the ‘for sale’ sign at Minglewood Hall, which I drive by every day, and I see these smaller venues struggling. I’ve served on almost every single one of these nonprofit music boards and I’ve seen what it takes to raise money just on the nonprofit side to keep venues open. So you just wonder: Are we splitting the pie in an economy here that I wouldn’t say is robust? It’s the opposite of robust. I think it’s a struggle. So that’s my concern, really: the splitting of the pie.”

On the consumer’s side, meanwhile, one could argue that putting Minglewood Hall up for sale would only exacerbate the Bermuda Triangle effect here. Even if mitigated somewhat by this year’s opening of Grind City Amp, which has quadruple the capacity of Minglewood, there would still be a midsize venue gap in the city. And, as Willmott told Sanders last year, “There’s no one with deeper pockets” than Live Nation, with resources to ride out rough patches in live attendance. Nor could many alternatives offer the touring and booking reach to draw larger bands to a market they typically avoid. 

For Richardson, Live Nation’s scale was actually a positive. “They’re going to produce, on average, 100 shows a year, and not just anybody can do that.” That partly comes down to Live Nation’s network of venues, and that network is only expanding, as Satellite is but one of 18 new venues Live Nation has committed to building, announcing a total investment of $1 billion in them last year.  That alone is a remarkable show of confidence in the live music market, even as others are turning their backs on it. “Live Nation’s wager underscores confidence that the post-pandemic surge in demand for shared experiences is far from over,” wrote TicketNews last year. In that context, Satellite seems a more modest project than Live Nation’s other planned venues, which more typically seat 3,000 to 6,000 people.

Memphis A.F.

Live Nation’s overwhelming resources notwithstanding, Satellite Music Hall stands in stark contrast to its other projects. The degree to which Satellite represents a collaboration between Live Nation and Crosstown Concourse makes it unique, and somewhat immune to the entertainment conglomerate’s financial whims. The building itself is owned by Crosstown Concourse and leased to Live Nation, and Richardson and local architects archimania had much say in the final design. Ultimately, it was a shared vision, as Heinig notes. “We really wanted Satellite to be part of the neighborhood. We decided on the 1,300-capacity size partly because we embraced blending in and being a great neighbor and part of the neighborhood. The size of the building felt like it was part of the neighborhood rather than just being too big and really sticking out.”

Richardson notes how Satellite’s design was meant to echo the semi-industrial chic of Crosstown itself, even as its brick walls complement the older homes surrounding it. The building’s profile, meanwhile, steps down to street level, with the front being a single floor in height, despite the cavernous ceilings of the venue inside. Beyond that, a commitment to local music both old and new informs the entire project. That’s partly due to Heinig sharing Richardson’s vision, having cut his teeth on the local Knoxville market for most of his career, first managing a band that regularly played Memphis in the ’90s, then running increasingly larger clubs in Knoxville since then, before selling his promotion company to Live Nation in 2020. Even now, he sees the corporation as the best way to pursue his very local dreams. 

“Live Nation has been the greatest thing that’s ever happened in my career,” says Heinig, “and I feel really, really blessed just to be a part of it. It’s got the leadership and the resources to really enable someone like me who’s got a lot of ideas. I want to go out and make communities better and find partners like Todd and Staley, where we’re really pouring ourselves into a project that we think is going to make people’s lives hopefully a lot better.”

That includes local bands, of course. “Opening the venue with The Band Camino was intentional and really important to us,” says Heinig. “We wanted to have a Memphis band open the room, and they’re doing a live recording and a filming of the two shows now, which is super exciting. Valerie June will be playing the Satellite on September 17th, and her support act will be Vaneese Thomas, who’s also from Memphis; and then we’ve got Project Pat at the end of the month. So we’re working really hard to find Memphis bands that will play the venue as part of the grand opening, and then anytime we can utilize a local Memphis band to support another artist that’s coming in, we really want to do that, too.”

Indeed, there could be no better expression of Satellite’s commitment to both national and local acts than the double bill of Valerie June, who parlayed her years playing Bluff City coffee shops and the like into an international touring career, and Vaneese Thomas, sister of the great Carla Thomas, daughter of Rufus, who also grew up here before finding greater success working out of New York. Now, those two locals-made-good have the incentive and the capacity to return home in style. 

For her part, June is filled with anticipation. “When my agent called and said, ‘Val, there’s going to be a new venue in the Crosstown area of Memphis, and they would like for you to be one of the first artists there because of your connection with the city’s history and music.’ And I was like, ‘What? Yeah, that sounds great!’ I have played some Live Nation venues over the years, and so I’m thrilled when I see the season that they have in store. I’m like, ‘I’m gonna be catching some shows there when I’m in my tiny house!’”

Beyond attracting big-name performers, or uplifting the scene with those 100 shows a year, or bringing more commerce to the Crosstown neighborhood by virtue of those shows, Satellite Music Hall is also cultivating its Memphis roots in deeper, less-visible ways. The name itself is an homage to the original name of Stax Records and the record store that always occupied its storefront. But, like the Soulsville Foundation itself, paying respect to Stax goes beyond mere nostalgia. 

Isaac Daniel, Stax Music Academy’s executive director, may be more excited than anyone about Satellite’s grand opening. “We always knew Live Nation was coming, and we’re going to partner with them and give our students opportunities in conjunction with them. Live Nation will be doing certifications with our students for workforce development, where students will actually be getting certified on stuff like Pro Tools, Dante, Logic, and other behind-the-scenes stuff.”

The impact on those students should prove to be considerable, and that’s just what Heinig wants. All corporate interests aside, he’s driven by a deep sense of the community that’s hosting the new venue, a community he’s known for decades. And his personal knowledge of the city has made all the difference. “Each market is really like its own unique ecosystem,” Heinig says. “And it takes a really excellent local partner like Todd to come in and work together to understand how to create a venue that’s going to be a great asset for the entire community, and to start to move the live music community and music fans in a really positive trajectory. We want to provide Memphis with a music venue the city deserves, one we felt Memphians would be super proud of.” 

Satellite’s Fall Schedule 2026

Sept. 4th & 5th – The Band Camino

Sept. 8th – Chance The Rapper – Coloring Book 10 Year Anniversary Tour

Sept. 11th – Isaiah Rashad: Lil Sunny’s Awful Road Trip

Sept. 12th – Bop To The Top

Sept. 17th – Valerie June with Vaneese Thomas

Sept. 18th – Judah & the Lion

Sept. 19th – Houndmouth

Sept. 22nd – GWAR

Sept. 25th – Club ’90s Presents: MJ Night

Sept. 26th – Project Pat

Oct. 1st – Umphrey’s McGee

Oct. 11th – Ravyn Lenae Presents: Blue Island

Oct. 12th – Modest Mouse

Oct. 13th – Ryan Bingham & the Texas Gentlemen

Oct. 16th – Grief Sucks: A One Man Show by Kevonstage

Oct. 18th – Mastodon

Oct. 23rd – We Came As Romans

Oct. 24th – The Emo Night Tour

Oct. 27th – Iron & Wine

Nov. 4th – Prof

Nov. 7th – Fetty Wap: Nostalgia Tour

Nov. 9th – Bowling for Soup

Nov. 12th – Medium Build Presents The King of Having Fun on Tour

Dec. 1st – Pouya