How the Acrisure Arena Became an Unlikely Desert Oasis for Music Fans

Is there such a thing as… an intimate arena? That may seem like the type of oxymoron that could only belong to the show-biz hype lexicon. But plenty of southern Californians would swear that it’s true, once they’ve been to the Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, which in its three years open has turned into a sort of destination venue for music fans who like to see a superstar tour in a venue that’s just a little less than super-sized. That holds true not just for the local population of Coachella Valley residents but concertgoers from Los Angeles and even farther afield who, for now, consider it an almost well-kept secret of an alternative venue for certain tours. It’s worth a couple of hours on the freeway, for some, to see a Paul McCartney in a place where no seat counts as a nosebleed.

“It’s kinda like the three little bears,” says John Page, senior VP of Acrisure Arena and the Coachella Valley Firebirds, the hockey team that plays there when Blink 182 isn’t. At a concert capacity of about 10,000 — about a third bigger than the Greek, but smaller by at least a third than the Forum, Crypto, Intuit Dome or Hollywood Bowl — “it’s not too big and it’s not too small.”

But what’s in it for the artists who deign to perform a show there, in addition to the larger SoCal markets? For starters, there’s just the ability to squeeze in one that’s just far enough from L.A. to not fall afoul of radius clauses for those other arenas. But more significantly, for some artists, there’s the ability to start a tour there and have rehearsals for days ahead of time in a place that — to borrow the three bears language, again — is not too far away from but also not too close to the watchful eyes of Los Angeles.

Some of that was coming into play in September when the Acrisure Arena had a busier-than-usual period of what it called its “magnificent seven.” Over a two-week period, the venue put on what was the official tour opening for McCartney and the official tour closing for the Who (the latter’s final U.S. show ever, supposedly) in a matter of three days, providing strong evidence that the Palm Springs area offers the kind of creature comforts that make it appealing to hang around either right before or right after a major tour. In that same two-week time span, the arena also was the home for two Blink 182 concerts, a Maroon 5 show, a pre-season game for the Los Angeles Lakers, and the home season opener for the Firebirds, who are effectively the house band for the venue.

In attracting top-name talent for a venue just a little off the beaten track, it has not hurt that one of the principals in this Oak View Group development is veteran manager-mogul Irving Azoff, whose early bookings of a couple of his own clients there — the Eagles and Harry Styles — surely acted as bait for other A-listers to know that they could do potential sellouts there, too.

On the night of McCartney’s show at the Acrisure, Azoff is holding court with a reporter alongside the backstage mini-mini golf course that is part of the Silvercrest Artist Compound lounge, which basically is this arena’s equivalent of the Forum Club. He’s explaining the origins of the place.

“I’ve had a house here for many, many, many years and own a golf course with my partner here, and it’s been my winter place,” Azoff is saying. “So I know it well, and it just felt like the Coachella Valley was underserved. There became an opportunity to do something with the American Hockey League team, the B-team for the Kraken, who have been wildly successful. I think we’ve been pretty much the highest-grossing and attended American Hockey League team for three straight years. So the market supports it. The Lakers love to come down here for preseason and it sells right out. We do college football in November — Michigan State, Arizona, that rivalry. And then for concerts, you don’t make as much money here as you might at a stadium in L.A., but it’s a great stop for people. The building looks great, it sounds great…

He is interrupted by a visitor — his client, John Mayer. The rock star, suddenly aware that it’s an interview situation he’s stepped into, just takes over as formal interlocutor for a minute.

“To what do you attribute this success right now you’re having at the arena?” Mayer asks, playing reporter. “It’s not in L.A. Do you think that Coachella has had something to do with sort of priming people’s minds? Has the Coachella trip sort of embedded that in the culture, coming out to Palm Springs to see a show?”

Azoff is too amused to answer until Mayer takes his leave, but yes, he agrees, the answer was embedded in the musician’s question, or at least part of it was. “We get people from L.A., and San Diego’s just as close, as you know, and we get some Phoenix…” And beyond. “People like to travel, as the phenomenon people traveling for a Taylor Swift show proved, that the fans will come to you. And first of all, it’s the best winter weather in the country here, so people who come for a concert aren’t all coming just to go to a concert. There’s a lot to do down here.”

Page, interviewed separately, says the geotargeting can be wildly different from show to show (or sporting event to sporting event). “It varies. The first show that we really dug into on this was Harry Styles. When we pulled our purchase metrics, I think it was between 3-5% of the purchasers for the two shows were from the Coachella Valley. And then the balance were from all over the place. We had 3-5% international buyers, as well.” On the opposite end of that scale, “certain events like our Latin/Hispanic shows are, I would say, 90% local.”

What’s the attraction for out-of-towners, besides the chance to budget time to stay over one or two nights at a place with a nice pool (and maybe a date shake at Hadley’s on the way)? Even for those who plan to make the trip from the greater L.A. area or back without a hotel stay — maybe most of all for those who don’t have a mini-vacation as part of the plan — there’s just the mere fact that a tour that may be sold out or only have terrible or pricy seats left “in town” may have better and more affordable tickets in Palm Desert.

…And, that once inside, first-timers are inevitably surprised by how un-vast the auditorium feels, compared to Crypto, Intuit, et al. Describing it as living-room-like might be a stretch, but there’s no doubt that everyone who enters who’s used to the size and scope of major tours in L.A. knows they are benefitting from being in a secondary market that’s thisclose to a metropolis.

The difference in scale is part-real, part illusory. The Acrisure Arena has the same basic footprint as those bigger arenas. It just basically has what you’d consider the loge level as the only level, above the floor. (There’s a row of suites on top that has its own concourse and dining and seats 800 high-rollers, but it’s almost easy to miss.)

Azoff explains how this size and shape came to be, partly out of practicality for this being a smaller market, and partly for other reasons.

“There’s not a bad seat in this house,” Azoff explains, “because, ostensibly, it’s two-thirds of an arena. It’s just that we didn’t put the third deck on, because we didn’t think the demand was there. Well, we couldn’t have gotten permission to, anyway,” he adds, slightly correcting himself, “because it’s in a flight lane. Unless we wanted to dig the building down, that’s as high as we could build.” One man’s zoning restriction is another man’s intimacy-maker.

It would stand to reason that, with attendance necessarily cut down by a third or more from the biggest venues in L.A., tickets might need to cost more for everyone to meet their nut. But looking at ticket prices doesn’t necessarily bear that out. At least, there can be a lower-get-in-the-door cost than at L.A. shows, even if things tend to even out up top. One factor cited by some sources is a lack of union costs that affect ticket prices in major markets. There’s also a desire to look at the wide range of working-class to upper-upper-class residents in the Coachella Valley and have a price point for everyone, to fill the seats.

“Even though we’re smaller,” says Page, “sometimes we have more price levels than some venues of our size just because they want to make sure that there’s enough pricing disparity to cover the people from Indio or Coachella as well as the people that are living in some of these country club communities in Indian Wells, La Quinta and Rancho Mirage. Everybody has really gathered enough information, now that we are going into our fourth year, so that they can create the right pricing dynamic so that everybody wins and, at the end of the day, everybody has an opportunity to get a fair-price ticket to see a first-rate artist. … You’ve got tremendous wealth in many cases (in the area). And then you’ve got an incredible blue-collar workforce that just loves to have an arena in their marketplace where they don’t have to drive two hours to see first-rate entertainment or sporting events. So, we punch above our weight in ability to take a gross to make sure that we can take care of a Harry Styles guarantee or a Paul McCartney date or the Who or having two Blink 182 shows.”

Latin-focused entertainment, which, as noted above, draws more significantly from the Valley than most other types of shows, is a significant draw.

“We just had Ana Gabrielle last month, second time through the marketplace, and she sold more tickets this time than the first time,” says Page. “We’ve had Peso Pluma two times. We just put Ricardo Arjona on sale. We’ve had a wide variety of Latin artists, some that of that new genre of music coming up, and then some of the older artists that have got such a tremendous following, like Los Tigres Del Norte.” Palomazo Norteño just performed, and the schedule for upcoming shows includes Jorge Medina and Josi Cuén.

It also includes Duran Duran, Cardi B, Tate McRae and “Gabby’s Dollhouse Live.” And hockey. Lots and lots of hockey.

“Hockey in the desert” was considered a folly by some prior to opening, but as it turns out, there are a lot of “snowbirds” from Canada as well as the northern U.S. who are happy to buy season tickets and get cold for just a couple of hours a night and that’s it. (Beyond all the aforementioned demographics, the arena’s operators also count on drawing patrons from Riverside and the Inland Empire, who, faced with the choice of driving an equal distance to L.A. to the west or Palm Springs to the east, might favor the show or game with the least traffic at the point of destination.)

Proof-of-concept came when the arena did $36 million in gross ticket sales in its first six months after opening in December 2022.

Says Page, “Our first three seasons, we’ve been the leader for the most part in most of the metrics that the American Hockey League recognizes — season ticket revenue, paid attendance. We’ve been number one or two in total attendance from the start and the inception of this team. But we’re constantly changing and evolving as well. For most (locals), we were starting to really understand that their threshold was coming to 36 games. So we made some really nice changes for our fans, like having intentional game plans. We’ve made some adjustments on our parking prices. We’re actually going to a 6:30 p.m. start for our weekday games, to really kind of give the families an opportunity to get here early and get home so they get their kids to bed, or, if you’re from an older demographic, you can get home before 10 now.”

“Our analysis from a hockey perspective” was valuable for overall planning, says Page. “If you look at just the static population here between the nine communities, it’s approximately 500,000. And when you compare us to the rest of the American Hockey League, we’re the third-smallest market. But from 500,00 permanent residents, this market doubles to north of a million people once you get into the end of October through the 1st of May. So summertime’s slow, but even then there’s still this great core people that are desiring entertainment, and we’re providing that. But when it swells, it’s a completely different animal. It truly morphs for that five- to six-month period. So it’s a real interesting market that we’re constantly learning more about all the time.”

The off-season is when it’s best for someone like a McCartney to come in and build in time for set-up and rehearsals for an entire tour. He’s not the first to do so; Olivia Rodrigo did the same, rehearsing and starting her first arena tour here at the beginning of 2024. The building isn’t so busy, if hockey isn’t around, that they can’t turn the venue over to a superstar for a bit for whatever they need to do, in a lot of cases.

“When we began discussions a couple years ago about the potential to have Sir Paul here at the building, we went through all the amenities and providing enough time for them to come in and do technical rehearsals, band rehearsals, whatever it may be,” Page says. “We carved out a full week, and even a couple days after the date, just so that they could have enough time to do what they needed on the front end and take their time on the back end, whether that was loading trucks or going through some of the technical aspects of the tour so they could have everything buttoned up before they went onto their next stop. So, we want to accommodate as much as we can.”

Azoff also emphasizes what a nice landing spot it makes for artists about to go visit an intinerary’s worth of places with fewer creature comforts to come. “As a manager,” he says, “I just give everybody the building to rehearse. If the days are dark, just take it. Costs here are way lower, and the ambience is great. Even though it’s a smaller building, you can hang your full production. Like, Paul’s production is the same production he’ll hang in Vegas at Allegiant Stadium a few nights later. So it’s a great, great place to start.”

As for the Coachella connection… there isn’t one, apart from, as Mayer said, getting all of Los Angeles and its surroundings used to the driveability of the area. They’d like to change that, down the road.

“Our biggest issue with respect to radius clauses is the two Coachellas and Stagecoach,” says Page. “We get into that time period now that they’ve announced the Coachella and Stagecoach participants. We try to kind of counterprogram around that. We’d love to do more with Paul Tollette and AEG on that. But, you know, it is what it is. We understand what they’ve created, and we want to be here if they want to look at putting something in here as well during that timeframe.”

Although the venues aren’t on the same scale, there is casino competition, particularly from the Yaamava’ midway between L.A. and Palm Springs in Highland, which offers a really intimate experience for fans of some of the acts who play arenas, with limited enough seating that the get-in-the-door price can be more daunting. Says Page, “We firmly believe that you can play a Yaamava’ Theater and then play the Acrisure Arena as well. It’s one plus one is three in my mind, for the artists that can do two (extra) play dates and not skip a market. Those are things that, going into our fourth year, we will continue to push and explain to people and hopefully get them on board with their routing and touring programming.”

Azoff wishes the area around the Acrisure had more of the development they foresaw, but there have been snags in that. “There’s been a couple false starts on people building sound stages down here, and recording studios. It’s really hard to develop stuff down here. There’s real problems getting power and infrastructure, because it’s exploded. There’s been an inability to develop around the arena because you can’t get entitlements here because there’s flood plane issues, there’s power issues. You know, we would’ve built more. There should have been a hotel here already, and we would’ve built out rehearsal spaces.

“But,” he says, not to complain, “this thing’s here to stay. It’s great.” And if there’s a lack of development immediately surrounding the arena, still? It only makes it seem more oasis-like, which is the feeling a lot of desert travelers will have once they step inside from the heat to see a Beatle in a very sub-Shea Stadium situation.