Colorado live music economy hits $500m with new venues
Colorado live music economy hits $500m with new venues
Live music brings in $500 million a year in Colorado. If you ask J.W. Roth, there’s still room to grow.
Eric Peterson // September 24, 2025
The founder and CEO of Colorado Springs-based VENU Holding Corporation (NYSE American: VENU), Roth is a fifth-generation Coloradan and serial entrepreneur who caromed from biotechnology to prepared foods to real estate development to venture capital before he parlayed his passion for music into VENU in 2017.
Roth says he’s building a new model in the concert business that takes a page from professional sports. “I started VENU because I saw a gap in the live entertainment industry,” he says. “While industries like Major League Baseball and the NFL had spent years refining every detail of the fan experience, maximizing dwell time, enhancing amenities and creating unforgettable moments, the music industry hadn’t caught up. The level of intentionality just wasn’t there.”
The $130 million, 8,000-seat Ford Amphitheater on the north side of Colorado Springs has been the standard bearer for this vision since it opened in August 2024. Roth says his experience as a rock fan (he’s an avid vinyl and guitar collector whose first date with his wife was a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert) informed the venue’s design. At Ford Amphitheater, that means wider seats and aisles, lower ticket prices and 130 Luxe FireSuites, luxury suites with fire pits and dedicated restrooms. VENU has already sold 90 of them for $250,000 apiece.
The missing piece
Levitt Pavilion Denver strikes a balance between bar sales and community support. The Denver offshoot of a national nonprofit, the 6,500-capacity outdoor venue opened in Denver’s Ruby Hill Park in 2017. The construction budget was about $5 million.
“Levitt really exists in this space between the larger music venues that are typically for-profit enterprises and a nonprofit, mission-driven model,” says Meghan McNamara, the venue’s executive director. “Most music venues of our size, with our production capacity, are for-profit organizations, and I think what we offer the community is something that is often missing from a lot of music markets.”
The missing piece was “an accessible, all-ages venue where the programming looked a little bit different,” says McNamara. “Ninety percent of what we do each season is free to the public, but concessions and rental and a couple of our own ticketed shows really help create a robust earned revenue stream that a lot of arts organizations are struggling with.”
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