After record year, Premier Center could be positioned for more concerts, campus growth

It’s 8:30 Saturday night, and there’s barely an open seat to be spotted in the Denny Sanford Premier Center.

Tipoff for the SDSU men’s basketball first-round game in the Summit League tournament has drawn a crowd of more than 8,600 fans — some who began the day waiting in the hall of the Sioux Falls Convention Center before the doors even opened.

“I’m hoping people will come out to enjoy good basketball,” said Mike Krewson, general manager of the three facilities on the Premier Center campus managed by ASM Global.

“We have a new court design, and we’re excited. Last year was a perfect year for us. We had great matchups from the state schools into the semis and finals that contributed to near-record numbers and certainly record numbers on the food and beverage side. We’re hoping we can pass those with an extra day of basketball, but the state schools drive the attendance.”

Attendance is everything in the world of arenas, and 2022 wasn’t a good year just for basketball at the Premier Center.

The venue set records for revenue and profitability, drawing more than 673,000 visitors to concerts, sports and special events.

“We had a great year,” Krewson said. “And we should be as strong or stronger from the concert perspective as last year.”

Sioux Falls increasingly is proving it can fill seats for concerts, with concert revenue up 6 percent in 2022 thanks to shows from Morgan Wallen, Eric Church, Snoop Dogg, Backstreet Boys, Pentatonix and Thomas Rhett.

That moved the Premier Center up to No. 129 worldwide based on average gross revenue for events other than sports, according to Pollstar, which also reported the industry experienced a 12 percent reduction in ticket sales last year compared with 2019. Average gross revenue was down 1 percent.

More than 30 percent of ticket buyers at the Premier Center were from surrounding states.

“We sell a lot of tickets out of Sioux City,” Krewson said. “It’s an hour away, but we look at that and outside that 50-mile window, (and) we will draw people based on our geography.”

It all helps in talking with concert promoters, though there still are hurdles in booking more shows.

For one, there are fewer.

“Country is heavy everywhere. It’s an easy sell for promoters, and it sells,” Krewson said. “It’s an easy lift to bring country here.”

Still, the venue is “always trying to fight that perception” that country and classic rock are the only shows that sell in Sioux Falls, he said.

And even in the classic rock genre, “they’ve had people pass away, or for health reasons they’re doing less dates,” Krewson said. “They used to do 50, and now they’re doing 30, and we’re a market of 200,000 competing with markets close to 1 million. When you look at it that way, we’re doing a heck of a job.”

This year already brought a sold-out Blake Shelton concert, and upcoming shows include Journey, Kane Brown, Kenny Chesney, Brooks & Dunn and Matchbox Twenty.

Later in the year, the country theme continues with Zach Bryan, Jason Aldean, The Chicks and Luke Bryan. Others are yet to be announced.

“It probably appears that we always get six country shows all at once, or we get this influx of family shows and sporting events or the Summit … but because the way the touring cycles work, a lot of artists don’t want to tour Midwest markets in late fourth quarter, early first quarter,” said Jered Johnson, president and CEO of Pepper Entertainment.  “Weather cancellations, trucking, buses, logistics, they want to stay south or west.”

Balance that with the demands of other events in venues, and “you only have so many dates and a limited window to try to get availability to line up with the rest of the country to get Sioux Falls on the routing, so naturally you’re going to see peaks in that window of multiple similar-genre shows,” he said.

“Our sales in Sioux Falls specifically have been very strong. It’s a healthy market. Disposable income. Still fairly reasonable for living. We’ve got the corridor of I-90 and 29, so everything west to Denver comes here or east to Minneapolis or Chicago, Detroit comes here and southbound to Omaha and Kansas City and St. Louis, so we’re perfectly located for artists to stop and play.”

As convention business swells, planning restarts

At the Sioux Falls Convention Center, this year already is trending up “tremendously,” Krewson said.

“Last year, we set a record for rental revenue in the history of the Convention Center … and for 2023 we are over 100 percent of our budgeted number as far as rental revenue already, and we’re not even into March yet, which means there’s not a lot of dates left to book this year. We constantly run into that trying to move stuff around to make it fit, or we have to turn business away.”

National or regional meetings that came to Sioux Falls during the height of the pandemic because the facilities were open have rebooked and referred business, he said.

“And that’s just continuing. I think it’s, selfishly, the job we do here, and our food is top quality and the way we treat clients when they do come, they want to come back or they tell friends.”

The demand is supporting the city’s ongoing effort to study the future of the Premier Center campus. A marketing consultant is being hired to forecast out 20 years ahead of recommendations surrounding what Krewson dubbed “the iconic Sioux Falls Arena” and Canaries Stadium.

The Sioux Empire Home Show is one of several events that uses the Sioux Falls Arena.

The hope is for a report by the end of the summer.

“So we can hopefully take that and potentially look at an architect and go, ‘This is what we need to start doing,’ and some of the accoutrements we need to incorporate in a new space. For me, that’s exciting.”