Colorado Springs music venue secures new naming rights | Arts & Entertainment
After a five-year run, Boot Barn has gotten the boot at a live music venue and event center on Colorado Springs’ north side.
Boot Barn Hall at Bourbon Brothers, named for the Western apparel retailer, is being rebranded as the Phil Long Music Hall at Bourbon Brothers under a new naming rights deal announced Wednesday by Colorado Springs-based Phil Long Dealerships and VENU, the local entertainment company formerly known as Notes Live and the facility’s owner and developer.
VENU and Phil Long officials declined to disclose financial terms of the deal, which they said is for five years.
“Phil Long has been kind of providing some geographic connectivity for 80 years in Colorado,” said Kevin Shaughnessy, president and CEO of the longtime new and pre-owned vehicle dealership. “We’ve been connecting Coloradans through mobility, helping people get with each other and get where they need to be. We really think that the Boot Barn Hall, soon to be the Phil Long Music Hall, is a place where communities can connect. We want to support communities and we’ve done that in other ways as well.”
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Boot Barn Hall opened in 2019 next to the Bourbon Brothers Smokehouse & Tavern restaurant — also owned by VENU — as part of an entertainment complex in the Polaris Pointe development, southwest of North Gate Boulevard and Voyager Parkway.
The 15,000-square-foot indoor Boot Barn Hall, which also has a 7,000-square-foot patio, has hosted concerts, corporate gatherings, public meetings and parties, among other events. It can hold up to 1,000 people and has averaged more than 200 events a year, VENU officials say. Country singers Randy Travis, Josh Turner and Easton Corbin are among the many acts that have performed there.
JW Roth, VENU’s chairman, founder and CEO, said his original five-year naming rights deal with Boot Barn was expiring this year and he chose not to renew it.
He called Boot Barn a great company and partner, with good people.
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“We loved Boot Barn,” Roth said, adding that the retailer “stuck with us all way through COVID. You can’t beat partners like that.”
Still, Roth said he wanted to expand the types of music and performers at the hall. The Boot Barn name, however, gave it a reputation as a home for mostly country acts, though other performers played there, too.
“When people think of Boot Barn Hall … unless you know the hall and unless you know what we do there, you would have a tendency to immediately think it was all country music,” Roth said.
“We’re trying to broaden the genres of the hall to include more than just country music, to include more than just event rentals, to include more than just corporate functions,” he added. “We want to bring some other genres of music into the hall. The renaming to Phil Long Music Hall was important in that regard, too.”
Boot Barn officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Gazette. Based in Southern California, the retailer bills itself as the nation’s “leading lifestyle retailer of Western and work-related footwear, apparel and accessories for men, women and children,” according to company news releases. Boot Barn has 425 brick-and-mortar stores in 46 states, including two in Colorado Springs.
Beyond wanting to change up the venue’s music offerings, Roth said a major reason for the new naming rights deal was a relationship he’s established with Phil Long officials.
Founded in 1945, Phil Long describes itself as Colorado’s largest privately held automotive group with more than 4,000 new and used vehicles. It has locations in Colorado Springs, Denver, Glenwood Springs, Trinidad and Raton, N.M.
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Roth said his relationship with Phil Long grew this year when about 40 Ford dealerships in Colorado, including Phil Long, agreed to a naming rights deal for the 8,000-seat outdoor amphitheater that VENU developed and opened in August at Polaris Pointe and within walking distance of the music hall. Originally called the Sunset, that facility is now known as the Ford Amphitheater.
Shaughnessy, the dealership’s president and CEO, said he served on a committee with other Ford dealers as they decided whether to invest in the amphitheater.
“Through the process of going through that, I became aware of these guys (VENU) and I shared with our team that it would be nice to do something probably on a little different scale,” Shaughnessy said. “Phil Long is smaller than Ford for sure, but when this (music hall naming rights) became available, we decided to try and find a way to make it work out. And we did. I’m very glad for that.”
Phil Long already had been a customer of the music hall, using it for some of its company events, Roth said. But talks about the amphitheater’s naming rights, he said, elevated VENU’s dealings with Phil Long, especially Shaughnessy and Mark Barton, the dealership’s general manager.
“We really got to know Kevin and Mark,” Roth said. “Just a great relationship formed. We have a lot of the same way of thinking. All things being equal, while the money (for the naming rights) is important and while the compensation for it is important, I think the relationship in this particular case is more important.”
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One provision of the naming rights deal that Roth and Shaughnessy shared: Phil Long has provided a pair of 2024 Lincoln Navigators for use as event vehicles to transport artists and VIPs to and from the music hall.
“We’ll swap those out in a couple years for a couple brand new vehicles,” Shaughnessy said. “They won’t be 5 years old at the end of the term. We’re going to keep them in some fresh, new Lincolns.”
Naming rights deals have become common over the last several decades as corporate sponsors pay to have their names and logos placed on sports facilities, municipal arenas and concert and music halls. In general, a venue owner and operator gains financially from a naming rights deal, while the company that buys the rights boosts its name recognition and exposure.
The naming rights deal with Phil Long is only for the music hall in Colorado Springs, Roth said.
A deal with Boot Barn for a venue that his entertainment company opened in Gainesville, Ga., about an hour’s drive northeast of Atlanta, still has two more years to run and will continue to carry the retailer’s name, he said.
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