Ed Spoto made the big leap from touring life launching a live sound biz with a booming concert segment.
Ed Spoto laughs at the question of whether or not he misses the touring life. “Not one bit,” he says with a hint of laughter. “I am one of the few people who does not miss the road. I spent 10 years of hard touring and it was time to come home, have children and all that.”
While Spoto got off the road, he did not get out of the audio business. In fact, along with two partners — Stewart Bennett and Robin Magruder — Spoto has been running Dallas-based Crossroads Audio since 2001. The trio purchased the company, which had been open since 1972, after leaving Showco where they had earned their stripes. Bennett is the only one still out on the road, touring with Tom Petty whenever he goes out.
Spoto admits that they’ve retooled the company over the years and Crossroads Audio now includes a retail outlet, concert services department and rental division. Why all three? “It helps smooth out all the lumps,” Spoto answers. “When the concert department is a little slow then we have the retail department to make up for that.”
From Dane Cook to Christian Festivals
That said, Crossroads Audio has a booming concert department that supplies live sound services to corporate events, music festivals and regional tours. Included in those categories are corporate shows featuring Reba McEntire and Rod Stewart, regional tours supporting Diana Krall, Dane Cook and a college tour featuring cartoons from the Adult Swim show, as well as stages at Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits Festival and the Big State Festival. It’s a good market, Spoto reports, especially since the company works from Dallas to Ft. Worth to Austin.
Crossroads also services one of the largest Christian music festivals in Dallas that takes place the weekend before the 4th of July. “We did 60 bands in two days,” Spoto says with a laugh. “There were 10 minute sets and two minute set changes.”
The company has also picked up a number of jobs at the large membership Christian churches that are popular in the area. “Some have 20,000 people a weekend go through and they tend to do outdoor festivals in their parking lots that are fairly large scale,” Spoto says. “The market for these guys is very high end; they are really only interested in upscale products, so it is kind of the religious one-off gig. There is a whole area of Christian tours where the Christian artists go from church to church and play in the sanctuaries. When the larger artist comes through, they need a fair amount of support because they usually don’t carry any gear at all.”
Other than the regional tours the company supports, Crossroads is not in the touring business. “We all come from touring backgrounds and it is just a market segment that doesn’t have a lot of return on investment,” Spoto says. “And to try to go up against Clair and those guys for accounts and nitpick here and there is just something we weren’t interested in doing. We wanted to do regional work. Now a lot of people are just getting stacks and racks for the region instead of taking full production with them. We do a lot of console rentals and that kind of thing.”
According to Spoto, Crossroads also doesn’t chase smaller events around town. “We don’t do a lot of the local festivals that are run by the city, because, quite frankly, there is not enough money in it,” Spoto explains. “There are a lot of sound companies in the Dallas area, so it ends up that we don’t even try for the smaller gigs. We put our eggs in corporate shows, festivals around the country and things that give a better return. One-offs, basically, but large-scale one-offs.”
Housing Versus Owning
In addition to sharpening the company’s marketing approach, the trio has improved Crossroad’s list of equipment. In fact, the PAS boxes that were in the inventory back in 2001 have been replaced by all things Meyer, including the M1D, M1D-Sub, M2D, MILO, MILO 120 and MICA lines along with UPJ-1P, 600-HP and 700-HP subs.
When it comes to consoles, Crossroads doesn’t own any large-scale boards. Rather, the company houses and maintains boards like Digidesign Venues, Yamaha PM5Ds, Midas Heritage H3000s and the like for other rental companies. “We house and maintain all the consoles for preferred rates. It’s so hard to rent [a large- scale console] enough to pay for it and to be able to return the investment on just using that console in a regional market is almost impossible,” he says. “This way, it keeps our overhead costs way down, but we are able to offer the client pretty much any console they want.”
As far as expanding beyond audio, Spoto says the company has mostly resisted any temptations so far. “It’s what we’re good at and it’s where our contacts are,” Spoto states. “We have been expanding as much as we have to into video products, but we pretty much stay away from lighting and sub that out to local companies that we have relationships with.”
Spoto points out that the company is always looking to expand its reach as well as its collection of gear, with a “measured pace.” At the same time, the Crossroads staff is fairly small — there are the three partners, a couple sales reps and a couple rental people. Spoto’s wife handles the books and the office management.
“Everybody else is an independent contractor,” he says. “We’ve become the Showco retirement home, which is an advantage because there are clients who want to see somebody old on their jobs. We have younger guys that we teach and bring up, then we send them off to Clair Bros. when they’re ready to tour.” He pauses and thinks back to his experience. “Then they come back to us when they’re tired of it.”
