Everybody wants to see their favorite R&B artist live. But in this economy, with these prices, with artists dropping new tours left and right!? Unfortunately, not everybody can afford to.
Broccoli City founder Brandon McEachern created Holding Hands: An R&B Experience to solve that very problem. The new event debuts September 19 at Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, Virginia (about 45 minutes outside Washington, D.C.), with Summer Walker, KWN, Elmiene, and Destin Conrad on the bill, and tickets as low as $25 to $39.
Yes, for the cost of a week’s worth of coffee.
McEachern got the idea watching the day party circuit charge $100, sometimes $150, for a DJ half the crowd couldn’t name. “Y’all are paying this?” he exclaimed, still sounding a little stunned by it months later. That frustration is what led to Holding Hands. He wanted to create something community-forward, without assuming everyone in the crowd has $200 to spend to come out and listen to the music they love.
That vision for community comes with a bill somebody has to pay, and it isn’t the fans. “We definitely still have to pay these artists their rate and respectfully,” McEachern said. The gap comes out of Broccoli City’s own margin. What makes it possible, he said, are partners like AT&T, and he credited them directly for absorbing a chunk of what it takes to hold the line on price.
Partners like that are rarer than they used to be. Corporate money for Black cultural events has thinned considerably over the past few years, even though the audiences behind those events haven’t gone anywhere. McEachern chose his words carefully here, unwilling to call out any brand by name, but it wasn’t hard to read between the lines: a budget that supposedly doesn’t exist for one event has a way of reappearing for a similarly…
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