Beyond the Spotlight
Beyond the Spotlight
Ep. 025: Jen Kellogg - Tour Accountant / Educator
Jen Kellogg has spent over 25 adventurous years in the concert industry as a roadie, educator and entrepreneur. Sometimes she’s one part of the large machine that gets a huge show on stage for an arena full of excited fans. Other times she’s teaching the next generation of our industry so they can further their own careers.
She began road life in 2004 with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson in minor league baseball parks across America as part of a talent buying team at Jam Productions. In addition to three summers with Bob and Willie, she was also part of ballpark tours with Def Leppard and Bryan Adams and the Counting Crows. The other seasons each year were filled with more traditional talent buying work at Jam Productions for theatres and arenas throughout the midwest. Turns out Jen is a roadie at heart, so she left the full time talent buyer position to become a freelance tour accountant.
From 2009 - 2017 Jen was the tour accountant for the Vans Warped Tour. The legendary punk rock summer camp typically featured 80+ bands on 8+ stages, 22 production busses, hundreds of production employees and a very, very large volume of cash. In addition to settling the shows with the promoters, she handled all band payments, production payroll and per diems, bus floats, vendor deposits and more.
Since 2013, Jen has taught Producing and Touring Live Entertainment at Columbia College Chicago as Adjunct Faculty. It’s a 15 week, 3 credit hour course that focuses on all aspects of putting together a tour. Teaching at Columbia got Jen comfortable speaking in front of an audience, and led her to speak at a number of highly respected national events like Pollstar Live and SXSW and smaller regional conferences such as Yellowphone, Driven, and LAUNCH Music Conference and Showcase Festival.
From 2015-2018 Jen was a partner and the conference director for the LAUNCH Music Conference and Showcase Festival, where she lined up a diverse group of speakers, addressing topics such as mental health awareness and suicide prevention which might be outside of the “music industry” but affect everyone’s lives.
Through her company The Entertainment Institute (TEI), Jen was able to bring this same kind of information to a wider audience. She created the 6 hour course The New Music Biz for CreativeLive and presented it alongside Kevin Lyman, TEI co-founder and Warped Tour Producer.
https://www.jenkellogg.com/
https://www.showmakers.com/
https://www.instagram.com/jkellogg11/
https://www.instagram.com/weareshowmakers/