Azoff was born in Danville, Illinois, on December 12, 1947. We don’t know much about his childhood or parents, but we do know that he grew up in a Jewish family and went to Danville High School. He started promoting and booking local bands while he was still in high school, and he soon realized he was good at it. When he went to school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he kept doing the same thing.
Irving Azoff Personal Life
Shelli Azoff is married to Azoff. They don’t talk much about their personal lives in public, but they have four kids together: Jeffry, Allison, Cameron, and Jaye. The couple bought The Apple Pan, which is one of the oldest restaurants still open in Los Angeles. Soon after, they bought Nate n Al’s with the help of a group of Los Angeles-based investors. The restaurant is also one of the oldest in Los Angeles. It opened in 1945.
Irving Azoff Career
REO Speedwagon, a band from Champaign, was Azoff’s first client. He then began managing Dan Fogelberg. In 1972, he and Fogelberg moved to Los Angeles, where he quickly got a job with Geffen-Roberts Management. He started working with the Eagles while he was at this company. Then, this couple was together for more than forty years.
After working in Los Angeles for more than a decade, he was made chairman of MCA Music Entertainment Group. During his six years in this job, the struggling label turned out to be a big hit. He left MCA and went to Warner Music Group, where he started Giant Records. He was in charge of the record label for most of the 1990s, until Azoff decided he would rather focus on managing artists again.
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He kept managing artists into the 2000s, and two trade magazines for the touring industry have named him “Manager of the Year” twice. He started the management company Front Line Management Group and was the company’s CEO. In October 2008, Ticketmaster announced it would buy Front Line, and Azoff became the CEO of Ticketmaster. He was named the chairman of Live Nation in February 2011. By 2012, he was the most powerful person in the music industry, according to Billboard Magazine’s Power 100.
By 2013, Azoff had started the Global Music Rights organization. Artists like John Lennon, George Harrison, Bruno Mars, Pearl Jam, Metallica, and Bruce Springsteen all had their music published by the company. In the same year, he started a business called Azoff MSG Entertainment with The Madison Square Garden Company (MSG). He was the chairman and CEO of MSG and also worked there as a consultant. The group ran a number of places where live events took place, like the Forum in Inglewood, California.
Azoff MSG Entertainment caused some trouble when they joined a lawsuit against the city of Inglewood to stop the building of a new arena for the Los Angeles Clippers. Later, leaked emails showed that MSG tried to get the Los Angeles Lakers to move back to the Forum when their lease at the Staples Center was up. MSG was also interested in stopping the building of the new arena for the rival NBA team.
Together with Tim Leiweke, he started Oak View Group in 2015. The Belmont Park Arena in Milan, Italy, is one of the company’s biggest projects. In 2018, Azoff and Oliver Chastan started Iconic Artists Group. The group is a company that handles entertainment rights. The group was able to buy David Crosby’s and The Beach Boys’ catalogs or rights to their music. But Azoff got into some trouble in 2018 when Nicki Minaj said that Azoff was behind a campaign to hurt her upcoming tour. But the tour members must have been able to get along, because Azoff soon became Minaj’s manager. Most of her songwriting credits are also handled by Global Music Rights.
Azoff was honored by being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 2020. He was given this honor because he won the Ahmet Ertegun Award, which is given to a non-performing music industry worker who has spent their life helping artists and their music.
Azoff has also co-produced a number of popular movies, including “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Urban Cowboy,” “Jack Frost,” “Above the Rim,” and “The Inkwell.” In 2012, he was in the documentary film “Artifact,” which was about the legal battle between the band Thirty Seconds to Mars and the record label EMI. In 2015, he also played himself in the “Documentary Now!” parody of “The History of the Eagles.”
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What Is Irving Azoff Net Worth?
American businessman Irving Azoff has $400 million. Entertainment executive Irving Azoff. He led Ticketmaster, Live Nation Entertainment, and IMG.
He represented Christina Aguilera, Joe Walsh, Van Halen, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Steely Dan, Chelsea Handler, and Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac.
Azoff founded Front Line Management in the mid-1970s. Front Line managed Boz Skaggs, Stevie Nicks, Heart, Jackson Browne, and the Eagles (bequeathed to Azoff by Geffen) and became the most dominant rock management business.
Azoff took over the struggling MCA label in 1983, following Geffen. The savvy entrepreneur signed Tiffany and acquired Motown’s distribution rights to put the label around in a year. In 1989, Azoff left MCA to form Giant, which had early success with Color Me Bad and the New Jack City album. Azoff’s 1994 Eagles reunion record and tour showed he still had the instincts to stay on top.
In his book Hotel California about the late ’60s and ’70s Southern California rock scene, Barney Hoskyns said that Randy Newman’s song “Short People” was directed at Azoff, who is 5’3″, because Azoff aggressively recruited Newman for Front Line management. “Poison Dwarf” Azoff is a musician.