Music has been the through-line of my career, but I've also spent the last twenty-five years building companies. Three of them, in order.
Patrick Lamb Productions (founded 1997)
Patrick Lamb Productions started in Portland, Oregon in 1997 as the umbrella for everything I was doing outside the touring band: production work, my own record releases, and the concert programming I had begun curating around the city. By the early 2000s the company had expanded into producing tribute concerts and large-format theme shows.
The most consequential project Patrick Lamb Productions produced was the NW Tribute to Ray Charles, a 25-piece show featuring the Oregon Symphony that debuted at the Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival in 2005. The show won the Cascade Blues Association's Muddy Award for Best Performance of the Year and opened the Oregon Symphony's 2007–2008 Pops season. An album drawn from the production was released the following year.
Patrick Lamb Productions remains the parent company for my recorded output and several of the live productions I still program today, including the Jazz at the Oxford concert series at the Oxford Hotel in Bend, Oregon, where I've curated and performed since 2015.
Ticket Tomato (founded 2007, exited 2016)
Ticket Tomato grew out of a problem I kept hitting as a concert producer: the existing ticketing platforms charged punitive fees and gave producers little visibility into their own sales. In 2007 I launched a ticketing service called Tickets Oregon as a DBA under Patrick Lamb Productions, with a five-thousand-dollar loan from the parent company.
The early customer that proved the model was the Waterfront Blues Festival. Producer Peter Dammann engaged Tickets Oregon to handle festival ticketing. Building a real-time sales dashboard for an event that size — and giving the producer the ability to watch sales by day, by ticket type, by venue — became the differentiator that separated us from the larger national platforms. Other festivals and venues in the Pacific Northwest signed on after that.
In 2009 the business was reorganized as Ticket Tomato, LLC, and rebranded to Ticket Tomato in 2010–11. I co-founded Ticket Tomato with Amy Maxwell, who serves as the company's president and chief executive officer. Under the company's leadership, Ticket Tomato grossed more than fifty million dollars cumulatively before I stepped away from day-to-day involvement in 2016 to focus on touring and recording.
The company is still operating, still serving Pacific Northwest festivals and venues, and still run by Amy.
Icon Entertainment Group (founded 2017)
In 2017 I founded Icon Entertainment Group as a talent and production agency. Icon serves as the booking and production umbrella for several of the ensemble projects I lead, most prominently Hit Factory, the cover band that opened ilani casino resort and headlined ilani's first New Year's Eve celebration in 2017–18.
Icon also handles booking for some of the curated theme productions I program — Stevie Wonder tribute, Ray Charles tribute, Earth Wind and Fire tribute — and for the Christmas-season Charlie Brown shows I produce annually.
Why the music and the companies aren't separate
People sometimes ask why an artist would also be running companies. The honest answer is that for an independent artist, the companies are part of how the music actually reaches people. Producing your own concerts gives you stages. Running your own ticketing platform gives you data on who your audience actually is. Booking your own ensembles gives you control over who plays the music with you. None of it works without the music — but the music doesn't reach as many people without all of it.
If you want to talk about any of the companies, the music, or anything else, contact me directly.