Industry Insiders: Meet Damon Whiteside, CEO, Academy of Country Music
The seasoned marketing exec leads Academy of Country Music during challenging COVID era.
As fans and members of the country music industry gear up for the 56th ACM Awards live on CBS this Sunday night, few people understand the trials and rewards of staging such a major event than Damon Whiteside. Since taking the reins as CEO of the Academy of Country Music in January 2020, Whiteside has shepherded the organization and the award show through an unprecedented year due to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Once again, we’re going to embrace Nashville, which we’re so proud of and we’re going to have some really legendary artists in the show, some that weren’t there last year and haven’t been in the show for a while. That’s going to be exciting,” Whiteside tells Sounds Like Nashville during a recent Zoom interview. “We have some really amazing tribute moments planned. There’s going to be some really fun performances and there’s going to be some really heartfelt performances. You’re going to laugh. You’re going to cry. You’re going to have a good time, and overall people are going to forget, hopefully for three hours, about the pandemic and they’re just going to tune in to some really amazing country music with some of the biggest stars out there and the biggest hits, both current hits and classic hits.”
Though the ACM Awards have traditionally been held in the spring on the West Coast, first in Los Angeles and then in Las Vegas, when Whiteside took the ACM gig last year just before COVID, it soon became apparent that holding the show in Vegas in April as planned wasn’t going to happen, and that life in general was going to be very different than he’d planned. Though the ACM job was based in LA, Whiteside lives in Nashville and had negotiated to divide his time between the two cities. “The awards were going to be April 5th and we were sold out,” Whiteside recalls. “I was supposed to be in LA half of the time. My plan was to be there half the month and be in Nashville half the month. Once we got into March, everything shut down and we had to postpone the show from Vegas, and at that point we closed the office. So I basically have been in Nashville ever since other than one trip to LA this year. The only times I’ve seen the staff is in September at the show and then saw them just a couple of weeks ago in Nashville when they came for a site visit. Other than that, it’s been Zoom. Thank God for Zoom because I feel we haven’t missed a beat. We’ve been more productive than we even would have been in the office…We all are in touch constantly and we meet as a staff once a week. I’ve really tried to keep things as normal as it possibly can be so that we don’t lose morale and that everybody feels connected because I know how important that is as a team. You’ve got to feel that we’re all working together versus everybody being isolated. That’s been a huge focus and a challenge this year is how to keep everybody really connected and keep the communication flowing and keeping the morale up.”
Whiteside and his team rescheduled the 2020 ACM Awards from their original date in April in Las Vegas to September in Nashville, holding the show in three legendary Music City venues—the Bluebird Café, the Grand Ole Opry House and the Ryman Auditorium. The ACM’s philanthropic arm, ACM Lifting Lives, has been active in educating people about the virus and vaccine as well as raising 3.5 million for the ACM Lifting Lives COVID-19 Response Fund, which was created in April 2020 to help individuals working in country music who are suffering a financial crises due to the pandemic.
Though the ACM is involved in a lot of great work on behalf of the country music community, the ACM Awards is the organization’s most high profile event. Hosted by Mickey Guyton and Keith Urban, this year’s show will again be broadcast from the Bluebird, The Opry House and the Ryman. Plans call for nominees to be socially distanced and masked in the audience at the Opry House and plans have been made for vaccinated Vanderbilt staff and first responders to enjoy the show from the balcony at both the Opry House and Ryman.
Staging a show that celebrates the achievements of country music’s elite and entertains their fans is a massive undertaking, particularly in the COVID era, but Whiteside’s extensive history as an entertainment executive make him perfect for the job, especially because show business is in his blood. “My dad’s family lived in Santa Monica [CA] and were in the entertainment world,” says Whiteside, who grew up in Riverside, CA. “My great grandfather—unfortunately I never knew him—but he was one of the founders of the Hollywood Bowl in Hollywood. He opened a recording studio in LA. He was the first recording studio in LA that opened and he did a lot of jazz music. I grew up on these stories. The family was in and around the entertainment business, and I had an aunt who was a pretty well known figure skater, so they were always talking about show biz. I think that sort of opened my eyes to, ‘Oh! There really is a career in that. You really can work in that.’ That’s what planted the seed.”
Falling in love with music proved to be the catalyst that set him on his own path in the entertainment community. “I got really into music when I was probably in the 6th grade, and that was the MTV era in the 80’s. I was always just fully engrossed in it and followed all the artists,” he smiles. “I loved all kinds of music, so I ultimately knew I wanted to work in music. I’d sneak off to go to concerts and my parents were pretty lenient. I got away with everything. I was living in Riverside, but I was driving with friends to LA to go to Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard just to go record shopping. I really had the bug. I loved record stores, so I got a job at a record store when I was 15 and that really just sealed it for me.”
The job proved to be a valuable training ground. “You learn a ton about the record business being in a music store because you are dealing with all the label reps. You’re basically in and around music all day every day, and talking to fans about music,” he says. “We also sold concert tickets there, so I got a good basic knowledge of concert business, the music business and distribution. I worked at the record store through high school and then when I went to college. I actually went to college in Orange County at Cal State Fullerton, about an hour away from Riverside. I continued to work at the record store there. It was a chain called Music Plus and they had about 100 stores in the LA area, so I just transferred to a Music Plus in Orange County. I did that for several years while I was in college.”
While in college, Whiteside also landed an internship at radio station KIIS working with noted radio personality Rick Dees. “That was a lot of fun and I got a look at what radio was all about,” he says. “Ultimately, on campus I started getting into concert booking and so I did a lot of on campus concert publicity and marketing and that type of thing, so that kept me learning about working with artists.”
Whiteside did other internships during college, including one for Disney Studios that led to a more than a decade of employment at Disney. “There were some really great executives there that took me under their wing and helped me get to know more people and ultimately a job opened up at Walt Disney Records,” he says. “This was a dream because I could work in the movie business, but on the music side of it. It was the dream job. That’s what got my foot in the door at Disney and in the music business. I was there about 12 years. At Disney, you literally work with everybody because every artist at one point in their career, either on their way up or on their way down, they do a Disney project, and it’s every genre. So I got to work literally every genre of music.”
During his tenure with Walt Disney Records, Whiteside worked with Raven-Symoné, Demi Lovato, Hilary Duff, Jesse McCartney, Phil Collins and Rascal Flatts when they recorded “Life is a Highway” for the Cars soundtrack. He began his tenure at the label as marketing coordinator and when he left 12 years later, he was senior vice president of marketing.
“Even having the marketing title, I did a little bit of everything. I was involved in sales. I oversaw the music video production, radio, PR. I was involved in all of it,” he says. “That’s why it was really fun and will probably be one of the best jobs in my whole career. The reason that I got the bug to move on was just that teen craze started to cool a little bit and you get to that point in your career where you’ve done everything that you could do. There wasn’t much more I could do to build the label. We were a 40 million dollar label when I started and when I left, we were 200 million dollar label. That’s how substantial the growth was, but when it started to kind of cool off a little bit, it didn’t feel like much of a challenge anymore. I was also really interested in international and the way we were structured, there really wasn’t an opportunity to get into international.”
Whiteside got his opportunity to expand his career globally by accepting an offer to work with another part of the Disney brand. At one point, the Disney retail stores had been sold off to a third party until Bob Iger, who was Disney CEO, decided to buy the stores back again. “He said, ‘We need to own that brand again. We need to own the Disney store chain again because that was the front door with consumers,’” recalls Whiteside, who accepted a job with the retail chain. “They were looking for somebody to come in and run global marketing who understood entertainment and music and all of that and synergy…I was in charge of all of that, and loved that because I got to work with everybody at the company. That was exciting because we were opening stores in France, the UK and opening a store in Times Square that is still there now. It just sounded really exciting so that’s what pulled me away from music for a while. I really enjoyed it, but I also learned that I’m a music guy. I love music and I want to be in music, so I ended up making a tough decision. I ultimately left Disney to start my own venture and that’s what ended my 14-year Disney tenure.”
In 2011, Whiteside launched Nomad Entertainment Group in Hollywood where he represented artists, producers and songwriters. “Ironically my first client was Disney, so they hired me back,” he says with a grin. “I was doing a lot of projects for them for probably another year or so, working a lot on their teen franchises like Hannah Montana and stuff like that but my passion was really in music and to start managing artists, so I did marketing consulting and brand consulting more as a side hustle to fuel the artist side of my business. I had quite the roster of artists, really amazing and talented artists.
“All had different levels of success and have gone on having success, but it was tough,” he admits. “It was really tough going from a major global company like Disney and having all of those tools at my fingertips and all of those relationships. I could just pick up the phone and get anything done anywhere to then suddenly you hang your own shingle and you’re working for yourself and boot strapping it. It was a huge wake up and learning curve.”
Whiteside candidly admits going from being part of a major company to running his own business was more of a challenge than he anticipated. “Every day I’d have to get up and really motivate myself and be like, ‘You’re good enough. It’s about you. You don’t need that Disney brand behind you. You’re the one that’s got the talent and can do it. People are going to take your calls because of the relationships you’ve built. It’s not all just because of Disney,’” he says. “But when you don’t have that big Disney name behind you, you suddenly feel very naked. You definitely feel very much like it’s just Damon Whiteside calling not and not Disney, and I had a real issue with that sort of mentally making sense of all of that. I struggle with self-confidence and there were days when I felt like, ‘God, I can’t push this up the hill. It’s really hard.’ I like being a part of a team. I like leading teams and I like being part of a community. I like feeling like I can do things on a bigger scale, that I can leverage more opportunities and I can actually move the needle for an organization versus working for myself individually.”
Though he had employees he enjoyed working with, Whiteside really missed being part of a larger corporate team. He got his chance again when he accepted a job in Nashville with the Country Music Association (CMA). “I was really getting tired of LA. I had been there my whole life and I thought I would probably always live there, but I just was really, really getting tired of that lack of community feeling and the traffic. Everything was so difficult and I got to a point where I was just ready for a change. Not long after that, the CMA opportunity came my way.”
Whiteside accepted the job as VP of Marketing and Partnerships, and at the same time, CMA was also looking to hire a new CEO. Surprisingly, Whiteside took the marketing job not even knowing who his new boss would be. “When I flew there to interview in person for the job, it was under Ed Hardy, who was interim CEO at the time, and I didn’t really know what the status of CMA was,” he remembers. “I learned they had just selected the CEO candidate so they were hiring both of these positions at the same time, but he couldn’t tell me who the CEO was. So if I take this job, I’m taking it without even knowing who my boss is and who the CEO is. Talk about a leap of faith of not only moving to Nashville, but then I don’t even know who the CEO is going to be. They couldn’t tell me. I asked Ed point blank, ‘If you were in my shoes, would you take this job and move across country not knowing who the leadership is going to be? He said, ‘Absolutely! I promise you that you and this CEO candidate will fit perfectly together.’”
Hardy was right. Sarah Trahern became CEO, a position she still holds, and she and Whiteside became a formidable team. “We had never met before but Ed took the two of us to dinner and we just immediately hit it off. She and I were just like that from day one, on the same page,” Whiteside smiles. “We think the same way. I could finish her sentences. She could finish my sentences. That was a true partnership.”
Whiteside has many fond memories of his six years at CMA, including working on the multi-artist “Forever Country” video in honor of The 50th Annual CMA Awards, and helping promote the Ken Burns PBS documentary that chronicled the history of country music. He’s also proud of the growth at CMA during his tenure. “We almost doubled the staff size over those years. I was so happy,” he says of his tenure at CMA. “Our team was great. I was so proud and we were really in a great place. I had no intention of leaving. I had heard about the opportunity at ACM and honestly I just didn’t really think twice about it because I just loved Nashville. I had recently met my fiancé and we were happy in Nashville and had no intention of moving. I just made the assumption that you had to be in LA [for the ACM job]. Somebody called me about the role, and I just said, ‘Well it sounds really exciting and I am ready to grow and ready for my next step in my career,’ but I said, ‘I’m not interested in moving to LA.’ And the response was, ‘Well, I think we can make that work. If you are willing to go out there frequently, you can stay in Nashville.’ So then I was like, ‘Okay I’m in.’”
As someone who has worked in leadership at country music’s two most powerful trade organizations, Whiteside appreciates their similarities and differences. “There’s a lot of confusion also between the acronyms of ACM and CMA,” he admits. “There are things that are very similar, but then there are things that are also just very different in terms of our DNA and the fact that we were formed in Los Angeles and have always been based out there. That was really to support the Western side, the California-based artists, because at the time there was a really big disconnect between California country and Nashville. So that’s really how it was formed was to provide a support for those artists and also be more of a conduit to Hollywood, being that it is in our backyard.
“Over time, things have changed and we now embrace the whole country music community and most of that is based out of Nashville, not California. However, we continue to still have that renegade spirit. Our mission statement is that we want to be a progressive country music organization, and progressive is the word that I would underline. That illustrates some of the things that we’re able to accomplish. We’re able to pivot on things quickly, make quick decisions and take some risks. Our show also shows that. We’re out of the box with a lot of the collaborations, the performances and the tone of the show. We try to make it fun and make it the party of the year. We embrace everybody, all country artists and all fans, but I think we’ve got a bit of a differentiator just because of our DNA and our spirit. The two shows feel very different. I have major respect for CMA because I cut my country music teeth there and they have a stellar brand. I think we have a stellar brand as well but it’s a different brand, and one thing I want to do is differentiate the two more and make it more clear to fans.”
Though this weekend’s ACM Awards will again be held in Nashville, where the CMA Awards are held each fall, Whiteside says there are no plans for the ACM Awards to remain in Music City. “We’re not going to stay in Nashville long term because we need to have our own identity,” says Whiteside, noting they have explored other cities for next year’s show and will announce a location soon. “The roots of our show have been Los Angeles and Las Vegas. We’re the ‘Country Music Party of the Year.’ It’s typically our positioning and that’s what we want to go back to… The artists miss Vegas. They want to go back to Vegas. They can see each other, have fun and go to dinners together, all of that, and we also know the fans want fun. We did a gorgeous show in September and it was the right tone. You’ll see this show is going to be pretty similar, but it’s going to be more on the fun side of things, a little brighter and even more positive. We’re going to have some really fun performances that are going back to our roots, but it’s still not going to be party of the year. We know we aren’t at that place yet to have the party of the year, but by next year, that will be back.”
