James Madison University has a new president and a new plan.
Part of that plan will have a direct impact on Harrisonburg: a major renovation of part of the campus that will involve tearing down some dorms and building new high-rise dorms so that a higher percentage of students can live on campus.
Another part will have a less direct impact on Roanoke: The school wants to host more concerts at the football stadium.
That makes good sense for JMU. Concerts would generate revenue out of the stadium at a time when football isn’t. This is where what’s happening in Harrisonburg reaches two hours down Interstate 81: If JMU pushes Bridgeforth Stadium as a concert venue, that represents yet another competitor to shows at the Berglund Center in Roanoke.
The Star City is currently debating the future of the Berglund Center and how to make the best use of the multibuilding facility, which includes the 10,500-seat coliseum and the 2,151-seat Performing Arts Theatre. City officials last year pushed the idea of a casino at the Berglund Center, as part of a larger “entertainment district.” The casino is something more discussed than acted upon. No enabling legislation was introduced in the General Assembly. The chair of the House committee that deals with gaming has said he doesn’t want to see any new casinos approved until Virginia has a gaming commission, and the bill creating that body was put off a year. Nonetheless, the legislature did vote to add Fairfax County to the list of localities allowed to have casinos, but at least there are some Fairfax legislators who support a casino; no Roanoke Valley legislators do.
In a column last week, I looked at some larger issues related to the Berglund Center. Namely, it was built for the entertainment landscape of 1971, and it’s not 1971 anymore. The music industry has changed almost beyond recognition. There are fewer acts touring that can fill up a venue the size of the coliseum — and those that can now have more international options. Roanoke is no longer competing with Greensboro, North Carolina, for shows; it’s competing with Singapore. Meanwhile, there are more venues that serve as competition to a venue the size of the Performing Arts Theatre.
JMU has always been a competitor to the Berglund Center to some degree — bands playing in Harrisonburg aren’t likely to book another show so close by. If JMU pushes Bridgeforth Stadium as a venue, that’s just one more competitor. More venues, fewer touring shows. That math doesn’t really work well.
Of course, it may not work well for JMU, either, because the school is going to have to deal with the same entertainment landscape that the Berglund Center does. The idea of about 24,000 college students in a single town does seem an attractive proposition to promoters, but I’d gently point out that Virginia Tech has about 38,000 — with almost 8,000 more down the road at Radford University — and that hasn’t turned the New River Valley (or the Roanoke Valley) into a regular stop for that many touring bands of stadium size, either.
At a meeting of the JMU Board of Visitors’ athletics committee, one board member, Tom Galati, said, “I have no idea how you fill a stadium but if it were up to me every weekend we’d have someone either at the AUBC [the Atlantic Union Bank Center] or Bridgeforth rocking the house.”
Hear! Hear!
I’m all for getting more bands to anywhere within driving distance — I’ve personally sent emails to some of my favorite acts (the Arkells, the Beaches, Skye Wallace) to beseech them to book a show nearby, with no success thus far — but if we’re going to have a serious civic conversation about entertainment, we should not fall victim to magical thinking that is untethered from the facts.
The Atlantic Union Bank Center and Bridgeforth Stadium on the JMU campus may well attract more shows, but they will not be “rocking the house” every weekend, any more than the Berglund Center is.
However, JMU’s interest in using the stadium as a concert venue does open up an area of discussion that I did not touch on in the previous column: outdoor shows.
This is another part of the entertainment market that has changed since 1971 — and changed dramatically. There is now a bigger market for outdoor shows, and venues to host them. Roanoke now has two outdoor venues that it didn’t have then, the Dr Pepper Park (which keeps a busy schedule of shows) and the Elmwood Park amphitheater (which doesn’t). Lynchburg now has the Riverfront Park Amphitheater, which hosts Everclear and Marcy Playground for the venue’s inaugural show on May 8, then ZZ Top and Dwight Yoakam on May 21. There’s also The Coves at Smith Mountain Lake, Lime Kiln in Lexington and the Blue Ridge Music Center near Galax. There are likely some places I’ve inadvertently skipped over, but the point is, we now have a lot of outdoor venues that we didn’t have then.
If those acts existed in 1971 (some of the performers booked at those venues this year weren’t even born then), and if they had toured through this part of Virginia, their options would have been limited to the Roanoke and Salem civic centers. Now look at all the places these musicians have to play. Everclear played Dr Pepper Park in 2018 and the Academy Center of the Arts in Lynchburg in 2023; now the band is coming back to Lynchburg’s new amphitheater. Molly Tuttle played the Blue Ridge Music Center in 2022 and 2024 and is now coming to The Coves this summer. Steve Earle has played multiple times at the Harvester in Rocky Mount; this summer, he’ll also be at The Coves. As a fan of all those artists (my tastes are eclectic), these appearances are great — but my point is that these are also all shows that aren’t at the Berglund Center. We might already have an entertainment district; it’s just a regional one rather than a small section of a single city. We certainly seem to have more entertainment options than we did when the Berglund Center opened in 1971. That doesn’t help Roanoke in its quest for more revenue, though; it only makes things harder.
We also have something else we didn’t have in 1971: regular outdoor music festivals, from Rooster Walk in Henry County to FloydFest in Floyd County to the Red Wing Roots Festival in Augusta County to Bristol Rhythm and Roots. (Again, this isn’t intended as a comprehensive list!)
It is against this backdrop that Roanoke is reevaluating the Berglund Center. The city’s decision to pursue a casino may or may not be the right policy decision (that’s up to you), but the factors that are driving it seem quite real. One is the city’s quest for new revenues (which Cardinal’s Roanoke Valley reporter, Samantha Verrelli, has written about multiple times, including her most recent story about staffing cuts with city schools). The other is that, if the city feels the facility isn’t attracting enough acts, the problem isn’t management or marketing, it’s the size of the market — and more competition for fewer acts. The solution to that is to increase the size of the market by bringing in more people, which a casino would do.
However, that casino does not look very likely at present. Even if it did, that would not necessarily bring in acts to fill the coliseum. As I noted in last week’s column, if we look at the acts that casinos not in Las Vegas bring in, they are generally ones that would go to the Performing Arts Theatre, not an arena-sized venue. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the city should not be thinking a casino is going to regularly fill the coliseum with bands. The market has changed, and arena rock is mostly dead except as a nostalgia act.
What Roanoke is facing is not unique. Other midsized cities that built arenas in the early 1970s are facing the same market forces. Seven years ago, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle wrote about cities across upstate New York that have seen their arenas no longer attracting acts like they once did: “In the first few years after the 1973 opening of the Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena, the concert list was so impressive you could identify the acts by first names: Frank, Elvis and Liza. Forty-six years later, the number of tours has dwindled to a mere handful. Just one would be known solely by first name: Ringo.”
That story quoted a Stanford University professor who studies sports economics: “These [arenas] are just obsolete. There’s no other word for it.”
That seems harsh, at least if applied to the Berglund Center (which does have something many cities of its size don’t have in the form of a well-attended minor league hockey team), but it might be useful to those in Roanoke to understand that other cities are dealing with many of the same issues when it comes to concerts. Richmond has closed the Richmond Coliseum entirely. The main concert venues there are now smaller facilities because that’s how the music market works now, with more niche audiences. Roanoke should also understand that the competition, be it for large or small venues, is increasing. And JMU will eventually come to understand, as well, why its arena and stadium aren’t rocking every weekend.
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