2021 Emerging Leaders — Flymachine’s Acacia Newlon

XLIVE is proud to present its first-ever list of Emerging Leaders in Event Tech. Our group of 2021 winners includes young event professionals — in both B2B and live events — whose innovation, creativity, and drive are pushing the industry forward. We will be featuring all of the winners over the coming weeks, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for what they do next!

 

Growing up in the Bay Area, Acacia Newlon took every opportunity to catch shows in the city as soon as she could drive. She was eventually connected with Zeitgeist Artist Management (now Brilliant Corners) through friends in the local music scene and interned with them the summer Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism came out – incidentally, the band streamed one of their performances on Flymachine earlier this year, which Newlon notes was a full circle moment.

While studying at UCLA, she took advantage of living in LA and went to as many shows as possible, and she spent her senior year interning for Irving Azoff’s Azoffmusic Management, hoping to follow in his footsteps as an artist manager. Upon graduating, she worked in tour marketing and management at LA-based indie label and management company Dangerbird before moving back to the Bay Area to pilot iTunes music social features at Apple just before Steve Jobs passed away.

“In 2011, I traded big tech for startup life,” she says, “going back to my roots in live events marketing at Ticketfly. Since then, [Flymachine co-founder and CEO] Andrew Dreskin and I have worked together for the better part of a decade — from Ticketfly, to Pandora, Eventbrite, and now Flymachine!”

Flymachine is a virtual venue startup that enables fans to watch their favorite artists perform and chat with friends and other fans is if they were in person. Newlon joined the team in November of 2020 as the company’s Marketing Director and uses her prior brand and marketing experience at the intersection of music and technology when dealing with artists, promoters, labels, and management teams and ensuring the successful implementation of each virtual show that Flymachine puts on.

For Newlon, every day is a new, exciting challenge. “We’re building a business and team from the ground up, so on any given day, you’ll find me touching the full marketing mix,” she says. “Now that we’ve publicly launched Flymachine and have our show marketing engines firing, my focus is shifting back to strategy, taking our brand to the next level, and supercharging our industry and product marketing efforts.”

Joining the team in the early stages was a particularly exciting opportunity for Newlon. She has previously brought products to market, led lifecycle marketing efforts, and produced large-scale conferences, but she had never helped launch a company. “We always saw hybrid events as the future and built for a post-COVID world,” she says, “and the rapidly changing landscape has definitely kept me on my toes!”

One of Newlon’s future career goals is to “build, manage, and mentor a diverse marketing team and shape our transparent, inclusive culture here at Flymachine. I’m making strides towards that goal as a founding member of our new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council.”

Newlon fully believes that hybrid events are the future. “That ‘always on’ mentality has permeated so much of our lives, considering how much we capture and share on social media, and the event-goers of tomorrow are truly digital natives,” she notes. “I’m interested to see how XR will impact how we experience in-person events and how in-person and virtual audiences will converge.”

Newlon shares that one of her biggest inspirations in the industry is her best friend Alex Maxwell, a tour promoter at Live Nation. “Over the last decade, she’s grown from booking tiny local 100 cap shows to her first arena play, and I couldn’t be more proud of her. Her tenacity and focus inspire me every day,” says Newlon. She has also been impressed and inspired by the work that Noelle Scaggs of Fitz and the Tantrums has done during the pandemic, launching Diversify the Stage to promote inclusivity in the touring industry.

Outside of her work on Flymachine, Newlon, who is a classically trained vocalist and got back into studying voice during the pandemic, has made it a personal goal to start auditioning in 2022 to make singing a bigger part of her life again. She and a few colleagues sometimes jam together as Bandrew, a play on CEO Andrew Dreskin’s name. 

She also loves to travel and is on her way to visiting every continent before she turns 40. She is currently planning her honeymoon to the Galapagos and figuring out how she’s going to get to Antarctica, while making progress towards her double masters from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.