Meteoric rise for Mount’s music man

Promoter Mitch Lowe parties with international rappers and DJs, runs hundreds of events a year and has built a multimillion-dollar music enterprise off the back of a T-shirt company he started as a teen.

The young ‘‘opportunist’’ has gone from paying a pair of disc jockeys $50 each to host a show at an east Auckland nightclub, to putting on star-studded concerts and co-promoting festivals throughout Australasia – including tomorrow’s Bay Dreams at Mount Maunganui with long-term friend Pato Alvarez.

Keys to his entrepreneurial success are seeing risks as chances, mistakes as learning curves, and ‘‘being nice, having fun’’.

‘‘Being nice breeds good business and good relationships,’’ says Lowe, who helped organise a crowd-stirring haka for Grammy Award-winners Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and took US rap legend Ghostface Killah bungee jumping.

The 27-year-old from Howick has promoted close to 1000 music events on both sides of the Tasman since lucking into the industry through the launch party for his first business as an 18-year-old clothing label AYESAP.

‘‘I did a whole season with about 25 different designs. I was making barely anything but I was just having a lot of fun giving friends clothes.’’

Eager to promote his venture, he held a launch party at a nightclub on Auckland’s K Road – attracting 650 people and making more money than his whole season’s T-shirt range.

Two of the party goers were music promoters, so impressed they asked him to join their team. He went out on his own a year later.

Lowe started with low-cost local gigs and grew incrementally.

‘‘It’s that 10-year overnight success that everyone talks about. You start with a $300 show – if it makes a bit of a profit, re-invest it in yourself and keep going. Now we’re so solidly set up, we’re doing shows that cost hundreds of thousands more regularly than I’d ever thought would be possible.’’

He’s now putting on 300 events each year, based around three of his companies.

Oh-One/Eight runs club nights in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

Talk Later – comprising him and business partner Kane Hawkins – brings major hip-hop and R&B acts, some for the first time, to New Zealand.

The Audiology Touring company caters for DJ-related and electronic acts. It also runs major festivals, including Hullabaloo across three cities for university orientation week.

Its New Year festival (in conjunction with Pato Entertainment), Bay Dreams, will tomorrow feature hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash plus US rap giant Yelawolf, as well as homegrown headliners Shapeshifter.

From a 6000-strong audience for the inaugural festival last year, Bay Dreams’ initial run of 15,000 tickets for tomorrow’s event sold out two months in advance. And a further 3000 sold out within minutes after they were released on December 22.

Lowe relocated from his Sydney base to Mount Maunganui last month to launch his latest business, management and booking agency Tenfold Agency.

Lowe handles acts in New Zealand and Australia for Tenfold, and he has a partner in each of India, South Africa and Japan who will manage artists there.

He will move acts between the countries.

‘‘The ultimate aim of Tenfold is to take NZ to the world … to create a gateway to get these artists overseas a bit more easily. Because within a day I could organise a world tour.’’

Lowe says one of his most memorable shows has been Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s concert at Vector Arena in 2015.

‘‘We (he and Kane Hawkins) organised for a kapa haka group to be at the concert and perform the haka welcoming them on stage. But what we didn’t plan for was 5000-plus other people to join in sync with them. It was this spinetingling moment where we’d got (group member) Bizzy Bone to New Zealand (his first time out of the US), and everyone thought we couldn’t do it. It was this pinnacle where a sold-out crowd were doing the haka, and it was so loud, and perfectly in sync, and me and Kane just turned to each other and said, ‘God, we actually did it’.’’

Lowe says he goes ‘‘way over, above and beyond, in terms of providing for the artist. You’re contracted to provide them a dinner on the night of the performance – I’ll take them fishing, whatever hobby they’re into, snowboarding, I’ll pay for it.

‘‘I took Danny Byrd, who’s a big drum‘n’bass act from the UK on the (Skippers Canyon) Jet in Queenstown. I kind of forced him to get on it, and he ended up loving it. We made Ghostface Killah do the bungee in Queenstown as well.’’

Lowe says he sometimes pinches himself at his booming business – flying around the planet, listening to music and partying with stars.

‘‘But I’ve worked my ass off for 10 years. It wasn’t fluked and it wasn’t just having fun and then ‘‘boom’’ there’s this business. I can look back on some of the times where I had absolutely no money.’’

Lowe says keys to being a successful entrepreneur are not being risk-averse, and regarding failures or mistakes as learning curves.

‘‘Everyone’s too scared of failure, I think. But it’s the failure that makes the success.’’

I did a whole season with about 25 different designs. I was making barely anything but I was just having a lot of fun giving friends clothes. Mitch Lowe