GQ Pulls The Curtain Back On The Insanely Lucrative World Of Celebrity Nightclub Appearances

Nick Hissom, Model And Recording Artist, Makes His Performance Debut At Tryst Nightclub Inside Wynn Las Vegas With Manufactured Superstars And Lil Jon
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Famous for doing nothing usually means being on a reality show, or getting product endorsements based on your Instagram feed. It also means the nightclub appearance, where promoters will pay various reality TV stars, DJs, and rappers outrageous sums just to get them to appear and stay at their club for an hour.

In GQ‘s thorough report about the celebrity nightclub appearance industry, Kourtney Kardashian’s baby daddy Scott Disick can make $70,000 to $80,000 per appearance in Las Vegas. Lil Jon gets paid similar amounts to DJ for two hours at the Vegas club he’s contracted with, and to not get photographed outside of a rival club.

At the turn of the millennium, celebrities and nightclubs depended on each other. Celebrities would show up if they had something to promote, and musicians would even pay clubs to play their new songs. The clubs themselves would get some cachet and revenue from expensive booze. Paris Hilton blew up this system, though, when clubs began paying her and her friends just to appear, at the beginning of the reality TV craze:

The real breakthrough came in 2005, when a Vegas club owner named Steve Davidovici started to routinely pay Hilton and her cohort outrageous sums just to walk through the door of PURE and Tangerine. In a blink, the transactional economy between nightclubs and celebs reversed direction. Weintraub fondly remembers the biggest deal he ever brokered, in 2009, for the 51st-birthday party of Ed Hardy’s (now deceased) founder, Christian Audigier. He helped land a $4 million fee, to be split among Hilton, 50 Cent, and Lenny Kravitz.

The large fees went from Hilton to EDM DJs. Now rappers like Drake, Nicki Minaj and Future are commanding the biggest bucks. And with Saudi princes paying tens of thousands of dollars for tables near the stars, as well as fancy bottle service, this phenomenon will just keep growing.

(Via GQ)

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