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EventNewsDXB - Ean Thorley: From MTV to Mega Events! A 30-Year Journey in Entertainment

• W4 Podcast Studio • Season 1 • Episode 5

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EventNewsDXB Ep.5 - Ean Thorley: From MTV to Mega Events! A 30-Year Journey in Entertainment.

Supported by Warehouse Four - Dubai's best independent event venue.

In this episode, Ean Thorley, founder of Whatever Live, talks to EventNewsDXB host, Ian Carless, about his journey from MTV intern to Executive Producer of some of the world’s biggest music award shows. From launching MTV Asia, Hong Kong and China to producing groundbreaking events like the Chinese Music Awards, Ean reflects on over 30 years in the industry.

Through highly entertaining anecdotes, Ean recounts the highs and lows of large-scale television event production, including handling crises like fires during Dubai’s New Year’s Eve fireworks and Snoop Dogg’s unconventional requests at the MTV Music awards. The conversation also delves into MTV’s shift from music videos to reality TV and its cultural influence, including projects like Dubai Bling.

Looking to the future, Ean discusses the Middle Eastern event scene, with Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi all competing for global recognition. And he highlights the need to balance local talent with international expertise while adapting to the industry’s evolving financial landscape.

Podcast Rundown

• Ean discusses his early career at MTV 
• Insights into producing large-scale events and firework shows 
• Crisis management lessons learned from past experiences 
• Importance of fostering local talent in Dubai's entertainment scene 
• Challenges of client budgets and managing expectations 
• Future of events in the competitive Middle Eastern market 
• The significance of personal connections through events 

Production Credits:

Presented by: Ian Carless
Studio Engineer & Editor: Roy D'Monte
Executive Producers: Ian Carless & Joe Morrison
Produced by: EventNewsDXB & W4 Podcast Studio

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Ian Carless:

Welcome to Event News DXB. Before we begin, I've got a quick favour to ask. There's one simple way that you can support our show, and that's by hitting that follow or subscribe button on the app you're listening to the show on right now. It really does make a huge difference in helping us get the show out there to as many people as possible, so please give us a hand and click that button right now. Thanks a bunch. Thanks a bunch. Thanks a bunch.

Ian Carless:

Event News DXB. You're listening to the Event News DXB podcast. Your behind-the-scenes look into the world of events in Dubai, the UAE and the MENA region. I'm Ian Carlos and each week I'll bring you the latest news, industry trends and insider stories shaping one of the world's most dynamic event markets. From professional insights to Dubai's most inspiring success stories, we've got everything you need to stay ahead in the ever-evolving event industry. So, whether you're an event planner, a brand manager or just someone passionate about the power of events, you're in the right place.

Ian Carless:

This week we're talking to, Whatever Entertainment's head honcho, Ian Thorley. After joining the then-fledgling MTV at the tender age of 19 in London, Ian went on to enjoy a long and illustrious career as an executive producer with the music network in Europe, Singapore and Australia, as well as spearheading the channel's launch in China. Following a four-year stint in Europe, Singapore and Australia, as well as spearheading the channel's launch in China, Following a four-year stint in Shanghai, Ian relocated to Dubai in 2020 to oversee television production for Expo 2020. He now runs his own entertainment production company, Whatever Entertainment, Ian. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Ian. This is going to be very strange, isn't it? Hello, Ian. Hello, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Ian. This is going to be very strange, isn't it Hello.

Ian Carless:

Ian. Now full disclosure, I guess, for anybody that happens to be listening hopefully there's a few, not just our mothers Ian and I first met. How long ago God? 30 years, Was it 30? Oh, yeah, no, maybe it's 40. No, shush man, it's not 91. No, yeah, yeah, 40 years.

Ean Thorley:

Okay, it's a long time ago.

Ian Carless:

For anybody that's good or better at mental math than I am, it was a long time ago, Wow. So, yeah, this episode. I mean it's traditionally about events, and so we're going just slightly off-piste with this episode. Ian's background is television events or televising events, so am I right there?

Ean Thorley:

Yeah, kind of big, big scale productions, events. So we won't do the wedding videos, but we do not even your own. No, no, gosh um, so yeah, so large scale events that we produce, so over the outside broadcast trucks, big cameras and all that kind of stuff. So that's kind of what we do. There's enough people doing the smaller events, yeah in them in the world.

Ian Carless:

Well, let's just very briefly start at the beginning. How did you get into MTV?

Ean Thorley:

Ah yes, Many moons ago I was doing hospital radio and they wouldn't let me have a radio show because they thought I wasn't experienced enough. I was 17 or 18 at the time and I found a book of all the TV networks around the world and I was flicking through the pages and I saw this thing called MTV. Didn't have cable, didn't have satellite at home, so I had no idea what it was. I thought that sounds fun. So I wrote to the program director because I knew what a program director was, because I was working at Hospital Radio Anyway. So I wrote this letter to the program director and this beautiful lady called Lauren Levine at MTV Europe said Kate, come and intern for four weeks. So I went down, went to the office in London and I did the job in two days and then I just went around every different department because it was like 80 people.

Ean Thorley:

It was a very, very small MTV Europe at the time, back in 1989, because it launched in 87. And I kind of got a job as an operations assistant. And then 87 and um, I kind of got a job as an operations assistant and then at 19 the operations manager went oh, I want to go and do on-air promos now. So I was the operations manager at 19. It was nuts right. And I heard about mtv new mtv hong kong launching. So I said I want to do that. All my friends were like, but you don't know anyone in hong kong. I'm like, yeah, but I'm sure I'll make friends. I mean, you know, you've got some people who stayed at MTV for 20 years in the same city. I mean I moved every year, I moved every two or three years to a different MTV. Now, with MTV Asia, as you know, we launched in Hong Kong as part of the Star TV network. Then Murdoch bought Star TV and Viacom, which owns MTV. We're like, yeah that. So we relocated to New York and then relaunched in Singapore as MTV Asia.

Ian Carless:

And that was where our paths crossed wasn't it. Well, actually well, in Hong Kong initially and then later in Singapore. Let's just get back on track. So I'm going to sort of fast forward to your event days, and I think a lot of that probably happened when you were with MTV Australia, is that?

Ean Thorley:

right, no, no, we started with MTV Asia. So MTV Asia, rmt. We were. Basically we were launching flags. We launched India twice because it was more of a star TV, and one was for Viacom. Then we launched MTV Philippines, mtv China, mtv Indonesia, malaysia. We had a four-hour play out on Malaysian TV.

Ean Thorley:

So we decided to produce the first ever Chinese music award show, so CMAs or VMAs, and that was interesting. We hired a director out of the UK. We had some people come from MTV Europe. I produced it and exec produced it, and we originally were going to do it on the 4th of April, but in Chinese numbers that means death. So we changed that. Yeah, so, and then we were told we couldn't use a production company in beijing. We had to choose. We had to work with cctv and the red army were our security detail. So we produced this. I mean it was mental right, but one of the things that was great about it is is this you know we had. So we had an english director, a chinese director from cct, lovely guy called Zhao, and this is back in 1997 or 98.

Ean Thorley:

But me and my co-producer, thomas Sevenhagen, I think you'd remember, we had the design of the show and they brought a model of the show, which we generally do for our big shows. We have a model. I mean we can look at camera angles and what works and what doesn't work. Now you can do it all digitally. And I mean we can look at camera angles and what works and what doesn't work. Now you can do it all digitally. And they had all this kind of splattered paint over the aluminium and we're like, no, that's great, but all the splattered paint we don't want that because that's not the design. But we had, like some big-name artists playing. We then ended up. Then this Chinese opera singer, a very famous opera singer, came out and my lighting designer director were kind of giggling and all the Chinese staff were just transfixed with this amazing woman who was just like singing, amazing. I said, guys, this is their no be culturally sensitive. But the show was a great success. The president of MTV was there, bill Rohde, yeah it was good.

Ian Carless:

Do you see more events or do you feel that the appetite for these big award show kind of things and music events, televising them, has gone a little bit now? Were you doing more of them back?

Ean Thorley:

in the day. Yeah, I was doing a lot more back in the early 2000s, mid-2000s, I think. The appetite, the Golden Globes. I think the Golden Globes, the Oscars, will always be televised, but they're not going to get the huge numbers that they used to get. For example, the Oscars will always be televised, but they're not going to get the huge numbers that they used to get. For example, the VMAs. Why is MTV doing the VMAs? Because they don't play music, and that was a cultural shift with MTV, because we didn't own the IP anymore, so all these music videos were owned by the record label.

Ian Carless:

So, when you're planning out these big shows, what's the process? I mean, where do you begin?

Ean Thorley:

So, the first thing we do. Obviously we pick a date. But then I would sit down with our production designer and say, right, this is what I want. And when we did the MTV Video Music Awards in Australia in 2008, I remember we were in LA and we went through this very amazing bookshop and we saw this stage design for an opera. I went that would be wicked. So we used the basis of that to build the stage design for the MTV Awards.

Ean Thorley:

So we do that. Then the designer makes a model. We then start working with TAR about talent and about bands we want, and if I suggest, oh, there's a band I saw or whatever, we bring them on board. And then basically, yeah, we start getting all the crew together lighting designers, director and then we spend five days building and then two days rehearsing one day show and then it's all over and generally the press are happy, and then it takes two days for the negative press to hit. So we do a show on a Thursday. It's a red carpet and all the socials going in the paper in those days on the weekend. So we get the weekend press. So we do the show on a Thursday, get news on a Friday, then Saturday and Sunday is the kind of glitzy papers on the weekend, and then the following Monday or Tuesday is the bad press hits.

Ian Carless:

So when you're talking about in terms of the size of the production, what are we talking here? How many cameras?

Ean Thorley:

So typically for MTV I would imagine, I think we'd use anywhere between 15 to 20 cameras, we'd have a Jimmy Jib, which would be a crane, we'd have a Steadicam, we'd have a no, we'd like the green room, and then we have backstage hosts, which is our sponsorship commitment. So when we go to a commercial break we would go to one of our presenters and they'd be standing in front of a Coca-Cola or a Branded doing links and interviews with artists, and then they would go to a commercial break and then we'd come back. But generally it's a large crew. I mean it's anywhere between 120 to 400 people. So when we did the YouTube Symphony Orchestra in Sydney, we had a thousand production staff. It was a big show, it was an amazing show, and we did that with Google. And what's the kind of lead time would you say? That was about six months. But this year actually, or last year, when we started working on New Year's Eve for EMAR, for Burj Khalifa, I started in March, nine months pre-production.

Ian Carless:

So, for those that aren't familiar with Ian and his company, whatever Ian's been responsible for, how many of the last 10 years of Dubai fireworks, you've been doing it 10 years, 10, 12 years, 12 years, right. So, and just to clarify so, your role in that is obviously you're not out there arranging all the fireworks show You're very much responsible for televising the fireworks.

Ean Thorley:

So there's a fireworks company that are hired by EMA. There's a lighting company who do the visuals on the Burj Khalifa. We just do the broadcast and we work with Dubai TV. So we bring a team of about 12 to 14 people from the production side from my side, and that's a producer, graphics producer, et cetera, et cetera and then we bring in Dubai TV with their 400 staff of cameramen, engineers, and we basically spend about four days setting up and then we have rehearsals and then we do the show.

Ian Carless:

So I have to ask you, though were you in charge during the year that they decided they weren't going to have any fireworks, Mm? And if so, how did that go down?

Ean Thorley:

So I said, well, that's silly, because a birthday cake you have on your birthday, fireworks you have on New Year's Eve. So the marketing chap, who's there? They want you to do something different. And I'm like, well, birthdays and New Year's Eve, you shouldn't mess with that. But the more interesting one that I did was when the dress hotel burned down. Oh, so it was 9.34.

Ean Thorley:

We'd just done the fountain show, camera 6, which is on the opposite side of the lake. There's a fire above your head. We're like what? And our tech director steps out of the OB van, looks up, goes holy shit. And then so we basically pack up. The army comes in, rips the OB truck out, takes the ob truck out, takes the generator trucks out. We've got generators there, right, yeah, all full of diesel, yeah and uh. So we then go to the media tent and we're just going wow is that just went up so quickly. It was amazing. Then we went to crisis management. We took over red lobster cafe in dubai mall to be our crisis management center. Then we got kicked out of dubai mall because they thought the building might collapse. Then we moved to another location so we had no cameras. But luckily that year we'd been asked to do all the firework shows uh across the whole of dubai right so we started business bay.

Ean Thorley:

Obviously they went down to jumeirah, so I had two helicopters flying and I always say recording camera and uh, thankfully they did. So they, they landed, we got the, we got the content. And then we spent the next next day editing a show together, trying to cut around the fire and the smoke because obviously it's not just the local market that you're doing the show for.

Ean Thorley:

Arguably it's not even the local market you're doing the show, people you're doing it for the worldwide audience yeah, so we've got the news organizations AP, reuters we have individual channels taking it. This year we worked with a company called TVU and they did all the digital as well as free-to-air content distribution, so it goes around. I mean, we had got the report yesterday and they're just channels that you think really you know, especially across Africa and Asia, and it's Really you know, especially across Africa and Asia. I mean, wow, okay, because you have the general stuff, bbc and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, about 1.1 billion people watch it worldwide.

Ian Carless:

What did you take away from that in terms of, like you know, emergency planning or contingency planning? That's the word I was looking for.

Ean Thorley:

Yeah, so we work with the command center, with EMAR command center, which is Dubai police, dubai EMAR security. So we have a range of procedures that we take, so we have content that we play on the screens. If there's people missing, we have slides. We also have a backup plan. We have a backup OB truck so we can relocate that with different cameras.

Ian Carless:

Is that something that you've had in place?

Ean Thorley:

post the fire. No post the fire, so post fire.

Ian Carless:

So pre-fire, you didn't have that, no, wow.

Ean Thorley:

So we have a backup OB, we have backup SNGs, which are satellite trucks, so we can get content out, because last year, for example, there was no big thing bad, but the fireworks were delayed by 48 seconds. Yeah, so we're in the OB truck and we're delayed by 48 seconds. Yeah, so we're in the OB truck and we're going. Did we go too early? And we're like no, it's midnight. So there are sometimes there are technical issues and we react accordingly. So you know, if it's something that's really serious, we'll go to a wide shot. If there's a crowd management issue which there has been for many years, but now it's all been sorted, which is great, so which there has been for many years, but now it's all been sorted, which is great, so it is. So, yeah, we have procedures in place and that's for any event, really, apart from the one we did but certainly taken more seriously post that year.

Ian Carless:

Yeah, backtracking to your MTV days. Yeah, what are some of the things that perhaps the public don't know that were going on behind the scenes at some of the award shows that you were part of?

Ean Thorley:

that you can talk about when we had Snoop Dogg at the MTV Awards. We had it in this huge arena, right, but we had to turn off all the fire alarms because he was getting Mr.

Ean Thorley:

Snoop, mr Snoop, he was getting his wacky-backy on, so we had three huge dressing rooms. So we had one dressing room for his security guards, one dressing room for his mates, another dressing room for Snoop and we had to have a fire attendance around the whole, like way more than we'd normally have the fire department just in case there's a fire breaking up because Snoop wanted to smoke some weed and I was like, okay, that's cool, what are you gonna do? But yeah, but right down, right down the board. It was a, it was an interesting time, but I wouldn't exchange it for the world.

Ian Carless:

I mean, it was, it was amazing experience so, as I think most people know, mtv went through quite a big transformation, didn't it? Where it, as you alluded to it, it moved away from playing music videos and very much into the genre of reality television. You know, 16 and what was it? Up the duff, or whatever, whatever it was called 16 and pregnant.

Ian Carless:

Was that? Yeah, close, yeah, it hasn't gone away, has it? Reality television? I mean, we've got a show here in dubai, don't we? Dubai bling, what? What is it about reality television? Do you think that?

Ean Thorley:

I think it's just I think reality tv really took hold probably about two decades ago, right. I think people are just consumed by this pop culture of content and it's they just need it super fast. If there was a terrible story that came out about a personality the next day, the news cycle works so quickly they'll be got be forgotten tomorrow, right. But I think with with shows, I'm glad that dubai bling's being made. It's being made by rise studios, who I'm a big fan of, with amanda who runs the company.

Ian Carless:

I think it's great that they're making yeah, yeah, who I love and I think you know what's great.

Ean Thorley:

Whether you like the show or not, at least they're making content and they're making local content and I think this is really important. And this happened with mtv years ago, where we were mtv europe. We're a pan-european network and suddenly this countries were like germany. Right, we were on mtv. We don't want to play. We had music from all different european countries or play on the same playlist, so that people wanted their own, their own kind and their own music.

Ean Thorley:

And I think that, with countries, and certainly with the GCC, saudi's making films now, which is fantastic. A friend of mine's produced a horror movie for Saudi that came out last year, based on a very famous book. Now Rai Studios is in the market of producing local content for the local market, and that could be anywhere, be arabic, or could be indian, or pakistani, uh, or subcontinent. So that's a good site. That, for me, that's just. That's a great site. I don't do long form content. I don't produce long form content. The only we did what we did. We produced a chinese kid show in shanghai, all in mandarin, which was amazing, but I think for for blint by bling it's whether, as I say, whether you like it or not, it's local content with local people, local crew. They're not bringing flying loads of people in from the uk or from the us. I think that is.

Ian Carless:

That's a great thing so, speaking of local content and local crew, you've been in dubai five years now. Well, yeah, five years back on yeah five years now. Uh, you have your own company now. Whatever entertainment. Tell us a little bit about that. What kind of shows are you hoping to do with whatever?

Ean Thorley:

so whatever was born in 2007 in sydney, uh, straight out and with with a, with a mission to create big, big, big events, big shows. We actually came to Dubai to launch the cricket stadium and then 2008 hit and that disappeared. Generally, we produce a lot of awards. We've produced a lot of award shows around the planet. We do stuff for Google, whatever now in Dubai. The GCC is certainly a. It's probably the last place where it's a new frontier, new opportunities. So obviously we're doing stuff in Saudi, we're doing stuff here.

Ean Thorley:

So what we envisage for whatever, we have kind of three main components. One is entertainment concerts, award shows, et cetera. New to us at the moment is sport. So we haven't really done a lot of sport. We've done. I mean sport. We've done.

Ean Thorley:

I've done the cricket in the caribbean for three years, the t20 championships. We did a whole bunch of stuff with nike. I did the porsche career cup championships in asia, um, but now we're getting a lot more invites from clients to cover sporting events, um. And then the other is kind of more business business, which is kind of now we did the Google 36 hour live broadcast for their, for their, their hard drive business, which is called next. I think that was nice, I was alive 36 hour show across five continents.

Ean Thorley:

So so for us, whatever we, the reason we call the name whatever is a. We sell it. We say a lot, but it has two meanings whatever we can do for you, we can do if we don't like you, whatever. So that's kind of the, that's kind of the marking of what we with under the brand whatever. Um, we've got a new guy on board, uh, patch khan, who's an ex broadcast expert, uh v I, senior vice president of warner's ex warner's sony pictures, and so he's coming on board as our technical and technology director. Yeah, so we've done some pretty gnarly shows since.

Ian Carless:

How tough a market is it to break into? Who's your competition?

Ean Thorley:

Well, actually well, there's a lot of competition. What we do, our main competition, is probably Done and Dusted or ex-MTV colleagues of ours competition is probably done and dusted, or ex mtv colleagues of ours, um, but in the region, no, we are. We're not cheap because we come with experience, right, and it's always the same clients will say, oh well, can you do it for x? You're like, well, you're not. The price point for me is not the issue. You're buying, like by 40, 30 years of experience, right. So we generally get recall because we we have that experience, certainly on the shows that are coming up in the next couple of weeks and months. The market is tough and people always know we want to budget for a show and they want to chop it in half, right, so you go, well, that's fine. But you have to work out, you have to sacrifice something because, no, the money is the money.

Ian Carless:

Now, one of the shows I know you did last year as well was Untold. Tell us a little bit about that.

Ean Thorley:

We came across Untold through a personal connection. We had a chat with them. They'd been talking to serious production companies about doing their broadcast, their live stream, and it was across across four days, starting at 5 pm and going to like 5 am it was. It was gnarly for us. It wasn't about making money on this show. We. I love house music, I love edm, I love concerts and it was the biggest edm festival in in the whole of dubai, backed by the um, dubai government or dubai uh tourism.

Ian Carless:

So I know you were also involved in Expo as well. Can you talk to me about that?

Ean Thorley:

Yeah, so I did Expo twice. So the first time I came out in 2020 or 2019, and then that pandemic thing happened that everyone got scared about I did a month's work at Expo.

Ian Carless:

That short period of time where everybody sat twiddling their thumbs.

Ean Thorley:

So we did so. That was shut down, so the Expo was delayed for a year. We came back in 2021. I was the head of production for Dubai TV, so my job was to ensure that I did all the live content. So we were producing, on average, 10 live shows a day, so that would be anything from a. Every morning we did a national day for a country, then there'd be some another thing that we did, a talk, and then we'd end the day with a massive concert. So but I've done a lot of shows at Expo and I think that's it's an interesting site that they're trying to do.

Ian Carless:

Where do you see this side of the industry, of the event industry, going in this region?

Ean Thorley:

Well, I think in this region we're quite lucky, unlike, say, the UK or Asia or Australia. You've got competing markets. So you've got, say, saudi are trying to take over everything. Right, sports, qatar are trying to do it, dubai and Abu Dhabi are trying to do it. So you've got this great competition between all these countries who are trying to get the customer's dollar or the tourism. So there are going to be these large-scale events, there are going to be these opportunities to produce content because these countries need it. So I think the market is still strong. What these companies are doing now, or these countries are doing now, is okay. If you want our dollars, if you want our local currency, you have to have a company in my country. So we've set up Well Ever Live here in Dubai. It's a Dubai media company. We are going to sell up Saudi at some point, but we're just seeing what the market does first, because everyone's flocking to Saudi and I think we're just going to hold back and go and our chairmen are like just hold back, just let's see what happens.

Ian Carless:

Talk to me about talent. I mean, how easy is it to get the people that you need in order to do these shows? Because I mean, I'd love to be able to sit here and say, all the talent that we need is on the ground here in the region well, some of it, some of it is, but the reality is yes, some of it is and some of it isn't, so I'm going to take it back.

Ean Thorley:

Step up, a step back yeah, what we did at mtv and our job was to go into these countries, these cities and create a new media landscape so that that's training. I hate using the word locals, but the, the, the local people generally young kids coming out of university or some kids who got some media training or no media training.

Ian Carless:

Which is well. Yeah, which is exactly what I was doing with MTV in the Philippines, exactly so so we've for our whole career.

Ean Thorley:

We've always been nurturing talent. We've always been looking and developing that skill set so we could get kicked out and they will run their own media network for their own country, for their own nationality. I think that was what we've achieved. Now that's kind of happening with us at Whatever, with who we're, we know who we can hire. We know we've got fantastic EBS operators. We have fantastic VizRT operators, so we're capturing fantastic vision mixers operators. We have fantastic uh viz rt operators, so capturing um fantastic vision mixers. We have fantastic cameramen.

Ean Thorley:

Yeah, we had this one particular cameraman on new year's eve for the budget for this year or last year, this year, last year, uh, who, I was just blown away, um, and the camera team were amazing this year, I mean absolutely flawless, yeah. So what I do when I, when we get asked to do a big, big show, we'll we'll probably do 50 or 60 local crew and then 40 and it's international, international, which would be the kind of the heads of department, head of lighting, head of uh, or the head of cameras, head of uh broadcast truck, um, but generally what we're trying to do is bring you know. For example, when we were doing COP28, I was asked to hire all these people and I'm like, yeah, we've got fantastic people. We had people coming in from India, we had people coming from Pakistan. We had fantastic people who we know have worked with and were fantastic. And then in the end, the client went no, no, I'm just going to bring everyone from the UK.

Ian Carless:

I'm like, oh, that's so shit, you've got to develop the local market, which is a shame, because then there's not that transfer of knowledge, is there? No?

Ean Thorley:

So in terms of managing it, for other productions, for New Year's Eve, for example, I bring one person from international. That's the director. I do have directors here, but the client wants to have a big international name director but everyone else is local.

Ian Carless:

Let's talk a little bit about finance and budgets, just briefly. I know certainly from both the production work I've done in the past and also now from having Warehouse for the event venue clients aren't too happy about paying much upfront. In fact, there was a certain period up until about 2008, 2009, where we got no deposit whatsoever for any kind of production, and it was only sort of 2008, 2009, when obviously the financial crisis and companies just didn't have any money, so clients begrudgingly had to put up 50%. So how does a company, like whatever, manage its cashflow? How are you getting past the stumbling block here of clients being reluctant to put too much money up front? And then not only that, it's then the long tail in terms of often getting paid as well, because 30 days I wish I didn't have to say this, but in this region 30 days is never 30 days.

Ean Thorley:

Well, we've been very lucky. So for New Year's Eve we get paid one month after the event and we get paid on time. We used to get paid three days after the event, so we've been quite lucky in that regard. In terms of the other shows, we will demand either 100 up front, 70, 70 or at least 50, but it's structured so 50 on signing, yeah, 30 on on on pre-production, then show day the remaining so we we at the moment touch wood.

Ean Thorley:

We've been very, very lucky, we get paid on time or we get paid in advance. So, for example, because our suppliers will go well, we want 100% upfront. Yeah, absolutely so, for example, when we went to another. If we go to another country, we're taking crew from here and a kit. No, we have to come out with insurance, insurance for the team and then basically the fee upfront. But it's a challenge and when you're in your own business there's peaks and troughs of cash flow always hard. But I think so far we've been okay.

Ian Carless:

So, before we wrap up, I absolutely know that you love your music. I mean, both of us cannot work for MTV without loving our music. I love my music. As you know, I'm now restocking my vinyl collection. What's on your playlist?

Ean Thorley:

So at the moment it ranges and there's three types of genres I listen to. Generally, more often than not I listen to it's a podcast called Deep House Moscow house music 90s and 2000s gangster hip hop. Okay, and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Ian Carless:

Big discrepancy there.

Ean Thorley:

So on. On the day-to-day it's house music. I love house music and if I'm in the car I want to get I mean dr dre, I named my dog snoop dog, right? So I had this beautiful white golden retriever and we called him snoop, so he goes. Respect to snoop dog d-o-dG. Gangsta hip-hop all the way G.

Ian Carless:

So, finally, what are you looking forward to in 2025? Personally and professionally Now, personally, I know you have a new addition to the family.

Ean Thorley:

Personally, I have a new addition Number 554 baby has been born Amira, who was born a few days ago. Congratulations.

Ian Carless:

To my lovely wife, thank you.

Ean Thorley:

Amira, who's born a few days ago my lovely wife, thank you, I think, professionally, what we're looking at we we are moving into kind of the sporting side. So we're working with a big client at the moment in America on a sporting, some sporting stuff. So I think this year probably a few more shows in Saudi and a few more sporting events as well, with all all the other stuff that we do as well as entertainment. But I'm kind of really pushing to do more sport.

Ean Thorley:

Ian, it's a pleasure as always, Always mate, Thank you sir, thank you for joining me.

Ian Carless:

Thank you. Event News DXB was presented by myself, ian Carlos, the studio engineer and editor was Roy DeMonte, the executive producer was myself and Joe Morrison, and this podcast is a co -production between Warehouse 4 and W4 Podcast Studio Dubai. And if you haven't done so already, please do click that follow or subscribe button. See you next time.