Paul Tollett and Rich Schaefer arrived at the top of the live music business by very different routes, but their careers now intersect under the AEG Presents umbrella in a way that illustrates the breadth of the company’s touring operation.

Tollett is the architect of AEG-owned Goldenvoice, the Southern California promoter whose Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival evolved from a relatively adventurous desert booking into one of the defining live music institutions of the modern era. As Goldenvoice’s president and CEO, Tollett has overseen not only Coachella but Stagecoach, Just Like Heaven, Portola and other festivals, building a portfolio that has made the company a powerful tastemaker across genres.

Tollett’s particular talent has been in treating festivals as more than collections of artists. Coachella became a destination, a cultural event and eventually a global media property, while Tollett repeatedly demonstrated an ability to put established artists into contexts that felt fresh. His 2016 Desert Trip festival, for instance, brought together The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, The Who, Neil Young and Roger Waters for a two-weekend event that became the highest-grossing music festival to that point.

Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish at Coachella (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella)

Nearly three decades after Goldenvoice first launched Coachella, that instinct remains central to Tollett’s work. In 2026, Coachella sold out both weekends three days after its bill was announced, while advance passes for the 2027 edition went clean without any lineup at all.

The Grateful Dead-loving Schaefer’s career has been more road-oriented. He came up through management, first working with artists such as John Mellencamp, John Legend, Counting Crows and Soundgarden under the tutelage of Randy Hoffman and later Gary Gersh, who brought him to AEG in 2018. Schaefer has said he was on the road for roughly 85% of Soundgarden’s shows between its 2010 reunion and Chris Cornell’s death in 2017.

That experience gave Schaefer a manager’s understanding of what artists and their teams need from a promoter—an education that became central to his next act. In 2018, after a stint at Mick Management and a period running LoyalT Management, he joined AEG at Gersh’s invitation to help build the company’s newly created global touring division. Schaefer worked alongside Gersh and Michael Harrison of Australia’s Frontier Touring as AEG sought to expand its worldwide touring presence, and when Gersh stepped away at the end of 2023, Schaefer succeeded him as president of global touring.

That operation has since become one of AEG’s principal engines for global artist development, promoting tours for acts ranging from Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs and Zach Bryan to Tame Impala, Tyler, the Creator, Sabrina Carpenter, Kacey Musgraves and Carín León. Of course, there are manifest opportunities for synergy between AEG’s clients and Goldenvoice’s festival offerings, but Coachella still occupies a realm unto itself.

“The first rule of Coachella is not to talk about Coachella,” Schaefer told HITS in 2025. “Paul and the Goldenvoice team have run it for years, and my only real role is to say, we’re working with these amazing artists and some of them want to play Coachella.”

Schaefer and Tollett represent complementary ends of the same AEG infrastructure—Tollett with an expert curator’s eye for the event and the artist mix, Schaefer with a manager’s eye for the career and a global touring network built to execute it.