REPORTING FROM COSTA MESA, CALIF. — Deidra Sibila is not a person who easily blends into the crowd. Maybe it’s her arsenal of bright makeup, or her love for all things pink. Whatever it is that makes Sibila so unique, fiery and passionate, it’s been going on for a long time. Well, at least since middle school when she rejected her clarinet in favor of something with a little more bass.
“Clarinet players are a dime a dozen,” said Sibila over a meal of spicy tater tots and waffle sandwiches inside a trendy diner in Orange County. “So I picked up the oboe. You don’t see too many redhead oboists. That’s pretty special.”
Special indeed. Friends say Sibila is one of the most unique, creative people in the ticketing industry with one of the most prestigious positions with the world’s biggest concert promoter. As the Senior National Director of Ticketing for Live Nation Touring, Sibila touches nearly every North American tour the company produces.
“She has worked hard her whole life and now she is at the top of world’s biggest entertainment company,” said Shelby Burdick, a sales executive at TicketForce and close friend of Sibila. The two met while working at the Cricket Wireless Pavilion in Phoenix, Ariz. (now the Ashley Furniture HomeStore Pavilion). “She’s an inspiration to all women in the business and she shows that if you work hard, you can rise to the highest level in the business.”
A Cleveland, Ohio native, Sibila is a lifelong music fan who eventually earned a music degree at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio and interned with promoter Belkin Productions, staying with the company as it first was bought by SFX and eventually spun off as Live Nation. It was a lot of box office time, working one-offs like the Gravity Games and the Cleveland Grand Prix, as well as paying her dues at the now defunct Odeon Concert Club in Cleveland. All that experience and those late nights in Cleveland eventually paved the way for an offer by former Live Nation ticketing executive Laura Gibson to move out to Hollywood and oversee the company’s ticketing efforts.
Her favorite analogy for her job? The hourglass.
“Before the tour starts, I talk to all the agents, managers and sometimes the artists themselves to establish all ticketing elements of the tour,” she said. Once all the information about sponsorships, VIP packages, ticket holds and Ticketmaster show builds are combined, “I flip the hourglass over and send all of the information and strategies to all of the venues on the tour,” overseeing on-sales and ticket reports that are eventually flipped back to the agents and managers.
“Then when a particular tour is over and follow-up and closeout procedures are complete, you turn over my hourglass once more, type a new band name on the ticket header, and do it all over again,” she said.
A lifelong music fan herself, Sibila said she’s most happy at a rock concert — whether it’s an arena show by The Killers or a party cruise with 311. She’s handled ticketing for nearly every major Live Nation tour in the last two years including Coldplay, Roger Waters, One Directon, P!nk and Jay-Z and Pearl Jam’s inaugural Made in America Festival.
Yet, even now at the highest level of ticketing, Sibila said she still draws upon her experience as an intern at the Odeon Concert Club in the late 90s, remembering the hard work and late nights required to climb to where she is today.
“I have had the opportunity to work with emerging artists who began their journey in 1,000-cap clubs who would later go on to become superstars and sell out arenas and stadiums around the country,” she said. “It brings me great satisfaction to continue to work with some of these artists 14 years later and still handle their ticketing, just now on a greater scale.”