For a fifth-generation Colorado native who grew up on a small ranch just north of Colorado Springs, the dream of being associated with the music industry seemed like a long shot for JW Roth.
Instead of finishing high school, Roth opted to get a GED and then worked nights at the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office. He eventually started working two jobs—in the Denver Police Department and as a salesperson at Universal Foods. The latter enabled Roth to get a job in the brokerage business, which allowed him to ultimately become a founder of AspenBio Pharma.
In 2015, he started Roth Industries with his son, and in 2019, he stepped away from the day-to-day operations of Roth Industries to focus on his true passion: music.
The irony, Roth says, is today he would never be able to get a job at the police department, at a brokerage firm or even at his own company with just a GED because a bachelor’s degree is required for all those positions.
Roth’s newest venture, Venu Holding Corporation, is disrupting the music industry with plans to build 10 luxury outdoor music venues across the country. With Venu, Roth plans to build a company that is fan-founded and fan-owned.
Venu opened its first stadium, the Ford Amphitheater in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last summer. Ford Amphitheater is competing directly with the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheater, located about 70 miles away in Morrison, Colorado.
OneRepublic, a band from Colorado Springs, opened Ford Amphitheater’s concert series in August 2024. John Fogerty, Steve Miller Band, Foreigner, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss also performed there in 2024. Shows for the 2025 season include Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Dwight Yoakam, Leon Bridges, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and “Weird Al” Yankovic.
“I grew up a music nut,” Roth says. He recalls a time in 1978 when he and his buddy had new girlfriends they wanted to impress so they invited them to a Rolling Stones concert before they even had tickets to the show. Roth and his friend camped out overnight on a concrete sidewalk in the rain to secure those tickets.
As Roth became more successful, he had the opportunity to attend concerts all over the country. “I noticed [the venues] were all sort of old and dilapidated, and they were built back before rideshare and the fan demand had just grown,” Roth says.
He also noticed that the NFL and MLB owners were putting together public-private partnerships with municipalities to build state-of-the-art stadiums. These stadiums aren’t just a venue for watching sports; they’re about experience and ambiance, he says. Many offer great restaurants and other unique experiences. These stadiums inspired Roth to establish Venu Holding Corporation, which became a publicly traded company on Nov. 29, 2024.
Initially the company was called Notes Live, but when Roth decided to take the company public, he realized his company needed a different name to create a memorable stock symbol: Venu.
Venu is currently building Sunset Amphitheater in McKinney, Texas. The total cost of the stadium is about $300 million, Roth says. Much like the NFL and MLB stadiums Roth visited, Venu put together a public-private partnership to build the amphitheater.
For instance, to build Sunset Amphitheater, the city of McKinney is contributing $110 million through the contribution of land, tax incentives, abatements and refunds in the form of cash from property tax and sales tax, Roth explains. In return, the city gets economic development because once the stadium is built, hotels and restaurants will start to open. “Other entertainment facilities show up because people come to what I build, and what I build is a magnet,” Roth says.
Within each amphitheater, Roth builds firepit suites, which he sells to local businesses, much like a condo building sells individual units. This allows the businesses to depreciate their investment, Roth says. Each firepit suite owner can choose to either give away tickets for the suite to clients or employees or to lease their seats in the firepit suite to fans, much like property owners rent out apartments through Vrbo or Airbnb.
Sunset Amphitheater will have 295 firepit suites for sale ranging in size from four to 10 seats, all with big, overstuffed chairs. The least expensive suite is $295,000, and the most expensive is $800,000, Roth says.
However, Venu’s amphitheaters don’t just cater to fans who can pay thousands of dollars to see a concert. Roth’s hope is to make the experience of seeing live music as comfortable and luxurious as possible even for those seated in the least expensive seats on the lawn. To make the lawn seats more lavish, a comfort pad is placed underneath the lawn’s artificial turf. Seats inside the amphitheater are three inches wider and deeper than at other outdoor music venues, and each seat has its own cup holder.
Plans call for Venu to build stadiums in El Paso, Texas, and Oklahoma City and Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
Roth believes that music is the greatest unifier. “You could put an independent, a Republican and a Democrat that hate each other, that can’t agree on anything, but they can all sit together and sing every lyric of ‘Hotel California,’ and they will enjoy that six minutes and nine seconds,” he says.
Music fans come from all walks of life. Some will save for months to buy lawn tickets, and some will spend thousands on firepit seats, but they will all sit together, united in their love of live music, Roth says. That experience doesn’t happen at a sporting event because the fans are rooting for different teams, he says.
“I can’t tell you in specifics a memory that was created every time I went to a ballpark,” Roth says. “But I can tell you a memory from every single concert.”
Photo by Josh Bourgeois @JBCreative. This article originally appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
