Nashville's new stadium will host more than football. Concerts are getting upgraded, too

Nissan Stadium is the home of Tennessee Titans football.

But it's the third-highest grossing stadium in the world according to Pollstar because it is home to so much more than football.

According to statistics collected by Conventions, Sports & Leisure International, an advisory and planning firm that services the sports, entertainment, convention and leisure industries, approximately 80% of the events that will take place in Nashville's new stadium won't be football games.

It projects 48 major events in the stadium each year, and only nine or 10 of those will be Titans games.

Of the two million visitors expected each year in the stadium, 75% will visit for events other than football.

The weekend of May 3-4 saw record-breaking hotel performance across Davidson County with hotels reporting an average occupancy rate of 93% with downtown Nashville hotels exceeding 97%, according to the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp.

The numbers were in part due to country star Morgan Wallen's string of concerts at the stadium, combined with local graduations and a Nashville Predators playoff game, which drove hotel bookings slightly above 2023 figures for the same weekend when Taylor Swift's Eras Tour was at the stadium.

It's for these reasons the Titans organization had to take concerts and events into consideration when designing the new facility.

Burke Nihill, president and CEO of the Titans organization, told The Tennessean activity in the new stadium could increase by 40% to 45% just because it will have a roof.

"There are a lot of people who set foot in Nissan Stadium who have no interest in football," Nihill said. "It's this venue that can deliver Taylor Swift and Monster Jam and WrestleMania, and that's something we pay attention to today."

Most enhancements fans will never see

With designing and building a new stadium come opportunities for improvements that will not only help the football crowd, but concerts and events as well.

Nihill said although there will be improvements to the concert experience, most of them are back-of-house upgrades only the production side will see. While not highly visible, they are crucial to the success of a large event.

For example, the existing stadium was built with only half of a basement or service level and there's only two tunnels that access the field. Only one of those is large enough to accommodate a semi truck, which makes for a very inefficient load-in and load-out process for a large event.

"I can't quote you on how many other stadiums fit that profile, but it's not many," he said. "That certainly is something that creates a challenge for any production, whether that's Taylor Swift or CMA Fest. There's just limited amounts of space compared to other venues that they're used to working with."

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The plans for the new stadium call for four tunnels, with two of them able to accommodate semi trucks, which will allow ingress through one tunnel and egress through another. This will minimize the time it takes to unload a massive stage production and therefore minimize the downtime between events. For perspective, a tour the size of Taylor Swift's can require as many as 50 semi trucks to move the stage and production from city to city.

'Elevate the fan experience'

Nihill said in addition to things fans won't see, there are enhancements designed specifically to elevate the fan experience. Some of those things include sections of collapsible seats that will allow a stage to be pushed back to create more floor space and entry from outside the building directly to the floor.

"Anyone who comes to Nissan Stadium today and is on the floor, it's manageable, but you end up with things like Port-A-Johns and portable concessions and people have to walk all the way down the normal stairwells to get in," Nihill said.

In the new design, he said, there will be permanent washrooms on the floor level along with dedicated food and beverage experiences. There will also be a secondary stage in the middle of the lower level about the same size as the one at Ryman Auditorium that will have its own green room for artists.

"These enhancements will almost certainly be eye-opening to the promoters of the world who otherwise wouldn't come here," he said.

'Nashville built one of the last VHS players'

Nihill and his team have visited all of the newest and coolest venues including Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas to survey ways they've elevated the fan experience.

"We wanted to know what are the very best things about these venues and how can we bring them here in an authentically Nashville way," he said.

One thing they learned was the importance of diversity of experience. Now at Nissan Stadium there are lower and upper bowls and club level seats. The new stadium will have 14 or 15 different types of experiences.

"There are a group of fans, whether for football or concerts, that are expecting something other than a traditional stadium experience," he said. "There are some who want an elevated experience. There are others, like my daughter, who want a very social stadium experience. So to go from a few standard experiences to a number of different ways to consume whatever the event is, we're excited about that."

Nihill said when Nissan Stadium was built in 1999, it wasn't outdated, but it was one of the last of its kind.

"Nashville built one of the last VHS players," he said. "Now the DVD era has come and gone and now we're entering the streaming era in terms of overall fan experience and the infrastructure and that sort of thing. They're making this stadium being built a modern experience. Recognizing that we have the opportunity to deliver really meaningful events and activity and economic boost to the city and to our neighbors is absolutely something we're paying attention to."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Tennessee Titans, Nashville East Bank's Nissan Stadium gets busier