The Riverside Board of Aldermen approved $120 million in bonds last week to build a new amphitheater along the Missouri River. The venue will be owned, operated and maintained by the global company Live Nation Entertainment.
The new amphitheater will seat 15,000 people and is expected to open in the 2026 concert season. It will also open in time to host overflow watch parties during the six 2026 World Cup games to be held in the Kansas City area.
Riverside, Missouri, City Administrator Brian Koral said the city has been working for the past seven years with Live Nation to develop the 135-acre site, northwest of Horizons Parkway and Interstate 635. He said the new venue will become a gathering place for Riverside residents.
“Having a place to bring families to enjoy an outdoor concert, to enjoy a soccer game, to take advantage of the trail system, all of the things that we've been spending years working towards,” Koral said, “it's really exciting for the community to kind of see these things coming to fruition.”
Koral also expects the concert venue to be a regional draw.
“There's a general excitement that a world class concert venue is going to be in our backyard,” Koral said. “That's incredible, right?”
The amphitheater will include a parking area with 5,200 parking spaces and an additional 200 spots designated for ride-share drivers.
The site will have access to the Missouri Riverfront Trail, which connects Riverside to the Line Creek Trail, and Koral said plans for the venue include traffic of all kinds, including pedestrians and bicyclists.
“To be able to say, ‘I'm going to go see a concert,’ but instead of getting in my car and driving across the metro, I'm going to hop on my bike and head down the trail,” Koral said, “that's just a really cool potential.”
Live Nation will provide $95 million in construction costs, the bulk of the funding for the project. The state of Missouri will kick in $20 million to support public infrastructure like roads and parking lots, and the city of Riverside will invest $5 million.
Live Nation will also save $15 million in the form of tax incentives, including sales and use tax exemptions on construction materials and a 10-year property tax abatement.
According to Koral, the amphitheater, to be located in an industrial park near a Kansas City Current soccer training complex and the Argosy Casino and Hotel, should have minimal impact on its neighbors, and residential areas on a bluff above the project have been accounted for in the project plans.
“It's really going to be designed to minimize the impact on neighbors,” Koral said. “From a residential standpoint, the sounds will be traveling away from residential areas.”
The projected impact on the music scene
Some in Kansas City’s live music scene have wondered if the metro has the capacity to absorb another major music venue.
Frank Hicks, the owner of popular East Bottoms music venue Knuckleheads, doesn’t expect his business to be impacted, but said other, larger concert venues in town might feel differently.
“I'm looking at it as a music lover for the city and, as a music lover for the city, I think it's going to be good,” said Hicks, who has hosted bands in his 120-year-old railroad boarding house since 1985.
"I think the people who are going to be affected more than anybody is the old Sandstone (now Azura Amphitheater) and places like Starlight (Theatre),” Hicks said. "Starlight is like half the size this new place is going to be but they're still going to be, in a sense, competing with them."
KCUR reached out to Azura Amphitheater and the T-Mobile Center for comment on the project but did not receive a response.
In a statement, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas downplayed concerns for Starlight, a 7,739-seat outdoor theater owned by the city.
“Starlight has been a tradition in Swope Park for Kansas City families since 1950,” he wrote. “New fads and new venues will come and go, but the quality, tradition, and diversity of performances and audiences at Starlight will remain.”
Protecting the venue from flooding
Development in tiny Riverside, on the north bank of the Missouri River just upstream from its confluence with the Kansas River, has had a long history with flooding.
According to the Kansas City Star, Riverside Stadium held car races on a quarter-mile dirt track at what is now the parking lot of the Riverside Red X grocery store starting in June 1951.
The following month, the historic 1951 flood covered the race track entirely, shutting down racing and causing $60,000 in repairs.
The track was demolished in the late 1980s, and the land was slated for industrial development.
The Missouri River also caused havoc for Riverside during the Great Flood of 1993. Without a levee to protect the area, the Red X grocery store, near the river on Northwest Platte Drive, came close to being inundated by water.
Koral said investments in flood-control efforts since then should protect the city, and the site of the amphitheater, against a 500-year flood.
“Following the 1993 flood, the city got involved and said we really need to be in a position where we can control our own destiny going forward,” Koral said. “We worked with the (Army) Corps of Engineers and the city invested north of $80 million in the levee structure.”
The antitrust allegations against Live Nation
Live Nation Entertainment, which is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California, was in the news earlier this year when the U.S. Department of Justice and 30 state and district attorneys general filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against the company and Ticketmaster LLC. Kansas joined the lawsuit in August.
At a press conference in May, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland accused the companies of unlawful, anticompetitive conduct, and of exercising monopolistic control over the country’s live events industry.
“The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services,” Garland said. “It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
Live Nation responded to the lawsuit in a statement, blaming the high price of tickets on artists and illegal ticket resellers. Live Nation rejected the notion that the company wields monopolistic power, and defended the company’s ticketing fees as fair market rates for the services they provide.
According to Forbes, Live Nation has earned more than $23 billion in revenue so far this year, and cleared $18 billion in 2023.
Koral said he does not believe that the lawsuit will impact the Riverside project.
“That litigation is going to play itself out and the city is not a party to that,” Koral said. “The city is comfortable with the direction that we're taking at this point.”
The amphitheater’s official groundbreaking is expected in the next couple weeks.
