Scott Clayton, one of five co-heads of music at Creative Artists Agency's Nashville office has resigned from his position, Billboard has learned.
Clayton reps some of the biggest names in music including John Mayer, Dead & Company and Kings of Leon. It's unclear if Clayton is taking his artists with him, but he is expected to accept a position at a rival talent agency in the coming days.
A CAA spokesperson confirmed to Billboard that Clayton left the company on Friday (Nov. 17). After moving to Tennessee in 1994, Clayton was one of the first CAA agents at the Nashville office to represent contemporary artists, signing Train and John Mayer.
"We were on the map from the beginning with our rock division," he told the Tennessean in 2016. "Now we handle the vast majority of the festival bookings for the contemporary music roster, we book all the colleges out of here for that roster, we do all the fairs. We’ve also gotten into the EDM (electronic dance music) space."
Clayton is a member of the Music City Music Council and a graduate of University of Virginia. One of his most recent successes at CAA was booking Zac Brown Band's 2017 Welcome Home Tour with dozens of sellouts and stadium shows on Aug. 26 at Wrigley Field in Chicago and July 27 at Coors Field in Denver, and booked Brown's seventh career sellout show at Fenway Park in Boston in 2016. The 2017 tour sold over one million tickets.
"We've been doing baseball stadiums for the last several years, starting with Fenway Park in Boston," Clayton told Billboard last month. "There's something about the intimacy of the ballpark experience that Zac really loves, much more so than the vibe of a football stadium."
Clayton's exit means the co-heads of the CAA Nashville office drop from five to four with Marc Dennis, Rod Essig, John Huie and Darin Murphy sharing leadership roles.
