Under Smallwood and Taylor\u2019s guidance, Maiden have sold over 100 million records, played approximately 2,500 shows across 64 countries, and released 17 studio albums. Five of those have reached No. 1 in the UK. Their most recent, 2021\u2019s Senjutsu (Parlophone\/BMG<\/a> in the USA), reached No. 3 in the United States.<\/p>\n More recently, the band were named among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame\u2019s 2026 inductees, while Smallwood was awarded an OBE in the June 2026 King\u2019s Birthday Honours for services to music and charity.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Iron Maiden are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2026 with a scale of activity that would exhaust acts half their age. The Run For Your Lives world tour is playing across Europe, Latin America, and Australasia, with a North American leg promoted by Live Nation<\/a>.<\/p>\n In July 2026, the band staged EDDFEST, a bespoke two-day festival at the UK\u2019s Knebworth Park, complete with a museum of band memorabilia, themed fairground rides, and a lineup of guest artists on the Friday, curated by Harris himself.<\/p>\n EddFest\u2019s Infinite Dreams Museum Experience, built around the band\u2019s 50th-anniversary book, was Maiden\u2019s first collaboration with Pophouse Entertainment, which on July 14 confirmed<\/a> a wider partnership, including a stake in the band\u2019s publishing, masters and NIL rights.<\/p>\n Working with UK-based promoter Stuart Galbraith, Smallwood says that EDDFEST stands as a unique, one-off testament to Maiden\u2019s 50th anniversary, featuring a funfair and an upscaled version of the band\u2019s Eddie\u2019s Dive Bar, all within a themed arena Smallwood and his team dubbed \u2018Maidenville\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cThis gave us the perfect opportunity to create a bespoke festival with a name to do it justice, dedicated to all things Iron Maiden, and invite guest artists who we have a connection with to join us,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n But before all that, Smallwood carved time out of the band\u2019s tour schedule ahead of EDDFEST to discuss the Iron Maiden Fan Club, anti-touting, and the secret to a near-50-year management partnership\u2026<\/p>\n The term \u201csuperfans\u201d can mean a million different things to both fans and artists. And of course, to merchandisers, broadcasters, corporations, and any other interested party, dependent on their relationships and intentions.<\/p>\n Maiden has always been about our fans. We wouldn\u2019t exist without the passion and loyalty they\u2019ve shown us; we have some of the most dedicated fans in the world.<\/p>\n Our Fan Club, the IMFC, has been an important part of everything we do across generations of fans now. While the core offering may evolve from time to time, it will always be about communicating with fans and making them feel as valued as possible, with pre-sales on tours, for example, our First-To-The-Barrier setup, and unique merchandise offerings.<\/p>\n We\u2019re very aware that some of our most loyal fans aren\u2019t necessarily the ones with the most disposable income, and we don\u2019t want to take advantage of them or make them feel excluded. It\u2019s why Maiden will never \u201csell\u201d meet-and-greets at our shows. It\u2019s why our VIP packages are focused on a Trooper Beer experience, which is about comfort and convenience for people who want or need that at a show. Likewise, it\u2019s why we have fought for years, largely against the tide, to control ticket prices and fight touting.<\/p>\n So the most important thing the industry can learn from Iron Maiden\u2019s approach: Respect your fans above everything else. Listen to them, engage with them, protect them from secondary touts, and create a family of fans that you nurture over many years. They will stick with you for life.<\/p>\n Despite your historic lack of airplay, especially in North America, you\u2019re playing some of the biggest shows of Maiden\u2019s career on this tour \u2013 including the Alamodome in San Antonio, and playing stadiums for the first time ever in Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. How do you explain a band that\u2019s still growing in scale, 50 years in?<\/p>\n The main reason is that this is just a great live band, something that was pretty clear from the start. People see them and come back for more; always have, tour by tour. Maiden are consummate players with a great frontman [Bruce Dickinson] who knows no fear, a vast amount of great songs between them, with many by Steve [Harris], who is also quite a remarkable bass player, three fantastic guitarists with no egos interrupting the flow, and powerhouse drummers [Nicko McBrain and now Simon Dawson].<\/p>\n Of course, we always put on the best show we can with the best art we can do. And as a bonus, you get [the band\u2019s mascot] Eddie.<\/p>\n The band are also in very good shape and have a ton of on-stage energy. They care about the fans. I guarantee that every one of the band gives everything every night with incredible consistency. That is what brings people back. But it\u2019s also rooted in what I said about our relationship with our fans.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have effectively created our own universe with Eddie at the forefront.\u201d<\/p>\n We\u2019ve never wavered in our commitment to them, and equally importantly, in our commitment to what we do. We have effectively created our own universe with Eddie at the forefront, and stayed true to the vision Steve Harris has always had for the band.<\/p>\n We never sought to follow fashion, and radio play worldwide has always been very scarce. To mainstream media, metal always seemed to be unfashionable for much of our career. We have always focused on putting on the best live show we could afford at the time, and going out to play to our fans, everywhere.<\/p>\n I think that sense of integrity and authenticity has become more and more valued across the globe. It\u2019s also seen us develop a cross-generational fanbase, with many parents bringing young kids to our shows. Every tour since we reformed with Bruce [Dickinson] and Adrian [Smith] in 1999 has seen large increases in attendance as new young fans join us. And, compared to the \u201980s, when our fans were pretty much all male, we now have a very welcome attendance of a high proportion of female fans, who are largely younger in age.<\/p>\n As you say, Maiden have been fierce on ticket scalping over the years. How much of that is philosophical and how much is hard commercial logic about keeping fan loyalty long-term?<\/p>\n In a sense, it is both. In 2010, a person I knew came to our office to tell me about secondary ticketing and the coming of Viagogo, which he was representing. He said that, effectively, if I gave them, say, 1,000 tickets per show at the on-sale of our next UK tour, they would resell [them] on their sites and give us a share of the profits. I think it was 30%. This could go to the band, charity, or \u201canywhere\u201d I wished, confidentially. It sounded rather sinister. What does \u201canywhere\u201d mean? It was obvious who was going to get hit: the fans.<\/p>\n Their main backup argument was that this gave anyone who had bought a ticket for an event they couldn\u2019t go to an ability to resell to Viagogo and get their money back. Then someone else would buy that ticket online, at an inflated price, of course, subject to \u201cdemand.\u201d<\/p>\n Roll on to late November that year, and we went on sale for The Final Frontier tour with the UK shows for the following July. Within a day or so of on-sale there were literally thousands of tickets on Viagogo, Seatwave, and GetMeIn for our shows. That is a lot of tickets for [real fans] to buy, and then, a day or so later, realize [they] can\u2019t actually go to that show eight months later, which stretched the credibility a bit.<\/p>\n As the tour was soon a sellout, all these [secondary tickets] would have been bought at big markups, the money going to the resellers. This was obviously appalling, and I felt it was something we should fight.<\/p>\n This was an industry-wide problem, not just a Maiden one. I soon found a number of people well situated in the industry who felt the same way I did. A key one was Ian McAndrew<\/a>, manager of Arctic Monkeys. We had various meetings, often with 20 or more in attendance, trying to raise some momentum. This led to [UK anti-scalping pressure group] FanFair Alliance, which is still keeping up the good fight some 15 years later, thanks to the formidable Adam Webb.<\/p>\n Also a good friend was the [UK Conservative politician] Mike Weatherley, a huge Maiden and metal fan who always wore his Maiden T-shirt under his shirt in the House of Commons. Mike fixed me meetings with Sir John Whittingdale, the [then chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee], as secondary ticketing would be in their domain.<\/p>\n The meeting went nowhere, and the Conservative government seemed to think that this was \u201cfair free enterprise\u201d. I was amazed. John is a Maiden fan with the art for our album The Number of the Beast on his wall in his office at the House. Very disappointing.<\/p>\n Later, there was a big meeting [between] many music business luminaries; agents, key promoters, and managers \u2013 all of whom were totally against secondary \u2013 with [UK politician] Jeremy Hunt, whose answer was that \u201ctechnology would solve it\u201d. Personally, I thought, \u2018solve what?\u2019 A total waste of time, and I think an insult to the quality and experience of many in that room. I could go on, but we seemed not to be getting very far, and secondary ticketing sites and touts were coining it in. Very sad, and still ongoing, I have to say, despite [UK MP] Sharon Hodgson fighting for years until she was moved over to Public Health earlier this year. A sad loss to the cause.<\/p>\n So the government had no appetite for it. How did you take the fight on yourself?<\/p>\n We focused on Maiden\u2019s own battle with [touts] to see if we could show what could be done and encourage others to do the same. So the next time we had a run of dates in the UK, 2017\u2019s Book Of Souls tour, we set out to ensure fans were able to buy tickets at the face value we set, not an artificially inflated resale price.<\/p>\n We pushed to use paperless ticketing as much as possible, and \u201cnames on tickets\u201d where they were still physical. We were able to get the tour delisted from GetMeIn, Seatwave and StubHub, which took out a huge chunk of that secondary market and left Viagogo as the only big player.<\/p>\n \u201cBanishing secondary ticketing would be the biggest thing I would want to change.\u201d<\/p>\n With a lot of messaging and warnings ahead of the on-sale, we hoped to deter touts from buying in the first place, making it clear that these tickets would be a massive pain to try and resell.<\/p>\n We worked, and continue to do so, with a fantastic chap called Reg Walker who literally made it his mission to fight the touts by scanning lists to spot their pseudonyms and canceling their inventory.<\/p>\n He started telling these \u201cbad actors\u201d that Maiden were not going to let this fight go, as many bands sadly did, and that it really wasn\u2019t in their interest to try and gouge our tickets. His consultancy now focuses on the major ticket harvesters who use bots and fake IDs to steal tickets from fans on an industrial scale.<\/p>\n All the activities combined to be really successful. When we checked the numbers the week after public sale [for the Book Of Souls tour], there were only 207 tickets listed on Viagogo. Back in 2010, there had been over 4,000 across the secondary sites after the same amount of time.<\/p>\n How do you give an honest fan a way out without leaving a door open for scalpers?<\/p>\n There are legitimate reasons why a fan might need to resell a ticket they bought months in advance, and since we had set the tight restrictions, we felt it was also our responsibility to help them. So we worked with Ticketmaster<\/a> and the other companies involved in the tour to authorize transfers or refunds where it was appropriate. We even sent someone from our office out on the road to be in the box office every night \u2013 someone with the authority to say yes or no to those last-minute cases where a fan turns up with an issue.<\/p>\n It was a lot of work, but to put some perspective here: we sold 156,000 Maiden tickets at face value on that UK tour, and the team authorized 110 refunds. That\u2019s it. It\u2019s a tiny fraction of fans that actually need to get rid of their ticket; everything else is just people trying to profit.<\/p>\n It got easier on subsequent tours as the process got smoother and the technology improved. Now we can tell Ticketmaster to cap the resale profit on their platform, which also verifies tickets are genuine. We restrict the resale and transfer of mobile tickets until much closer to the show, to try and prevent touts from acting at the on-sale. It\u2019s not perfect by any means, but there\u2019s a lot an artist can do to try and keep things under control.<\/p>\n Can you replicate that internationally, or is this a UK-specific operation?<\/p>\n With respect to the UK, I believe we\u2019ve made a real impact over the past 10 years by protecting our fans as much as we can from secondary pricing. Internationally, however, it is far more complex.<\/p>\n The reality is that the level of operational effort, coordination, and enforcement required to effectively combat industrial-scale ticket touting is enormous. What we\u2019ve built in the UK has required significant investment, dedicated manpower, deep market knowledge, and months of planning in partnership with promoters, venues, and platforms. Replicating that same infrastructure internationally is not a simple switch we can flip overnight.<\/p>\n If we had the scale of a multinational corporation with large regional teams, unlimited operational resources, and the ability to embed locally for extended periods, we would absolutely be deploying these same anti-touting measures across every territory we operate in. The challenge is not a lack of intent; it is the sheer complexity and resource intensity required to do it properly and effectively, globally.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve managed Maiden for nearly five decades. What\u2019s the secret to such a long artist-manager partnership in this business?<\/p>\n Honesty. Simple as that. I will never, ever, lie to the band and never have. Nor will they to me. For almost 50 years, since I first looked Steve in the eyes and agreed to manage the band, we have always been open, frank, and honest with each other about what was right, wrong, possible, and unacceptable.<\/p>\n We have enough mutual respect to argue, and I really mean argue, but only because that shows both parties have the strength of commitment to something, an idea or a principle, and that way you both know you are striving for the right thing or the best outcome.<\/p>\n The band have also always known that there is a clear set of boundaries: what they do and what I do. Sure, they meet at certain points, but ultimately, I don\u2019t go in the studio, for example, or question the music, unless they ask me to, which they haven\u2019t since the first album. And they don\u2019t get in the way of my planning, tour scheduling, marketing, and the vision for Eddie and the band, though of course, I keep them informed.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a fantastic relationship. But in a way, they don\u2019t know any other style of management, and neither do I. It certainly makes business far less complicated when it\u2019s like this.<\/p>\n The power dynamics have shifted massively in the music business since you started working with Maiden. How do you see the role of the artist manager in 2026 compared to when you began?<\/p>\n I actually don\u2019t see the role of a manager shifting much. Much the same applies, though with different emphases. But I agree the industry has changed almost beyond recognition for rock bands.<\/p>\n I know for a fact that Andy [Taylor] and I could not have broken this band without the help, and more specifically the money \u2013 and by that I mean tour support \u2013 that EMI gave us back in the \u201980s.<\/p>\n We lived hand to mouth for the first three albums, as our priority was the extensive touring and the show for the fans, which was all very expensive even back then.<\/p>\n Without tour support, we had no chance to execute these huge touring plans. Andy even had to take out a significant personal loan to allow me to put together the expensive [live run] in North America for the Number of the Beast tour. We stayed out there for a long time, taking the show with us. We actually went through Chicago three times, once each with Rainbow, Judas Priest, and The Scorpions. Thankfully, it paid off.<\/p>\n With that level of label backing gone, where does a new band find the money to tour like that today?<\/p>\n In the age of streaming and drastically reduced record sales, tour support has vanished. I see how hard my team at Phantom works on the band\u2019s solo projects to get albums and tours set up, and all the rest that involves. I then see how they have to create something worthy of attracting social media support, for example, to try and move the dial.<\/p>\n I know we never had radio support per se, but how do new bands get the attention of media partners when there is no one to talk to at a digital aggregator, for example? How do you cut through at a retailer like Amazon<\/a>?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n I know Maiden had their challenges back in the early years, but I always felt there were relationships to be made that would provide a solution; I\u2019m not so sure it\u2019s that easy anymore. Critical mass is so hard to achieve when there is so much fragmentation.<\/p>\n I take my hat off to anyone who, as a manager, believes enough in a band to devote everything to trying to achieve that in the face of today\u2019s challenges. Also, [emerging] bands need places to play. Those places are expensive to run nowadays with all the taxes going on, so the number of venues is gradually declining, which is tragic.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s not just in the UK. How does a band refine its chops when they don\u2019t \u2013 or can\u2019t \u2013 play much? That\u2019s a problem largely for bands, as solo artists, pop acts, and producers focus primarily on their online presence. So in the future, there is likely to be a preponderance of solo artists and pop in its wider sense. In fact, isn\u2019t that what\u2019s happening already?<\/p>\n If there was one thing you could change about the music business today, what would it be?<\/p>\n If I had the talent, I would go into politics and find a way to get rid of secondary ticketing and the whole malaise around it. It only serves to make these guys, and some dodgy artists and managers, rich \u2013 while the fans get substantially poorer.<\/p>\n If you look around now, at the ever-increasing price of tickets and particularly at the shenanigans of FIFA, the rich get richer and sod the rest. How could we have allowed that to happen? Is [scalping] of any real value other than taking advantage of the fans?<\/p>\n And of course, a knock-on effect of secondary ticketing is that all the extra cash spent [by fans] to see a big act leaves less finance to go and see that new band in a club. A very vicious circle.<\/p>\n Banishing secondary ticketing would be the biggest thing I would want to change. My team and I are doing whatever we can to bring about that change, at least in our own world.<\/p>\n<\/a>Credit: John McMurtrie.Iron Maiden at EDDFEST<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
<\/a>Credit: John McMurtrieIron Maiden<\/p>\n
<\/a>Credit: Ross HalfinOn tour in the US in the \u201980s.<\/p>\n
<\/a>This article originally appeared in the latest issue of MBW\u2019s premium print publication, Music Business Worldwide Magazine, which is out now.<\/a><\/p>\n