Peter Katsis, Veteran Music Manager Who Guided Backstreet Boys & Smashing Pumpkins, Dies at 69

Peter Katsis, the veteran music manager who helped shepherd the careers of artists including Backstreet Boys, Korn, The Smashing Pumpkins and Snoop Dogg, has died, a representative tells Billboard. He was 69.

Katsis kicked off his music business career at age 23 in Chicago, his hometown, when he discovered and managed the industrial band Ministry. He later went on to work as an A&R executive at the city’s Trax Precision Records, where he served as a booking agent for influential Chicago house artists including Marshal Jefferson and Adonis just as the dance sub-genre was in its nascent stages.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1990, Katsis began working with artists including The Cramps, Material Issue and Tuck & Patti. Between 1997 and 2008, he became a partner in The Firm, where he helped launch artists like Backstreet Boys, Enrique Iglesias and Thirty Seconds to Mars to stardom. While working on the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium arena tour in 1999, the run sold 765,000 tickets in just one day, the vast majority in the first hour; the tour also won Katsis a Pollstar Award for most creative stage design. The massive success of that run resulted in the boy band moving up to stadiums on its Black and Blue tour the following year.

While at The Firm, Katsis scored another major success with the rock supergroup Audioslave, helping secure the band’s 2005 performance for tens of thousands of fans in Havana, Cuba, as part of a cultural exchange between Cuba and the U.S.

In 2008, Katsis, along with ex-The Firm partner and CEO Jeff Kwatinetz and former Disney executive Rich Frank, launched Prospect Park Entertainment, where he continued managing Backstreet Boys, Audioslave and Korn along with acts including the The Smashing Pumpkins (which he signed in 2012), Jane’s Addiction and Ice Cube. After leaving Prospect Park in 2014 following an alleged dispute with Kwatinetz, Katsis continued laying the groundwork for successful tours for some of those same artists, as well as acts including Liz Phair, Morrissey, Pentatonix and 5 Seconds of Summer, at firms including Deckstar Management and YM&U.

Katsis is survived by a son Ian Katsis and sister Anastasia Katsis.