The growing Lancaster County business that hosted Beyonce, U2, and Justin Bieber

LITITZ, Pa. — Out by the cornfields, between the barns and church steeples in Lancaster County, Justin Bieber ordered a bacon, egg, and cheese croissant at a local diner.

Ariana Grande went to Target, Whole Foods, too. Katy Perry got touristy and took a road trip to Hershey Park.

Lancaster County is a swell place, Pennsylvania’s bread basket, home to the Amish and antique stores and lots of farms. It’s a nice day trip for Philadelphians. And a growing number of famous performing artists are spending up to two weeks there, rehearsing for huge arena and stadium shows that could reap nine-figure profits.

Welcome to Rock Lititz, one of Pennsylvania’s, and the nation’s, most unique businesses.

“This was a great example of, ‘If you build it, they will come,’” said Andrea Shirk, CEO of Rock Lititz.

The 96-acre campus consists of a 30,000-square-foot rehearsal studio with 100-foot ceilings to replicate the scope of arena tours. It was the largest dedicated rehearsal space in the world when it opened in 2014. A second, slightly smaller Studio 2 debuted on April 1. There’s a whole host of associated businesses and amenities there too, in collective workplaces known as pods. Nearly all of them are dedicated to music in some way.

During a recent weekday, men in harnesses dangled from what appeared to be large jungle gyms, riggers practicing techniques and rescues they might have to apply at concert venues.

“It’s sort of like an open gym today,” said Brian Leister, a senior technical trainer at Columbus McKinnon.

But there’s also game developers, a bicycle store, and medical offices.

If an artist needs a spinning stage, fireballs erupting behind the drummer, or a digital backdrop of swirling fractals, someone at Rock Lititz can get it done. But really any business that needs a spectacle can find one there.

“You’ll hear us refer to this as an ‘entertainment campus.’ Concert touring is certainly the roots, and I would still say half of what we do is concert touring, but the other half of what we do is theme park installations like Disney, Universal, cruise ships,” Shirk said. “Companies have worked on the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and the Pope’s visit to Philadelphia.”

In the trendy hotel that opened on campus in 2018, artists can play shuffleboard in the lobby or soak in the deep tubs upstairs in what have to be the swankiest penthouse suites between Pittsburgh and Philly.

“Dancers really appreciate the soaking tub,” said Kim Levenson, sales and marketing director of Hotel Rock Lititz.

While the folks at Rock Lititz have a policy not to discuss the artists who rent their spaces — unless the artist already has — they also don’t make it a point to shelter them. There’s no security checkpoints, no gates, and many of the businesses are open to the public. It would be possible, for instance, to run into Bruno Mars or Adam Levine at Lititz recROC, the rock climbing gym.

“We’re professionals and always thinking through what could happen, but the restaurant is public, the hotel and bar are public,” Shirk said. “The public is very respectful.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept over the globe, just before summer of 2020, most large venues canceled or postponed concerts. Some early pandemic estimates said the concert industry would lose $30 billion. Those concert cancellations trickled down to Rock Lititz, but some livestream performances were filmed there, including a performance by the pop trio AJR, in 2020, and a 2021 New Year’s Eve show by the iconic jam band Phish.

Concert revenue rebounded in 2021. Today, with COVID restrictions loosening worldwide, both studios at Rock Lititz are close to capacity for the rest of the year.

“The numbers I’m hearing is that the industry is expecting a 100% to 125% increase,” Shirk said.

While the campus sits on Warwick Township land, the small borough of Lititz sits inside it like a doughnut hole. Timothy Snyder, mayor of Lititz, said Rock Lititz is a win-win for the whole region, having built a community on campus for the public, along with baseball fields and walking trails. Nearly 1,500 locals work there.

“Lititz is a happening town and they’re a great addition,” Snyder said. “They’re great for this area.”

Snyder said Lady Gaga’s been seen in the Bulls Head Public House, Lititz’s renowned neighborhood pub, but media reports say a boyfriend is what drew her to Lancaster.

“I’m probably dating myself, but I probably wouldn’t know most of these celebrities,” said Snyder. “It would be pretty cool to see Billy Joel though.”

Turns out Joel did spend time in Lititz, back in 1979. Roy Clair, one of the founding fathers of Rock Lititz, explained why the superstar was rehearsing in a little town that was then known for its chocolate and pretzels.

“There aren’t the distractions of a New York or Hollywood in Lancaster County,” Clair told a reporter in 1979. “Here they enjoy being out in the country, too, away from everything but their work.”

In the decades that followed, the audio business the Clair Brothers started in their garage, along with other businesses associated with music and touring, converged into Rock Lititz. Roy and Gene Clair first supplied sound equipment to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons in 1966 when the group was playing Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster.

While the Clair brothers made concerts more professional, shows evolved in the digital age as singles and streaming replaced analog media. Concert tours, Shirk said, went from something artists did to support their albums, to their biggest moneymaker.

Shows became bigger, the special effects and lighting more intricate, and soft openings to iron out the kinks in Omaha or Des Moines no longer cut it when every ticket holder had a cell phone. Nearly all of the highest-grossing tours of all time have occurred in the last 20 years.

“That really upped the ante of what they had to do on tour,” Shirk said. “And that’s why we’re here.”