Festivals For The Rest Of Us: An Industry Roundtable About Festival Life, Part One
With winter almost over, the spring and summer festival circuit is beginning to roll into action. For many music fans, spending a day (or two, or three) catching a slew of their favorite bands is an experience they anticipate each year. But how do these festivals even end up happening? And what exactly goes into planning them? AP chatted with producers from some of your favorite festivals to see what it takes to make these events come off without a hitch.
The Festivals:
Bled Fest
When/Where: May 26, 2012, in Howell, MI
What: A six-stage indoor festival held at a community center
Notable acts: The Early November, As Cities Burn, Comeback Kid
Price: TBA
South By So What?!
When/Where: March 17, 2012, in Grand Prairie, TX (in the Dallas metro area)
What: A three-stage outdoor festival held at a baseball stadium
Notable acts: Asking Alexandria, We Came As Romans, Motion City Soundtrack
Price: $42.25
Vans Warped Tour
When/Where: June 16-August 5, various venues
What: A multi-stage outdoor festival tour
Notable acts: Sleeping With Sirens, Transit, Mayday Parade
Price: TBA
Rock On The Range
When/Where: May 18-20, 2012, in Columbus, OH
What: A three-stage outdoor weekend festival held at a soccer stadium
Notable acts: Mastodon, Attack Attack!, Falling In Reverse
Price: $151 for a weekend pass
The Panelists:
Mike Ziemer, CEO/Founder of Third String Productions; South By So What?! Producer
Nate Dorough, Co-Owner/Talent Buyer of Fusion Shows; Bled Fest Talent Buyer/Producer
Kevin Lyman, Founder/Producer of Vans Warped Tour
Gary Spivak, Co-President of Right Arm Entertainment; co-producer of Rock On The Range.
Joe Litvag, Senior Vice President of AEG Live; Co-Producer of Rock On The Range
How did the idea for your festival begin?
[Nate Dorough, Bled Fest]
When [Bled Fest] started—this is the eighth year—I wasn’t even involved. It was a local house show. A high school kid named Ben Staub from Heartland, Michigan had a pool party and had some bands play in his basement. His nickname was Big Love, but he called it “Big Love’s Educational Festival” and shortened it to Bled Fest.
[Mike Ziemer, South By So What?!]
The first show I ever did was during March, and the only reason I got any bands that weren’t local was because they needed a show by South By Southwest. Every year [after that] we would do what was our anniversary show; all we’d ever call it was “Third String Productions YEAR anniversary show.” This guy that I used to work with jokingly said, “You should call your festival ‘South By So What?!’” and at first I didn’t want to get in trouble with South By Southwest—I love South By Southwest, and it’s not a stab at it or anything—but it’s fitting because kids up here [in Dallas] can’t get into 21-and-up shows or [afford] a $700 pass. They can’t go [to SXSW].
So we decided to play off South By Southwest and make it known to agents that if you want your bands to get exposure in Dallas, instead of competing with 500 shows in one area, we’re going to put you on one big festival and this will be how your band gets a lot of exposure. We actually just signed a contract with South By Southwest that we’re not associated with them, we won’t use their logo, we’re not going to use [the abbreviation] SXSW—things like that. They don’t hate us or think we’re attacking them in any way. Some people have a common misconception about it.
[Kevin Lyman, Vans Warped Tour]
The idea of Vans Warped Tour is that it was going to be my last thing before I went and became a schoolteacher. We were going to go out and try to do something one last time with some friends. It was blending with the skateboard culture I grew up with in Southern California and the music scene I worked with. I always put shows on in California where we put bands on top of the ramp—whether it is the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Social Distortion—but this was the culmination of that. It was, “Let’s go out and have a skateboard music show and see what happens.”
[Gary Spivak, Rock On The Range]
Well, it’s our sixth year. It really came together in a wonderfully innocent way where ignorance is bliss. Myself, Del Williams and Danny Wimmer—the three partners from Right Arm—six years ago said, “Where’s the Coachella for the heartland? Where’s the big rock festival?” Yeah, there’s Coachella, there’s Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza—but where is the great rock festival?
How far in advance do you begin planning the festival?
[Nate Dorough, Bled Fest]
I feel like we start planning it the day the last one’s over, but we probably start making connections with the booking agents in like November, December to see what bands will be on the road in May.
[Mike Ziemer, South By So What?!]
Some of the first agents book months and months and months in advance. I think some of them started hitting me up in early winter or late fall. I’ll probably book some of my first bands [for next year] as early as October.
[Kevin Lyman, Vans Warped Tour]
September, October, November is music time—building the idea of where I think, musically, the show is going to go. In the meantime, [we’re also] working on getting sponsorships for the tour as well as finishing up paperwork from the year before’s tour—the amount of paperwork and bills that have to be paid and sign off on everything takes until about November. Then once you start to figure out the bands, you have: getting in contact with all the bands, [getting] all the deal points and the line-up to finish up. That takes you up to about December/January and now February/March you’re in the middle of starting to get the nuts and bolts down—hiring the staff, the crews, the contractors, trucks, lights, sound. Getting the shows on sale. It’s a year-round business.
[Gary Spivak, Rock On The Range]
It’s a 364-day siege. We’re talking about next year already.
What goes into finding out where you’re going to have the festival?
[Nate Dorough, Bled Fest]
We’ve done it [at the Hartland Performing Arts Center] the last five years. It used to be a high school—the high school I graduated from 14 years ago now. So, it’s an old high school building. You have that fantasy when you’re sitting in class or the lunchroom looking around and just having a “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Nirvana video breaking out at your school, and it never actually happens. It was just cool to be able to make that kind of visualization into a reality.
It’s a very alternative location. Bands walk in and kind of roll their eyes like, “Seriously? This is where Bled Fest is?” and then by the end [they’ve changed their minds]. Like last year, you have all these bands—Every Time I Die, Norma Jean, the Chariot—and all these bands that have been touring for 10 years or more tweeting that “This was the best show we’ve ever played” or “One of the greatest shows of our lives—thank you” kind of thing. It’s cool to have that at the end where they come back to you and say, “You were right; this was sweet.”
[Mike Ziemer, South By So What?!]
The first two we did at the Plano Center. Then they told us, basically, that we outgrew their venue and didn’t want all these kids running around. We moved to Dr. Pepper Arena for one year and kids didn’t like it because once the arena floor was sold out, you had to sit in a seat. Kids don’t want to watch Asking Alexandria or Attack Attack! from a seat. From there we went to Palladium Ballroom. It was cool to sell out that venue, but through trial and error, we realized this venue isn’t big enough and not a good fan experience.
This year we got approached by the baseball stadium [QuikTrip Park in Grand Prairie] who said, “Look, we can fit up to 10,000 people—maybe push 12,000—if you guys don’t want to have to worry about capacity. We can do the show here, and we’ll figure it out from there.” We started planning that in December, and we just had one of our final production meetings. I couldn’t be more excited about a venue. It really is the entire band and fan experience.
[Kevin Lyman, Vans Warped Tour]
We’re kind of in shifting mode—we’re probably going to have six or seven new venues on Warped Tour this year—trying out new places. A lot of it comes down to how to make the deals work so we can charge the kids the least possible [amount] for the tickets. The interesting thing with Warped Tour we figured out: Warped Tour is only profitable on about six to eight shows a summer—the rest of it is subsidized by sponsorship. If you’re coming to a show, your ticket price is being subsidized by sponsors and we need, like, 13 or 14 thousand people a show to break even on the day.
[Gary Spivak, Rock On The Range]
We took out a map six years ago and we were like, “Let’s put it right in the center of America.” And so we thought about several ideas right in the middle of America, but then the idea quickly shifted with our partners at AEG and Crew Stadium to Columbus Crew. Columbus is the home for Rock On The Range.
What permits or safety measures are necessary to make sure the festival is legally on the up-and-up?
[Nate Dorough, Bled Fest]
We have a really cool relationship with the school district, so a lot of the stuff is handled internally. Obviously, you have to work with the local authorities to make sure they understand these kind of things are going on inside the school. But the nice thing about it being in a school building is that it was built for high traffic. The doorways are wide, the hallways are wide—it was created for thousands of high-school-age people. It’s a pretty functional space.
[Mike Ziemer, South By So What?!]
We have to have multiple EMTs there that can take care of anything from a kid being dehydrated to someone getting seriously injured and needing to go to the hospital. We have professional, licensed security, volunteers to help and police officers. It’s a culmination that’s determined in advance by the city or the fire marshal, of what they say you need.
There’s always an ambulance on site; there’s always hydration stations in front of the EMT room. There’s just always a way for people to quickly get to anyone that’s having an issue. There’s always a plan. A lot of it is up to the city and the venue, but working with an outdoor ballpark has given us so many advantages of where we can have things and easy access to pick up a kid if something goes wrong.
[Kevin Lyman, Vans Warped Tour]
We count on local promoters. We work with everyone in the business, from Live Nation to AEG to a lot of independents. They have a production manager that coordinates with our production manager, and those are the things that you count on your local promoter to have. In all the years of doing this, I’ve had one show in Las Vegas where the promoter didn’t have the permits and I had to cancel the show—that sucked.
[Joe Litvag, Rock On The Range]
Because we do this at the Crew Stadium, the Stadium has a great working relationship with the city of Columbus. There are definitely a couple of event permits that need to get pulled and they need to be aware of what the security plans are. Typically, we put that in the hands of the venue because they often do large-scale events—mainly soccer games.
What sort of expenses does the festival require that a fan might not be aware of?
[Nate Dorough, Bled Fest]
Obviously, we have to a pay a flat rental to the school district itself to let us use the building. They don’t really have a stake in it—there’s not ancillary income. It’s less of a worry about additional costs as it is that we don’t have a bar or any alcohol sales, though we have some light food and drink sales, but nothing to write home about.
Our biggest thing is that, basically, we have the tickets to make money off of and very little ancillary income. We don’t use corporate sponsors. I’m not going out to get Monster Energy Drink to give me a huge sponsorship to pay for this.
[Mike Ziemer, South By So What?!]
I think a lot of people think you pay for the band and the venue and that’s it. They don’t understand that a venue is just a room—you then have to fill that room. You have to build the stage, pay for the sound, the labor, feed all those people—every single security guard, volunteer, sound person—every single fence and barricade that doesn’t belong there you have to pay for, and every bit of promotional material and advertising.
[Kevin Lyman, Vans Warped Tour]
You’ll have a first aid [tent], security, fences, toilets, clean-up, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), BMI (royalties), local taxes, stage hands—which could be union or non-union—runner vehicles, runners, production assistant, box office staff. Some of these shows you have to go through 15 or 20 lines—even 30 lines—of expenses.
What happens is that the promoter gives you a pre-expense sheet, and you sign off on expenses and then you have to settle the show that night. We’ve got advertising, artist production, artist marketing, catering, electricians, forklift rentals, ground transportation, generators—we bring all our own generators with us—permits, production managers, telephones. Even down to towels you use for the day.
[Gary Spivak, Rock On The Range]
The production value an artist like Rob Zombie will bring to a festival like Rock On The Range and not out on tour and what we put into the experience of Rock On The Range—our vendor village, our sponsor village, we’re going to have an art gallery this year showing great photos from our past and live art being created. Aside from the three stages of continuous rock and roll, we want to also create an experience so it’s not just another show where you just kind of get your beer and watch bands. We have a whole vibe.
