I came across an interesting read this week entitled “Why the Summer Festival Bubble is About to Burst”. You can find this rather long discussion on the economics of festivals at http://www.wonderingsound.com/feature/too-many-summer-music-festivals. Now granted, the article is really about Indie music festivals, a 30-ish demographic, and weighted to those mega-festivals we all hear about…..Coachilla comes to mind. Did you know that Coachilla is believed to have had $78 million in revenue this year? But one of the astounding statistics they mention is that there are about 847 festivals scheduled for 2014 in North America and if you add in Europe that number is about 1200 festivals. I suspect that they did not include bluegrass festivals, and a few other festivals, in the count…..but nevertheless on any given weekend Bluegrass festivals are competing with all those other festivals for attendees. Can you imagine the thought process of someone trying to decide which festival they are going to attend…hmmmm do I go to Bonaroo, Coachilla, Huck Finn, or The Father’s Day Festival? We all know what this readership would probably choose….but can we speak for someone who has never attended?
But think about it this way…..I would bet that most of those festivals happen between June and August, over about 12 weekends. To make the numbers easy, if 600 of those North American festivals were scheduled for the three summer months then there would be one festival per state every weekend of the summer…and we know that even for Bluegrass festivals on the left coast we have enough festivals that some of us have to choose between Father’s Day and Huck Finn. Sometimes I wish I was one of those people.
The article is really a pretty good breakdown for how festivals make money and this is also hits pretty close to home for our festival; tickets and sponsorships. I would guess that our Father’s Day festival ticket sales are driven by two things under CBA control, the band lineup and the festival atmosphere, the same as for the Indie festivals. I think we do a good job with both. I can’t tell you how much time we spend in board meetings discussing both. We constantly talk about what kind of bands to book, how many edgy bands, how many Old Time bands, how many emerging bands, how many California bands, and sometimes I am ready to hit the eject button to get out of those discussions because there is no satisfying everyone with the perfect lineup. A board meeting discussion might go something like “let’s see we have 10% edgy bands, 60% hard core bluegrass bands 10.5% Old Time bands, and 11.5% California bands…but wait 2% of the 10% of the edgy bands are also California bands so what do we do about that?”…..my head hurts! Oh and don’t forget Jim Ingram has the unenviable job of scheduling all the bands for the Main stage and Pioneer stage and keeping all of them happy. Every year Jim comes to the board meetings, his hair a little more frazzled the closer we get to the festival, and relates the same story, band X doesn’t like their slot and band Y has to leave early to get to another gig and now we have to smoosh them both in on the Main stage Friday evening with bands U, V, and W but we don’t have the time. But given that we are always going to disappoint somebody with the balance of bands and the lineup, our attendance is steady and there are almost always a lot of smiling faces leaving after the final act.
I think we do a good job with the festival atmosphere and in fact I think we do a great job. Don’t get me wrong here, there’s always room for improvement, things change from year to year, and some of our festival atmosphere experiments require modification, unfortunately we don’t always get things 100% right on the first try. But we work hard to make it a family friendly festival where the kids can roam free, the adults have the freedom to roam knowing the kids are ok, and the jammers don’t have to worry about the Sherriff’s deputies arresting them for picking while drinking between the hours of….well the hours don’t matter.
I could dissect this on and on but need to wrap this Column and get it posted. What’s the take home here? We are going into our 40th Annual FDF in June of 2015. What a great testimony to getting something right and the work of past and present CBA Boards, Festival Directors, and volunteers. We have a great festival, a great community, for great music whether it is hard-core Bluegrass, Old Time, Gospel, edgy Bluegrass, or even what the rest of world sometimes mistakenly calls Bluegrass (those other bands that play the mega festivals and make you scratch your head when they are identified as Bluegrass in the SF Chronicle). The take home is that even with a winning event like the FDF festival it is a hard, cruel, and highly competitive festival world out there, and like the rest of the festivals we live perilously close to the edge. We have been in the black the past few years, but cannot and do not live on the success of our past festivals. To some degree we reinvent the FDF every year. What would I ask of our membership? We need you to recruit, recruit, recruit! Recruit your non-picking friends (hey what are you doing next June…I know of a really cool event that you and the kids would like), recruit your picking friends (man the jamming is everywhere, 24/7 and sometimes you get to pick with the Pros who play onstage), recruit the potential pickers (we have a great music camp for the 3 days before the festival and then you get to pick in the festival jams). Our festival successes really depend on one thing and only one thing……your involvement!
