Music Festivals: Labour of Love for Organizers, Big Money for Communities
For most of us, music festivals are a way to spend a week or weekend watching great live music and enjoy summer with friends and family. But for the people who put them on in New Brunswick, it’s a year-long endeavour with lots of planning, risk and passion.
For most music festivals, planning for the next year begins right after the current year’s event concludes, often even during.
“We don’t ever really stop planning it. As you’re doing a festival for this year, there’s a lot of stuff that comes up that you plan for next year. You learn a little bit every year about what works, what doesn’t work and you always try build resources and make connections so you can help the future development of the event and help its sustainability,” says Xavier Léger, festival coordinator for Moncton’s Mud City Meltdown.
“You’re never not in planning mode, but at the same time we start planning next year’s event as soon as this one is over.”
One of the first things music festivals do is to secure their headlining artists. With so many popular music festivals all over the world, booking your acts early is crucial. This even goes for New Brunswick’s biggest music festival, Fredericton’s Harvest Jazz and Blues.
“It has really now become even greater than a 12-month cycle. What I mean by that is, I’m already talking to people now in April and May and June 2017 about September 2018. That cycle has expanded so much over the last five years that it’s been really fascinating to watch happen,” says Brent Staeben, program coordinator of Harvest Jazz and Blues.
“It’s because of the growth of so many festivals across America, largely. We’re competing with so many other festivals and events and we want to get out there now and establish relationships. For instance, if there’s a band we didn’t get this year, we’ll say to somebody very early, ‘Let’s put September 2018 in your schedule because we want to come back to this.’”
Harvest Jazz and Blues has a bit of an advantage over some of the other New Brunswick’s festivals because it has established a solid international reputation over the past 27 years. But for newer festivals like Mud City Meltdown, which is now in its third year, securing bigger and better headliners comes with slowly establishing your reputation year after year. It also comes with leveraging the connections of your team.
“There are so many festivals. There are so many new ones every year, you never know what you’re getting into so a lot of bigger bands don’t really want to take a risk on something like that so it is a challenge,” says Léger. “But the other key thing for us is when you get your bands in, hospitality is number one. You want to them to feel like they want to come back after they’ve been here.”
Organizers rely mostly on ticket revenues and sponsorships
You can’t pull off a music festival without money. Funding for festivals comes from a combination of revenue made from the last year, grants from different levels of government and corporate sponsorships.
“In a New Brunswick context, very little money in the province flows from government agencies to help produce events,” says Harvest Jazz and Blues’ Brent Staeben. “Going back to our early days, we recognized that if we were going to survive, we were going to have to produce a festival that was very customer-focused, that really produced a great time, was a lot of fun and was all about the customer experience.”
Staeben says only about eight per cent of the festival’s funding comes from government. The rest is customer revenue from last year’s event and sponsorship. For smaller festivals like Mud City Meltdown, having good corporate sponsorship is critical for having the festival grow and whether a storm, literally and figuratively.
“You can’t 100 per cent rely on ticket sales. Every festival, no matter how long-running or how big it is . . . You’re going to have a few bad years at some point,” says Léger.
“The market isn’t going to be good, there’s going to be bad weather, something is going to happen, so you need to be able to build for the future and have enough either through your own savings or through sponsorship and grants. You really need the support of your corporate community just to be able to cover a lot of costs and potential loss.”
But corporate sponsorships provide more than just monetary support to festivals. They also provide in-kind support of goods and services that help the festival run. This could include volunteers, alcohol, food, prizes, transportation, anything that can help enhance the festival and reduce its costs.
“There’s probably about another $500,000 worth of goods and services and help we get in-kind from our sponsors,” says Staeben. “All of that together is absolutely essential to making Harvest Jazz and Blues run.”
In-kind sponsorship is crucial to Saint John’s Area 506 festival, which includes a huge shipping container village dedicated showcasing New Brunswick products and brands.
“Everything we need we got engaged partners to help us pull that off at either very little or next to no cost. If we needed to pay top dollar for all of that, there is no way we’d be able to afford to do what it is that we set out to do,” says Area 506 organizer Ray Gracewood.
“Moving 70 shipping containers? It’s not like I can book off half a day and go down and carry them on my back. It’s a huge endeavour that takes this entire industry of the port together to make this happen. Without the support of those companies, there’s no way in hell we’d be able to do it.”
Competition is fierce amongst summer festivals
No matter if it’s big or small, every festival faces its own unique set of challenges. For newer festivals, competition is one of the big ones. Hosting a festival in the summer has a lot of potential for tourism and attracting bigger shows, but with new festivals popping up every year, you’re all competing for that market.
“As you’re growing, there are other festivals that will either move their dates or pop up and be competing for the market as far as fans, grants, corporate sponsorship, even bands,” says Léger. “You have to figure out what makes your event different, why should people come to you instead of something else. It’s building your reputation of good live shows and being able to manage that well year-to-year.”
For the well-established Harvest, the challenges are more around sustainability.
“It’s all about sustainability now. It really takes the whole village to sustain a festival in New Brunswick. Every one of those government funders is still important,” says Staeben With the size of the budget we have now and the bigger your budget, the more you’re at risk to impacts from the weather, to impacts from the moving Canadian dollar.”
One of the things Harvest Jazz and Blues needs to sustain is its volunteer base that it heavily relies on. Every year, around 1,200 people volunteer.
“Sustaining a community and replenishing a community of 1,200 has been a key to our success and it will always be a risk,” says Staeben. “We can never ignore those things, because we do so at our peril.”
Festivals generate millions of dollars for host communities
Though putting on a music festival is a lot of risk and volunteered time and effort, they can have a huge economic impact on a city or community. Harvest Jazz and Blues injected around $8-million into Fredericton. Mud City Meltdown brings around $1-million into downtown Moncton while Area 506 brought in about $2.5-million into Saint John last year.
“It’s easy to see when you have an event that really works downtown, the life that in infuses there,” says Léger. “Bars will tell you they’ll have record sales and restaurants as well. It’s not hard for us to convince anyone who’s asking that it’s a really important thing for a community to invest in.”
Area 506’s Ray Gracewood says signature festivals can also have a reputational impact for cities. This was something he set out to do when the first Area 506 was held in August 2016.
“For me, one of the most interesting business aspects is it also helps reinforce a brand. Harvest Jazz and Blues helps define Fredericton and when I left Harvest two years ago, that was the kick in the ass that I took to say, ‘If Harvest can light Fredericton on fire, why can’t I create something to light Saint John on fire?'” he says.
“When you start thinking about that way, you start to develop things that can uniquely be to your city or to your province. I think when you root it in something like that it, can help build the cultural fabric of a city.”
Though music festivals often have a big economic impact, the people who run them mostly do it on a volunteer basis. The people we interviewed do it not for money, but because of their passion to do something good for their community and city.
“It’s all about the community for us,” says Saeben. “It is all about what we’re doing for Fredericton, what we’re doing for New Brunswick. We love that fact that over 27 years we’ve helped change the community we live in and change the way we as Frederictonians look at our community and how people outside may look at our community as well.”
“If you’re not in love with it, it’s just going to consume you in the worst possible way. The challenge is more managing your time and expectation as to what you’re trying to get out of it,” says Léger. “If you’re just trying to get paid, it’s probably not for you. There’s a lot more secure work that you can find, even within the industry.”