It used to be that if you wanted a good ol’ roll-in-the-mud with music over a long weekend, you needed to catch a flight to Europe. America, the country that brought you Woodstock and Farm Aid, quickly ceded the title of home of the multi-day music festival to the Old Country.
The U.S. is home to only four major mainstream music festivals more than a decade old: Seattle’s Bumbershoot, New Orleans’ Jazzfest, Milwau-kee’s Summerfest (aka The Big Gig) and San Diego’s Street Scene. And four of the country’s largest music festivals — the peripatetic Bonnaroo, the stationary Austin City Limits, the on-again-off-again Lollapalooza (born: 1991, canceled: 1998, resuscitated: 2003) and Vegoose in Las Vegas (no descriptions, I just like saying “Vegoose”) — didn't even exist in 2001.
That’s changing. Over the past six years, the number of major U.S. festivals has doubled even as attendance at huge amphitheatre shows has de-clined. And multi-day arts festivals have become profitable at a time when the rest of the music business, including giant amphitheater shows, are tapering. Bonnaroo has only been around since 2002, yet it attracts more than 80,000 fans every year, each paying over $170 for a ticket.
Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, told me that while he doesn’t have specific numbers, he’s watching U.S. festivals multiply annually, noting that new live-music giants Live Nation and AEG are trying to replant the European mass-music experience here. “The festival culture in Europe is very well-established because they didn’t have the modern arenas that we have in the United States,” he says. (Although Led Zeppelin at the O2 in December suggests that may be changing.) “Live Nation, who are huge in the Euro fest business, has stated they need to become much more of a player in the U.S.”
They will. Taking their experience in Europe, where they partner with Mean Fiddler, the promoters behind the huge Leeds and Reading festivals, Live Nation has reportedly acquired stakes in U.S. festival brands like San Diego’s Street Scene and New York’s Bamboozle. Competitor AEG now has its own stakes in multi-day festivals, including Coachella, JazzFest and Bumbershoot. According to the San Diego Times-Union, the com-panies are in a race to establish a major music festival in each of the top 25 markets in the United States. “Whoever can reach a critical mass first will be able to strike exclusivity deals,” a feature on the subject in the paper last year stated. “In other words, they could tell an act like The White Stripes, ‘“Look, we’ve got these 20 festivals, which could fill your entire summer schedule. We’ll pay you a premium to only play ours.”
From a technology perspective, this sequence of events owes much to both the technology of concert sound and the technical talent that develops it and mans it. But it’s as accurate to suggest that both the technology and the talent will have to adapt to the kind of landscape upon which very, very large dinosaurs dance. It’s safe to say that the multi-day music festival owes much of its economic viability to the arrival of the automated digital audio console. The ability to toggle between artists quickly increases the number of performances per day and reduces the need for multiple stages, both of which increase the profit margins for festivals, which have inherently shaky numbers to start with. Fiber-optic snakes also contribute to a leaner, more nimble operation for multi-day/multi-stage operations, as do other items such as plug-ins, which further reduce weight and footprint.
Some of the challenges that the concert business is going to face in the immediate future include the growing confrontation between multi-day fes-tivals and urban downtowns that have been revitalized with new and costly residences. Street Scene in San Diego was essentially kicked out of the increasingly toney Gaslamp Quarter District that spawned it and denied access to the city’s major park, forcing new owners Live Nation to move into a company-owned arena — the kind of concrete environment that often spells doom for the festival culture that prefers wide-open grassy spaces.
The space that the festival is in is, thus, critical, and how audio technology adapts to what’s going to be a loud evolutionary roller coaster-cum-political-football will be interesting to watch. One crucial element in getting urban festivals approved will be the noise impact they will have on downtown residents. The technology and techniques needed to attenuate sound without emasculating it will become the subject of sound bites on the evening news.
Finally, the recent rise of the multi-day festival, whether it’s downtown or on Yasgur’s farm, has to be viewed in the context of the Internet social networking phenomenon. I’m not sure this has a direct effect on our end of the festival equation, but it does have an extremely important impact on music in general and concerts in particular. Bands like Arctic Monkeys became famous when people who went to see their shows posted videos on MySpace. A fan base that would follow them to shows developed from these videos and made the band famous the same way heavy radio airplay used to. And it’s going to take those elements — bands with lots of fans — to make the festival concept, and us, work consistently.
Contact Dan at ddaley@fohonline.com.
