Summer of Love's spirit blossoming in green movement | Reuters/Billboard, 6/16/07: "Willie Nelson's biodiesel company (we predict) will influence virtually every tour to travel green within five years.
MusicMatters introduced 'carbon offsetting,' planting trees and supporting alternative sustainable energy sources equal to your sins of emission.
The Vans Warped tour is using solar-powered sound. Bonnaroo, Coachella and Lollapalooza give prizes for recycling. The Hove Festival in Norway has pledged 100 percent carbon neutrality. The Wakarusa Festival will include a sustainability symposium. And on it goes."
Showing posts with label lollapalooza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lollapalooza. Show all posts
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Festival VIP passes
This article mentions that there are a group of affluent music fans who want to attend festivals, but want to minimize the hassles involved. Offer them good parking, clean bathrooms, a nice place to stay, a VIP bar, and they will pay for those extras.
Older, wealthier fans go VIP at music festivals - Music - MSNBC.com, 6/12/07: "... access to a real bathroom, enjoy free and discounted food and drinks and then he’ll be driven to a hotel 30 miles away from the festival site in Tennessee....
Bonnaroo draws 80,000 people to a farm in rural Manchester, 65 miles south of Nashville, but not all of them want to sweat through four days of music under sometimes inclement weather, crammed into the crowded tent city....
At Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park, private cabanas on the shore of Lake Michigan cost more than $32,500 for a party of 30. Air-conditioned viewing stands were available for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Bonnaroo artists will perform a private show for VIP guests on opening night Thursday."
Older, wealthier fans go VIP at music festivals - Music - MSNBC.com, 6/12/07: "... access to a real bathroom, enjoy free and discounted food and drinks and then he’ll be driven to a hotel 30 miles away from the festival site in Tennessee....
Bonnaroo draws 80,000 people to a farm in rural Manchester, 65 miles south of Nashville, but not all of them want to sweat through four days of music under sometimes inclement weather, crammed into the crowded tent city....
At Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park, private cabanas on the shore of Lake Michigan cost more than $32,500 for a party of 30. Air-conditioned viewing stands were available for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Bonnaroo artists will perform a private show for VIP guests on opening night Thursday."
Saturday, April 28, 2007
The high-risk, high-energy concert promotion business.
C3 knows concerts: "Charlie Jones, Charlie Walker and Charles Attal, nicknamed "the three Charlies" in the industry, are gearing up for the outdoor concert season, presenting Lollapalooza in Chicago in August, the Austin City Limits Music Festival in September and the new Big State Festival, with Tim McGraw headlining, in College Station in October. They're also producing shows at the new House of Blues in Dallas, five Harrah's Casinos and at Austin venues ranging from Stubb's Bar-B-Que to the Erwin Center. ...
Jones says his mentor, O'Connor, once said that if Jones wasn't prepared to put half his money in a suitcase and throw it off the tallest building in town, he didn't have the stomach to be a concert promoter. Attal likens the job to playing blackjack 12 hours a day. Sometimes you lose big. But on that recent Tuesday, the three Charlies were on a roll.
Long popular in Europe, festivals are a hot trend in the U.S. concert industry, and C3 owns two of the four most prominent pop music festivals. California's Coachella and Tennessee's Bonnaroo are the other two.
'People are busy,' Walker said of festivals' appeal. 'To go to, say, five concerts in the summer, it takes a lot of time and effort and expense. But with a festival, fans can can block off three days and see tons of great bands.'
A knock on festivals is that they can be at hot, uncomfortable, dusty fields where fans are treated like herds of cattle, a perception Walker said C3 is working hard to change.
"
Jones says his mentor, O'Connor, once said that if Jones wasn't prepared to put half his money in a suitcase and throw it off the tallest building in town, he didn't have the stomach to be a concert promoter. Attal likens the job to playing blackjack 12 hours a day. Sometimes you lose big. But on that recent Tuesday, the three Charlies were on a roll.
Long popular in Europe, festivals are a hot trend in the U.S. concert industry, and C3 owns two of the four most prominent pop music festivals. California's Coachella and Tennessee's Bonnaroo are the other two.
'People are busy,' Walker said of festivals' appeal. 'To go to, say, five concerts in the summer, it takes a lot of time and effort and expense. But with a festival, fans can can block off three days and see tons of great bands.'
A knock on festivals is that they can be at hot, uncomfortable, dusty fields where fans are treated like herds of cattle, a perception Walker said C3 is working hard to change.
"
Sunday, August 13, 2006
How to Improve Lollapalooza
Here's a list of ways to improve this (and I am sure other) festivals:
Chicago Sun Times, 8/13/06 - How to improve Lollapalooza: "In the days following last weekend's second fest, I interviewed 13 local concert promoters, club bookers, band managers and music industry professionals, all of whom attended the fest. ... The following represents their comments and my own."
The suggestions:
1. Fix the sound problems
2. Make it easier to catch back-to-back sets on far-flung stages
3. Consider fewer stages
4. Place some limits on the corporate sponsors
5. Lollapalooza needs to become part of the Chicago community
Chicago Sun Times, 8/13/06 - How to improve Lollapalooza: "In the days following last weekend's second fest, I interviewed 13 local concert promoters, club bookers, band managers and music industry professionals, all of whom attended the fest. ... The following represents their comments and my own."
The suggestions:
1. Fix the sound problems
2. Make it easier to catch back-to-back sets on far-flung stages
3. Consider fewer stages
4. Place some limits on the corporate sponsors
5. Lollapalooza needs to become part of the Chicago community
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Marketing festivals in the interactive age
An article about how Lollapalooza uses online reviews and sponsorships to enhance its image and make money.
Hartford Courant, 8/13/2006: "Giving media passes to bloggers also meant a better chance of positive, fanzine-style reviews of bands playing the festival, instead of risking more critical coverage.
"Lollapalooza was 'a good idea 16 years ago, grown bland, boring and distressingly mainstream, but with lingering pretensions to greatness it no longer has much right to claim,' critic Jim DeRogatis wrote in last week's Chicago Sun-Times, where he also lamented the overwhelmingly white audiences attending sets by Chicago rappers Common and Kanye West, who are both black, and the absence of the city's R&B and hip-hop radio stations as sponsors.
"By contrast, a blog called Stereogum wrote, 'this ain't your grunge-era 'palooza. But the new (and improved?) Lolla is a relatively well-run, music-first festival. And if there wasn't something for everyone (Bonnaroo was much more diverse), there was more than enough for Stereogum.'...
"Interactivity is also a boon for advertisers. It wasn't out of the kindness of its heart that AT&T offered webcasts of Lollapalooza or offered the air-conditioned tent there. They actually paid for the privilege. The Sun-Times reported that AT&T and other companies, including beer and apparel businesses, paid as much as $100,000 for the chance to spend three days marketing to 50,000 people wandering around a finite space plastered with corporate logos. As a bonus, many of those people are part of the coveted 18-to-34 age demographic."
Hartford Courant, 8/13/2006: "Giving media passes to bloggers also meant a better chance of positive, fanzine-style reviews of bands playing the festival, instead of risking more critical coverage.
"Lollapalooza was 'a good idea 16 years ago, grown bland, boring and distressingly mainstream, but with lingering pretensions to greatness it no longer has much right to claim,' critic Jim DeRogatis wrote in last week's Chicago Sun-Times, where he also lamented the overwhelmingly white audiences attending sets by Chicago rappers Common and Kanye West, who are both black, and the absence of the city's R&B and hip-hop radio stations as sponsors.
"By contrast, a blog called Stereogum wrote, 'this ain't your grunge-era 'palooza. But the new (and improved?) Lolla is a relatively well-run, music-first festival. And if there wasn't something for everyone (Bonnaroo was much more diverse), there was more than enough for Stereogum.'...
"Interactivity is also a boon for advertisers. It wasn't out of the kindness of its heart that AT&T offered webcasts of Lollapalooza or offered the air-conditioned tent there. They actually paid for the privilege. The Sun-Times reported that AT&T and other companies, including beer and apparel businesses, paid as much as $100,000 for the chance to spend three days marketing to 50,000 people wandering around a finite space plastered with corporate logos. As a bonus, many of those people are part of the coveted 18-to-34 age demographic."
Monday, July 31, 2006
Running big festivals in Austin and Chicago
This is a really good article on the team that created the Austin City Limits Festival in Austin and what has and has not worked for them in creating a big festival in Chicago (including the difficulties coming in as outsiders, and underestimating "the amount of time, money and bureaucratic wrangling it would take to secure city approval.")
7/30/2006 Chicago Sun Times: Charlies in charge at Lollapalooza "Although many Chicagoans think of Austin as a Mecca for live music, thanks to the annual South by Southwest Music Conference, for much of the rest of the year, the city is a backwater that attracts a mere fraction of the touring acts that play Chicago. ...
"In 2002, hoping to create an event similar to New Orleans' Jazz and Heritage Festival, [Capital Sports & Entertainment co-owner Charlie] Jones approached the long-running PBS concert showcase 'Austin City Limits' to lend its name to a massive concert in Austin's Zilker Park. He tapped [Charles] Attal to book the talent, which was a tall order, since the first ACL Fest was thrown together in two months. ...
"From the beginning of the ACL Fest, they weren't unduly concerned with booking the kind of rootsy artists regularly seen on 'Austin City Limits'; they just thought it would help to add the TV show's name to their festival, and they simply booked as many popular big-name acts as they could. They now are bringing that same approach to the TV show itself.
"In 2003, the show's home base of KLRU-TV struck a five-year deal with Capital Sports to co-produce and fund the broadcast. ...
"Capital Sports has floated nebulous plans to further expand into broadcast with a reality TV show, as well as issuing CDs and making movies. (Stapleton is producing an Armstrong biopic.) It is involved in artist management -- clients include Ben Kweller, Jack Ingram and Blues Traveler -- and it's building the sports agency beyond Armstrong: It now represents 10 NFL stars, including Delanie Walker, Brian Carter and Willie Andrews."
7/30/2006 Chicago Sun Times: Charlies in charge at Lollapalooza "Although many Chicagoans think of Austin as a Mecca for live music, thanks to the annual South by Southwest Music Conference, for much of the rest of the year, the city is a backwater that attracts a mere fraction of the touring acts that play Chicago. ...
"In 2002, hoping to create an event similar to New Orleans' Jazz and Heritage Festival, [Capital Sports & Entertainment co-owner Charlie] Jones approached the long-running PBS concert showcase 'Austin City Limits' to lend its name to a massive concert in Austin's Zilker Park. He tapped [Charles] Attal to book the talent, which was a tall order, since the first ACL Fest was thrown together in two months. ...
"From the beginning of the ACL Fest, they weren't unduly concerned with booking the kind of rootsy artists regularly seen on 'Austin City Limits'; they just thought it would help to add the TV show's name to their festival, and they simply booked as many popular big-name acts as they could. They now are bringing that same approach to the TV show itself.
"In 2003, the show's home base of KLRU-TV struck a five-year deal with Capital Sports to co-produce and fund the broadcast. ...
"Capital Sports has floated nebulous plans to further expand into broadcast with a reality TV show, as well as issuing CDs and making movies. (Stapleton is producing an Armstrong biopic.) It is involved in artist management -- clients include Ben Kweller, Jack Ingram and Blues Traveler -- and it's building the sports agency beyond Armstrong: It now represents 10 NFL stars, including Delanie Walker, Brian Carter and Willie Andrews."
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