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 bonnaroo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bonnaroo. Show all posts
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Radio at Bonnaroo
A good article on the radio set-up at Bonnaroo. It might give other festivals some ideas. Read the entire article, because I have only quoted parts of it here.
Nashville Scene, 6/14/07 - Radio Daze: "...roughly 30 Bonnaroo acts will record three-song sets and give interviews that will be broadcast throughout the weekend to about 30 of the country’s biggest rock stations, including KFOG (San Francisco), DAVE FM (Atlanta) and WXRT (Chicago), and in Nashville, on WRLT Lightning 100. It’s all part of Bonnaroo’s unique approach to radio outreach, designed by Asheville, N.C., music marketing company Music Allies....
Imagine a reality show called Build a Studio. That’s how carpenter David Gehrke describes the task ahead of him—building the recording and radio studios essentially from scratch. 'Every year they throw changes in,' says Gehrke, drummer for The Bees (U.S.) and co-owner of Niko’s bar in East Nashville. 'This year, I’m doing a proper control-room window. I’m really polishing a turd...trying to make a room that is in no way, shape or form acoustically fit for recording, trying to make it sound, look and feel good.'...
According to Gehrke, the setup is just as much a boon for the artists and radio stations as it is for Bonnaroo. “When you’re on the road pushing a record, you usually have to do a bunch of radio interviews, and it’s exhausting. Here, in 20 minutes, they can do one interview that’ll go to the biggest stations all over the country, then they can go watch the other bands. The artists love us. And the stations have access to all these artists in one space, and can reap the benefits of each others’ questions.'...
These segments will also be broadcast on Radio Bonnaroo, which airs 24/7 to the campgrounds and surrounding area for the entire festival. 'We lease a local radio station [Manchester’s Fantasy 101.5] for five days and put a frequency on the air,' says [Music Allies CEO Sean] O’Connell. 'And we have speakers all throughout the campground. When you’re crawling into your tent at 5:30 in the morning after seeing the Flaming Lips do a late-night set, and that hot sun is starting to come up on the horizon, you may hear Brian Eno holding a note for 20 minutes. We want this to be part of your dreamscape. Nobody has the luxury to program a radio station like that.'"
Nashville Scene, 6/14/07 - Radio Daze: "...roughly 30 Bonnaroo acts will record three-song sets and give interviews that will be broadcast throughout the weekend to about 30 of the country’s biggest rock stations, including KFOG (San Francisco), DAVE FM (Atlanta) and WXRT (Chicago), and in Nashville, on WRLT Lightning 100. It’s all part of Bonnaroo’s unique approach to radio outreach, designed by Asheville, N.C., music marketing company Music Allies....
Imagine a reality show called Build a Studio. That’s how carpenter David Gehrke describes the task ahead of him—building the recording and radio studios essentially from scratch. 'Every year they throw changes in,' says Gehrke, drummer for The Bees (U.S.) and co-owner of Niko’s bar in East Nashville. 'This year, I’m doing a proper control-room window. I’m really polishing a turd...trying to make a room that is in no way, shape or form acoustically fit for recording, trying to make it sound, look and feel good.'...
According to Gehrke, the setup is just as much a boon for the artists and radio stations as it is for Bonnaroo. “When you’re on the road pushing a record, you usually have to do a bunch of radio interviews, and it’s exhausting. Here, in 20 minutes, they can do one interview that’ll go to the biggest stations all over the country, then they can go watch the other bands. The artists love us. And the stations have access to all these artists in one space, and can reap the benefits of each others’ questions.'...
These segments will also be broadcast on Radio Bonnaroo, which airs 24/7 to the campgrounds and surrounding area for the entire festival. 'We lease a local radio station [Manchester’s Fantasy 101.5] for five days and put a frequency on the air,' says [Music Allies CEO Sean] O’Connell. 'And we have speakers all throughout the campground. When you’re crawling into your tent at 5:30 in the morning after seeing the Flaming Lips do a late-night set, and that hot sun is starting to come up on the horizon, you may hear Brian Eno holding a note for 20 minutes. We want this to be part of your dreamscape. Nobody has the luxury to program a radio station like that.'"
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."
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
The lure of the live music experience
San Francisco Bay Guardian, 5/23/07 - Show me: "Pavlov's e-mail robot knows what gets me salivating — aside from those wolf beach towels on Amazon.com (wintry wolves and hot sand go together about as well as infants and live grenades): namely, live music. Drive blearily into the Mojave for Coachella, jump through hoops to get to Seattle for Bumbershoot, make the red-eye to Austin for South by Southwest, take the midnight train to Tennessee's Bonnaroo, hock yourself for England's All Tomorrow's Parties, hazard reindeer sashimi for Reykjavik's Iceland Airwaves — take note of the chart; I have a history of doing anything for a life-altering show."
Sunday, May 06, 2007
How the popularity of rock reunions explains the joys of live music
Rock Reunions - Music - Column - New York Times, 5/6/07: "In fact, if it weren’t for sentiment, if it weren’t for our strong but ultimately inexplicable desire to be in the same room as people making music, we might not bother to go to concerts at all. In that sense, a reunion show is the ultimate rock ’n’ roll concert: a sensory experience overwhelmed by an imaginary one; a musical event that is merely a pretext for a social one. Those people onstage are old friends, in a sense; they have been living in our heads for years or decades. (That’s why substitutions are so irritating: what’s the point of being reunited with someone you’ve never met?) At a reunion show, those figments turn back into real people for a few hours."
The above column was in response to this column, published several weeks earlier.
Not Reunions, Reinventions (Back and Better. Really.) - New York Times, 4/22/07: "Ashley Capps, who helps produce mid-June’s Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tenn. — which has booked the Police as one of its headliners this year — put it in a slightly simpler way. 'When I was growing up, the release of an album was an event,' he said. 'We’ve moved away from the notion that the release of a recording is an event. Somebody can release a great album and get fantastic reviews and everybody’s talking about it, but how long does that last? Six weeks? In that sense, live performances are becoming the important event.'
Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the concert-industry magazine, is so used to old acts propping up the industry that he doesn’t believe this year’s picture is substantially different. 'Last year you had Bob Seger, this year you have Genesis,' he said evenly over the phone recently. He is not sure whether new bands — Arcade Fire, say — are striking deeply enough into the soul of the culture to necessitate their own reunions down the road. I think context will determine it. If there are lots of great new bands in the next 10 years, we won’t feel we need an Arcade Fire reunion. If there aren’t, we will.
It seems now that the audience position for rock is coming closer to that of jazz around the mid-1970s. Most of the forefathers are still with us; increasingly, they seem to have something important to teach us. And we are developing strange hungers for music of the not-so-distant past that might be bigger and deeper than the hunger we originally had. That feeling people talked about during the Pixies shows a few years ago — the word 'eerie' was used a great deal — seems similar to descriptions of the feeling generated in the Village Vanguard when Dexter Gordon played his comeback shows there in 1976, after living abroad. Since then, jazz has advanced into a culture of incessant re-experience, endless tributes. Actual reunions are barely noticed: a huge percentage of the music refers to great moments of the past. Yet that doesn’t mean that jazz can’t still be fantastic, even transformative. It is, all the time.
We have to allow for the possibility that Rage Against the Machine — or the Police, or the Jesus and Mary Chain — could be as good as it ever was, if perhaps a little more wizened, a little more skeptical. (It will depend on their practicing of course.) If you’re still looking for something sacred, it probably can’t be found in their values or politics or cult significance. It’s in you: It is your own reaction to how they sound. Nobody can take that away from you."
The above column was in response to this column, published several weeks earlier.
Not Reunions, Reinventions (Back and Better. Really.) - New York Times, 4/22/07: "Ashley Capps, who helps produce mid-June’s Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tenn. — which has booked the Police as one of its headliners this year — put it in a slightly simpler way. 'When I was growing up, the release of an album was an event,' he said. 'We’ve moved away from the notion that the release of a recording is an event. Somebody can release a great album and get fantastic reviews and everybody’s talking about it, but how long does that last? Six weeks? In that sense, live performances are becoming the important event.'
Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the concert-industry magazine, is so used to old acts propping up the industry that he doesn’t believe this year’s picture is substantially different. 'Last year you had Bob Seger, this year you have Genesis,' he said evenly over the phone recently. He is not sure whether new bands — Arcade Fire, say — are striking deeply enough into the soul of the culture to necessitate their own reunions down the road. I think context will determine it. If there are lots of great new bands in the next 10 years, we won’t feel we need an Arcade Fire reunion. If there aren’t, we will.
It seems now that the audience position for rock is coming closer to that of jazz around the mid-1970s. Most of the forefathers are still with us; increasingly, they seem to have something important to teach us. And we are developing strange hungers for music of the not-so-distant past that might be bigger and deeper than the hunger we originally had. That feeling people talked about during the Pixies shows a few years ago — the word 'eerie' was used a great deal — seems similar to descriptions of the feeling generated in the Village Vanguard when Dexter Gordon played his comeback shows there in 1976, after living abroad. Since then, jazz has advanced into a culture of incessant re-experience, endless tributes. Actual reunions are barely noticed: a huge percentage of the music refers to great moments of the past. Yet that doesn’t mean that jazz can’t still be fantastic, even transformative. It is, all the time.
We have to allow for the possibility that Rage Against the Machine — or the Police, or the Jesus and Mary Chain — could be as good as it ever was, if perhaps a little more wizened, a little more skeptical. (It will depend on their practicing of course.) If you’re still looking for something sacred, it probably can’t be found in their values or politics or cult significance. It’s in you: It is your own reaction to how they sound. Nobody can take that away from you."
Friday, January 05, 2007
Bonnaroo buying its site
Most festival promoters don't try to own the venues they use, but Bonnaroo plans to.
Billboard, 1/4/07 - Bonnaroo Organizers Purchasing Festival Site: "Superfly Productions and A.C. Entertainment, producers of the annual Bonnaroo Music Festival, are finalizing the purchase of the bulk of the festival site land near Manchester in Coffee County, Tenn.
"The festival will end up owning about 530 acres alongside Interstate 24 purchased from landowner Sam McAlister. Bonnaroo has long-term leases with owners of 300 additional acres at the site. ...
"'We always felt the land would be a good long term investment for us,' [Superfly president Jonathan] Mayers says. 'It's a big investment for us, but we believe in the long term of the festival and other events we can create on the property, and the fact that we're going to be able to put permanent infrastructure there. We're really excited about that.' ...
"'A lot of the infrastructure that we've brought in temporarily, whether it's power, water throughout the facility, permanent bathrooms, roads, even some of the actual staging, we're definitely planning to put in permanently,' he says. 'We're going to plan it very carefully to give us the flexibility to host several events out there. We want to make it one of the premier venues in the world.'
"Mayers says the rural Bonnaroo site would work for a wide range of events, large and small, 'whether it's a country event or a Christian music festival, or just a stand-alone concert out there, with us producing it, someone else, or us partnering with someone. We're totally open-minded.'
"Bonnaroo is the top-grossing event of its kind in the world, capturing the Top Festival award at the Billboard Touring Awards for three consecutive years. Last year's event grossed $14.7 million ..."
music festival
live music
Bonnaroo
Billboard, 1/4/07 - Bonnaroo Organizers Purchasing Festival Site: "Superfly Productions and A.C. Entertainment, producers of the annual Bonnaroo Music Festival, are finalizing the purchase of the bulk of the festival site land near Manchester in Coffee County, Tenn.
"The festival will end up owning about 530 acres alongside Interstate 24 purchased from landowner Sam McAlister. Bonnaroo has long-term leases with owners of 300 additional acres at the site. ...
"'We always felt the land would be a good long term investment for us,' [Superfly president Jonathan] Mayers says. 'It's a big investment for us, but we believe in the long term of the festival and other events we can create on the property, and the fact that we're going to be able to put permanent infrastructure there. We're really excited about that.' ...
"'A lot of the infrastructure that we've brought in temporarily, whether it's power, water throughout the facility, permanent bathrooms, roads, even some of the actual staging, we're definitely planning to put in permanently,' he says. 'We're going to plan it very carefully to give us the flexibility to host several events out there. We want to make it one of the premier venues in the world.'
"Mayers says the rural Bonnaroo site would work for a wide range of events, large and small, 'whether it's a country event or a Christian music festival, or just a stand-alone concert out there, with us producing it, someone else, or us partnering with someone. We're totally open-minded.'
"Bonnaroo is the top-grossing event of its kind in the world, capturing the Top Festival award at the Billboard Touring Awards for three consecutive years. Last year's event grossed $14.7 million ..."
music festival
live music
Bonnaroo
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Sometimes starting from scratch can be hugely successful
Nashville Scene - What’s So Funny ’Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?: "Bonnaroo is the largest-grossing music festival in the U.S., raking in a whopping $13.4 million last year. ...
"Russ Bennett describes himself as kind of a city planner. Except the city he and his cohorts are planning has been built and torn down annually for the last four years—and they’re currently constructing it, more or less from scratch, for the fifth time. With the exception of a few roads, fresh water pipes and a fountain, there’s nothing but trees and grass at 1560 New Bushy Branch Road in Manchester, Tenn., when Bennett arrives each May.
"But those 700-plus acres will become the temporary home for 80,000 people during the four days of the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. The empty pastures off I-24 will turn into the sixth largest city in Tennessee—a makeshift community of street performers, hippies, hitchhiking students, families in Winnebagos, and music fans of most every stripe, whether they pledge allegiance to Southern rock, world beat or the P-Funk Nation."
"Russ Bennett describes himself as kind of a city planner. Except the city he and his cohorts are planning has been built and torn down annually for the last four years—and they’re currently constructing it, more or less from scratch, for the fifth time. With the exception of a few roads, fresh water pipes and a fountain, there’s nothing but trees and grass at 1560 New Bushy Branch Road in Manchester, Tenn., when Bennett arrives each May.
"But those 700-plus acres will become the temporary home for 80,000 people during the four days of the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. The empty pastures off I-24 will turn into the sixth largest city in Tennessee—a makeshift community of street performers, hippies, hitchhiking students, families in Winnebagos, and music fans of most every stripe, whether they pledge allegiance to Southern rock, world beat or the P-Funk Nation."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
