Features
Booking Madness: How The Industry Is Keeping Up With ‘The 24/7/365 Siege’
Sam Shapiro –
The crowds at the most recent edition of Bourbon & Beyond, which went down in Louisville, Ky., and is produced by Danny Wimmer Presents, where talent buyer Gary Spivack says the trend of booking earlier and earlier is a sign of a healthy business.
Sometimes success is so overwhelming it makes you forget the toll it can take. Granted, this may sound like an over-dramatic intro to a music industry feature about artist bookings, but it’s not hyperbole.
The live business as a whole is doing so well that promoters and agents have been forced to lock in tour dates and festival slots increasingly earlier. The sheer number of events and artists wanting to tour has never been greater. Thinking about booking a festival for 2020? You may be too late.
Pollstar reached out to a cross-section of some of the world’s most successful professionals on both the agent and buyer sides to find out what this trend means for the business.
Ivan Milivojev, founder of multiple festivals in Europe, including EXIT in Serbia, Sea Dance in Montenegro and R:EVOL:UTION in Romania, remembers booking Wu-Tang Clan almost 20 years ago at ILMC in London, which has brought together the international live industry in March for 31 years. There’s no way he could still get an act of that caliber, let alone save his major festival slots for the upcoming season, until March nowadays. “The Cure, who played [EXIT] this year, we had them confirmed before the previous edition [in 2018],” Milivojev said. “We’ve been speaking with them for almost five years. We’re booking earlier and earlier.”
According to Geoff Meall, an agent at Paradigm in London, the main reason for this trend is competition. “With the increased size of the two, three or probably four corporate giants across Europe, they are obviously in a lot of competition with each other,” he said. “That then causes them to try and get the festivals up earlier and earlier. If they can book the talent earlier and get the big names out earlier, they feel it steals a march on everyone. I don’t think there’s any other reason you could attribute it to, apart from competitive nature.”
“It is the byproduct of volume in the marketplace, but not just on the live side,” said Sascha Stone Guttfreund, president and co-founder of ScoreMore Shows, which was acquired by Live Nation in May 2018 and produces JMBLYA, Dreamville and Astroworld festivals, and hundreds of other hip-hop concerts each year. “Artists are focused on their music, and their fan base. Do we have to compete with other festival offers? Of course, but I think that the competition within the market on a festival-to-festival basis is less prevalent (outside of California and New York). The majority of time, as festival promoters, we’re asking artists to skip their hard ticket date in the market in order to accommodate the festival’s radius clause.”
In order to have the most exposure in this day and age, Guttfreund explained, artists must announce tours early. “Think about every piece of marketing collateral for an album, from the top of your Spotify playlists, to the YouTube billboards, to Apple’s store placement,” he said. “There is a limited amount of inventory – and artists have to commit to their release timeframe to maximize their exposure. In doing so, you begin putting together tours further in advance in hopes of announcing the tour upon the release of the album.
So, if you want to book an artist for a festival you need to try to be in advance of that process, which is becoming further and further out.”
Jelena Ivanović – IAMDBB
performs on the main stage of EXIT 2019, July 7, where festival founder Ivan Milivojev says the biggest change is leaving spots open for when the next big thing hits.
Tom Windish, founder of the Windish Agency, which is now part of Paradigm, said it was too risky to postpone booking a tour. “If the artist is putting out a record and wants to go on a tour, you just book it, you don’t really have to wait,” he said. “What’s the point of waiting? You’re not going to be able to hear the record before you have to book that tour anyway. But most importantly, the venues are just getting booked. So, if you want Madison Square Garden, and you know they’re putting out a record, book it. Why wait and risk not being able to play Madison Square Garden the night that you want or maybe at all?”
For a festival promoter like Milivojev, the main challenge is leaving empty slots. “We can’t finish the lineup, because there are many things that can happen in between,” he said. “We finish around 80% and leave 20% open, because if we book 100%, which you could easily be doing, and be done with it, you don’t leave space for the acts that are coming up in December or January. If someone has huge success in winter, and you don’t have space for it, that also says a lot about your festival. What kind of festival are you, if you can’t put something hot [on your bill]? You need to predict that, because no matter what’s happening, someone will make a great song.”
Meall said it is “a balance game for an agent. Things change. Things shift massively over the next seven to 10 months. There’ll be new bands who come through and explode, and some of them won’t be getting on the festivals, because there are no slots left.
“I’ve seen a couple of offer sheets for festivals in June, and one for August [2020], where the entire bill was being offered out, and there were no slots left. What happens if there’s another Billie Eilish, another Lewis Capaldi [who] breaks in the next few months?”
Meall had just returned from the International Festival Forum, which occurred in London, Sept. 24-26, when he spoke to Pollstar. ILMC’s creators launched IFF five years ago to address the festival industry’s need for a gathering taking place earlier than March in order to book lineups for the upcoming year.This year’s IFF “has been fucking hard work,” Meall said. “You’re pitching your entire client base across hundreds of festivals, tens and tens of promoters. Obviously, you’ve got to try to balance that with routings for the artists.”
It sounds like booking a festival lineup has never been riskier. However, according to Guttfreund, taking chances on artists is nothing new. “There are many examples of booking an artist because you think an album will go one way, when it goes another, and then you’re in a position to deal with the result,” he said. “Sometimes artists gain momentum, sometimes they lose momentum. Our goal is to book the artists that we feel have a real connection to their fan base, which is not subject to any specific record or time period. Are we wrong sometimes? Absolutely, but, overall, we’ve been put in more favorable positions by booking earlier and earlier. We oftentimes will leave some slots open to add for later in the announced timeframe to make room for the fact that music is always coming, and it’s our job to incorporate the right now.”
Gary Spivack, talent booker at Danny Wimmer Presents, which stages rock festivals such as Aftershock, Epicenter and Sonic Temple, said “it’s actually a great problem to have if a band blows up between the time of their booking and the time of the festival performance. It means people will get to the festival early so as not to miss that band’s set. It’s a win-win.” When booking artists, “you bet on futures, like the stock market,” Spivak continued. “You hope you bat a thousand in betting on futures. Every slot to us is precious; every slot means something. When we book a new band, we do so because we believe in the band, and want to do our part in helping to break this band in the States. We do our best to bat a thousand and not miss a band.”
Spivack said earlier bookings are the result of a flourishing live economy. “It seems like ‘Live Events 101’ that the more days you have to sell tickets, the more tickets you can sell,” he said. “The consumer has a lot of choices out there. You have to give them every reason to make sure their purchase is your show, your event, your festival. The more time to do so, the better.”
Some promoters Pollstar spoke with half-jokingly suggested a booking window akin to the transfer windows in professional sports, during which offers could be submitted and accepted. While Meall admitted with a chuckle that “it would certainly make our lives easier if everyone did it at the same time,” he pointed toward the “commercial pressure on festivals. I understand why they do it. They invest an enormous amount of money in these events, and obviously they fear that the competitor is going to nab a slot by getting an artist that they haven’t got by not moving quick enough. That forces the situation that is happening now. I understand it, it’s something we have to deal with. It’s a job that seems to get more stressful every year, and I can’t see it getting any less stressful.”
The mental health of professionals working behind artists has been a topic close to Meall, tragically brought to the forefront by the death of ATC Live’s Chris Meredith last month at age 37. “Everyone needs to stop and think at times about the stresses we put on each other,” Meall said. “It’s an industry where enormous amounts of money are generated if it everything goes right. And enormous expenses are made touring and putting things together. Of course, an industry like that is always going to be surrounded by stress. Money brings stresses onto everything.”
Spivack acknowledged the stress, but embraced it at the same time. “This job, this festival world, is a 365/24/7 siege,” he said. “It is nonstop. But it’s music, and thank God for that. I have no issues with it being 365, for the sole fact that I’m listening to and discovering music on a constant basis.”
One thing is for sure: The pressure won’t let up anytime soon, because the live business is still booming. Windish recalled “a meeting the other day, where they were talking about a bunch of tours that were going out next summer, and I just thought, ‘Yeah.’ And this was just a fraction of what was going out there. And I just thought, ‘Wow, like how? How can this go on forever?’ And yet it does.”