Festivals Make Comeback

Last year, Lollapalooza, the longest-running American rock festival, was canceled before it even started -- one promoter characterized ticket sales as "terrible." This year, Lollapalooza made a comeback, not as a touring festival but as a two-day gig in Chicago's Grant Park, with a lineup of sixty bands including the Pixies, the Arcade Fire, Widespread Panic and the Killers. More than 30,000 people showed up each day, and the festival grossed $2.9 million, coming off as one of the most successful concert events of the summer.

Lollapalooza isn't the only festival doing big business. At a time when record sales are taking a nose dive and summer-concert attendance has fallen -- down an estimated forty percent in 2004 from the previous year -- U.S. festivals are a rare growth area. Eclectic events like the Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival in Indio, California; Bonnaroo in Manchester, Tennessee; Austin City Limits in Texas; Bumbershoot in Seattle; and Street Scene in San Diego are building a robust side business for the concert industry, while new-for-2005 events like New York's Across the Narrows and Las Vegas' Vegoose are expanding the market. Even concert giant Clear Channel is getting in on the act, launching an American version of the U.K. Download Festival in Mountain View, California, on October 8th.

For years fans have complained about summer concerts -- the overpriced tickets, huge service charges and uninspired bookings. "Concrete amphitheaters, with their eight-dollar hot dogs, are no fun," says Charles Attal, who co-created the three-day fest Austin City Limits with producer Charlie Jones four years ago and re-created Lollapalooza in a similar mold this year. "We create a green-space environment with 50 to 150 bands and a cheap ticket price that you'd normally pay going into a shed to see two bands. If you're a music fan, where are you gonna go? It's not just a concert. It's a weekend experience, and it's a vacation."

This year, Austin City Limits sold 50,000 tickets before the lineup was announced, and three-day passes to the September 23rd-25th event with Coldplay and Wilco have been sold out for weeks.

It helps that Attal, a former club booker, and other organizers of most of the successful festivals come from grass-roots companies. "We've been concert promoters since the mid-Eighties, concentrating on bands that played at festivals," says Paul Tollett, whose company, Goldenvoice, launched Coachella in 1999. His inspiration was early California raves, Lollapalooza and the massive British summer festival Glastonbury. "We've been to so many events as fans, going through the front door, experiencing it as you would as a fan. We felt we had a specific knowledge of what people wanted to see."

Adds Jonathan Mayers of Superfly Productions, who co-founded Bonnaroo in 2002, "In Europe, it's kind of a rite of passage. I definitely see a shift here in the States. People are looking for that broader experience, with multiple stages, art installations and the chance to establish a community."

While Coachella built itself around diverse indie-rock lineups, Bonnaroo is grounded in the jam-band scene, a natural successor to the colossal Phish shows held in remote locations in the Nineties, with free camping and a communal vibe. The first Bonnaroo, held in June 2002 and featuring Trey Anastasio, Widespread Panic and Norah Jones, sold out 70,000 tickets in eighteen days with little advertising. "It exceeded our wildest expectations," says Mayers. (This year, Bonnaroo drew 80,000 people.)

For artists, festivals can be a great way to reach a new audience -- even if the pay is not great. Often the top bands receive most of the money and others play for the exposure. Even a headliner like the Pixies, who have played Coachella and Lollapalooza, might make less than they would for a solo gig, but the band's frontman, Frank Black, says, "I like hearing about the huge numbers, getting that incredible reaction. It's another level of spectacle to play in front of 90,000 people."