It's that time of year when hordes of twenty-somethings start sharing rides to remote locations – music festival season. This Memorial Day weekend it's the Sasquatch Music Festival in Washington. But Sasquatch is one of many – many – festivals yet to come. Too, many, in fact? Jessica Robinson wondered how many festivals the music industry can handle.
Forget shows in clubs and concert halls. Some bands now spend long stretches of their summer just hopping from one grassy lawn to another. Take the Northwest's homegrown indie rock band Modest Mouse.
If you miss them at Sasquatch over Memorial Day weekend, you can catch them later this summer … at the Sloss Music festival in Birmingham, Alabama.
Or at the Forecastle Festival in Louisville …
At Celebrate Brooklyn
HomeAway Music festival in Ontario, Canada
Mo Pop in Detroit
Maha Music Festival in Omaha
Music Fest Northwest in Portland
And … you get the idea.
Jonathan Levine: “We do live in a culture right now which is heavily saturated with festivals.”
Jonathan Levine is a talent agent in Nashville.
Jonathan Levine: “And that, if someone has a plot of land and a checkbook, they can suddenly find themselves in the festival business.”
Levine's roster includes the Black Eyed Peas and Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead, who of course played one of the most iconic music festivals. But a lot has changed since Woodstock. Music festivals have gone mainstream and they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars. Millennials, it seems, are willing to shell out for multi-day music experiences. And deep-pocketed corporate sponsors are willing to shell out to reach them.
And it's all come none too soon for musicians.
Katelyn and Laurie Shook are in Spokane for a show. The two singers from Sandpoint, Idaho are the front-women of the Shook Twins, now a Portland-based indie folk pop group. The room is packed. But this is actually the group’s downtime, before festival season.
Laurie and Katelyn: “Been sitting around … we’re saving up our vegetative state … so we can just keep going, nonstop, all summer.”
The growth in the number of music festivals over the last decade and half has coincided with a big shift in how people buy recorded music -- if they buy it. And now streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and, soon, Apple Beats are reinventing the model again.
Katelyn: “I think the whole industry, the whole scenario -- all of it -- is changing so much,
Music festivals, by comparison, seem relatively easy.
Laurie: “It’s so good for an up and coming band because when we go to a new territory, we don’t have to have the pressure of filling the club all by ourselves, we’re just part of this huge thing and they’re promoting it and they’re doing all the cool stuff for it.”
Both up and coming artists and some big name headlining bands now plan their tours around festivals.
But is there a ceiling on all this growth?
Gary Bongiovanni: “The problem that we’ve got is that everyone is competing for the same pool of talent. And it’s not just in North America. It’s worldwide.”
Gary Bongiovanni is the editor of the concert business trade publication Pollstar. He says there aren’t enough really big names to go around and predicts a “market correction that weeds out weaker festivals.”
Even well-established players are feeling the pinch of competition. The 52-two-old Britt Festival in southern Oregon – which is actually a summer-long concert series – has found it tougher lately to book some country acts because of new nearby festivals.
This year, at least two new music festivals are launching in Idaho. And Washington's pot economy bred this year's “Hempapalooza.”
But the rush to get in on the action isn't bothering Drew Lorona too much. He's one of the founders of the fledgling Treefort Music Festival in Boise. Lorona says organizers have been careful to grow Treefort slowly and put the emphasis on discovering unknown bands.
Drew Lorona: “I think the festivals that will struggle are going to be the ones that don't have that differentiation. And that seems to be what's popping up the most – is kind of branded as like a party in the desert type of thing.”
By his prediction, the Coachella-copycats aren’t going to be the ones to make it in the long run.
But here’s a good sign for festivals like his that aren’t trying to compete for big-name established bands: Lorona says for the first time, after four years, Treefort broke even.
