Executive Profile:
Pasquale Rotella

Meanwhile, Insomniac’s events include EDC in Las Vegas, New York, Orlando and Puerto Rico, Beyond Wonderland, Escape From Wonderland, Nocturnal Wonderland, White Wonderland, Electric Forest and Bassrush, not to mention shows like Element Thursdays, Volume Sundays and Wet Wonderland.  Meanwhile there are shows for acts like Avicii and Pretty Lights.

 

The interview took place prior to the Burning Man festival, an event that Rotella attends religiously but had a hard time getting to this year. In fact, it was during the event that his girlfriend Holly Madison announced they were expecting a child. 

 

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So how did all of this begin?

 

I began as an attendee, a fan of the Los Angeles underground scene. That’s where I first got introduced to dance music and culture, and it really grabbed me. I was going out every weekend. I went to Europe to check out what was going on over there, because a lot of music was coming from the U.K. at the time, and I got really inspired. I came back, but the scene wasn’t healthy because all the events were being shut down. 

 

At one point, it literally just stopped. There was a lack of events and only a bunch of after-hour parties that were a little bit dark and seedy. I wanted the adventurous events that I was a fan of; I wanted them to come back so I took it upon myself to recreate them. I had my first warehouse party in October 1993, in South Central, on Crenshaw, and had about 300 people there. That was the beginning of Insomniac.

 

Prior to me throwing my own events, I and Will (aka Will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas) would go and see some events together. We were high school friends so we’d venture out into the underground parties in 1992. 

 

Were you happy with the first warehouse event?

 

Yeah, I was super excited. There was a buzz from it. Insomniac was a weekly Friday warehouse party. This was the first year of doing them. So that was the first Friday and had about 300 people. The second Friday I had about 600. It ended up getting busted at about 4 in the morning. 

 

But that was the adventure back then. Some Fridays would go until 6 a.m., and some would get busted. There were very few that did, though. Probably like five or six of them by the end of the year. 

 

You have a background with creating an experience. Was this the genesis of that philosophy?

 

Yeah, it was a lot about creating an environment and a lot of that had to do with the venue – finding the perfect warehouse. We would build props from paper-mâché and black lights, and create black-light paint rooms. 

 

And there was the energy that the crowd brought. That was always very important. You had to have the right people there, and they had to be into the music. It wasn’t just one thing. It was 10 percent venue, 10 percent music. All of it had be right, as good as it could be, but it was a bunch of different things that made a great party. The music, even though it was one of the pieces, might have been about 10 percent but it had to be the best house/techno that was out. And that was what made it profitable and unique – all these pieces coming together.

 

How long did it remain underground?

 

The underground scene existed before me, but for me it was underground until – I’d say there’s still underground events going on. That’s the beautiful thing. A lot of events are legit but there are still underground parties going on all the time. 

 

Now they’re not as frequent as they used to be. They used to be all underground. But I would say there were very few legitimate events up until around 1999. I ended up doing events with 40,000 people that were legit, but you had other guys who were doing 15,000 that weren’t. Even when my event may have been legit it was in a non-traditional venue and was under everyone’s radar. I was doing 40,000 people but nobody was paying attention. There will always be the underground, and there will always be the more legitimate events. And they’re very different. Some people don’t like going to certain kind of events, and others go to all kind of events and are open minded.

 

How long did Insomniac remain a one-person operation?

 

I always had friends helping out but it was a one-person operation all the way until, gosh, even five years ago. I’ve had tons of people come through my life, different friends, but no full-time employees. I didn’t have salary jobs. I didn’t offer that until about three or four years ago. And we’re still a small organization. We’re doing big events and subcontract out thousands of people but we only have a core team of about 20 people. 

 

Everybody is wearing a lot of hats. What we have on our side is the history and the fans that support us. Obviously, even with 20, we couldn’t do it on our own. There are a lot of companies we hire to do certain things for us.

 

What are some of the milestones along the way?

 

I think moving Electric Daisy to the Los Angeles Coliseum was a big deal. And then I think moving Electric Daisy from the Coliseum to Las Vegas was a big deal. I also believe that doing a New Year’s Eve event in 1998 at the LA Sports Arena was a big deal because it was a legitimate venue; nobody had used it for dances and weren’t open to it until we came. 

 

And then the National Orange Show Events Center was something that we took hold of in, I believe, 1993. Basically taking events that were in fields, deserts, ballrooms or warehouses and taking them to arenas, doing them on an annual basis and getting them to grow. It educated people on the music, on the culture and helped legitimize it. 

 

But the attention EDC got moving to a market that I feel is the entertainment capital of the world really took it to the next level. We had been doing EDC in downtown Los Angeles two or three days; we’d do 140,000 to 180,000 people, and there were still people in Europe who didn’t know what EDC was. But when we went to Vegas, all of a sudden, even though it became bigger but not by that much, it became an international festival, something that was recognized from around the world. We have producers from Russia and Brazil and Chile and the U.K. that have reached out to us, asking if we could co-promote. They’ve heard of us recently, although I’ve been doing this for 18 years.

 

You recently expanded to Brazil. What expansions are in the works?

 

We have some markets that we are having conversations with. Producers who have good reputations and infrastructures, and have other festivals that they own that we’re speaking to about, you know, where we would do this, what time of year. Just all the logistics and going as far as talking about the business relationship. Those are just conversations. We don’t have anything solid but I have confidence just because we’re having great conversations with these potential partners and will be in other markets pretty soon.

 

Will you be attending Burning Man this year?

 

Well, I try to go to Burning Man every year and this year I might only go for two, three days. I hate saying that because I’ve always been the person who says I have to go from start to finish but I might not be able to do it because of everything that’s going on, and it really just hurts my heart to not be there at all. But even if I’m there for two or three days, I’m not going to bring my art car, I won’t be setting up my camp. I’ll probably just go into somebody else’s camp and make the best of the little time I might have. I’ve heard it was going to be extremely dusty this year, the dustiest it’s ever been. But Burning Man’s fun regardless the weather. It’s kind of part of the fun.

 

Can you elaborate on how Burning Man has inspired your own events?

 

I’ve been inspired by many different things, but Burning Man absolutely is one of them. What’s amazing about Burning Man is the artists, the independent groups that set up camp and build these amazing art installations. I invite them to my festivals and we’ve had quite a lot of people I’ve met at Burning Man set up shop within our events to create a unique environment. We also sponsored artists from Burning Man and created art pieces that have been featured for the first time at Electric Daisy and some of our other festivals.

 

Can you talk about customer service? From what we can see, you put in a lot of energy even after the event is finished, like the lost & found section on the EDC website.

 

Absolutely. It’s a whole experience from the second you buy the ticket, to getting there, to getting back home safely to remember the experience. We try to do things so people can have something they can hold on to so they can remember that special weekend they had. It’s not just while you’re at the event. And it’s funny you mention the Lost & Found. As much energy as you see us putting into it, it’s still not what I want it to be. That will be improved in a whole lot of ways.

 

But, you know, we have these boxes of stuff and someone’s bummed out! A little thing like that – we can have all the bells and whistles that money can buy, the best music, the best production – but someone can go there, lose their passport, get stuck, can’t leave so we do everything we can to make it so it’s a great experience. And that’s not just with audio/visual stuff, it’s also with customer service.

 

You’ve talked about when people tried to “jump in” to the genre in 1992, ’95 and 2000, as well as currently. Can you elaborate?

 

In 1992, events started to get extremely popular and larger. Avalon Attractions were doing “rave” parties in 1992. And that was one upswing. And there were others. 

 

There were people with deep pockets always jumping in. They’d be lining up, and then they’d crash and burn. It kind of killed itself. And that’s when I started bumming out, and in 1993 I tried to create a scene again. 

 

Then there was another upswing in – God, there’ve been so many – ’96, ’98. There’s not much to tell other than there were people jumping in who weren’t around when things weren’t so big. It’s the same with anything; I’m not knocking it. 

 

But it’s unfortunate there are so many people out there who are doing things solely for money. I believe happiness is doing something you’re passionate about. And that’s what worked with my life. There’s something about when you’re working hard, you have these goals that get you really excited, these dreams, then once you get it to a certain point people just jump in and try to capitalize off it. There have been several upswings. I think ’92 was the first one, up until today. 

 

Talking about investors, you can’t get much bigger than Robert Sillerman. This is clearly as big as it’s ever been.

 

It’s been different every time. This is definitely the biggest it’s gotten. No doubt about it. People with much more money and bigger accomplishments under their belts have jumped in this round because it’s that much bigger. But that’s basically all that’s happened. 

 

I don’t know if it’s going to turn out the same as other upswings because the players are so different. All I was referring to is that there are upswings like this before and people who have not been part of the culture, who have not been in the trenches to make dance music what it is, are jumping in. So we’ll see how it pans out over time. But, yeah, I’ve talked to a lot of these guys. They just want to do well. They’re businessmen and want to have success, and they see this as something with potential. 

 

Skip Paige of Goldenvoice recently told you, “Only recently have these festivals become profitable. If you would have quit 10 years ago, you’d never be where you are now.”

 

Right, and neither would be the people who were jumping in. I was doing 40,000-person events, walking away with a loss when 40,000 people was unheard of. And everybody was saying, “Wow! That was huge! You must have killed it!” But it was hard. 

 

There were so many ups and downs. I was poor. I was handling hundreds of thousands of dollars but it was just going through my hands, going into the bank, going out of the bank. And sometimes I’d be in debt. 

 

It was very difficult. There was a stigma with what we did. So you’d get things at three times their normal cost – venues, local authorities, police. They’d almost try to price you out of the market. It was almost like you had to convince people to do the event there and the way to do that was to throw money around. Well, now we have mayors calling us and saying, “Hey, can you do one of these events in our town?”  It’s very different. 

 

And this was before Coachella or Bonnaroo existed. We were doing raves and that was the only thing going on, and we were doing 20,000 people. And people were, like, “Raves? Isn’t that what I saw on Fox News? Music? I thought people just go there to have sex and do drugs.” No, there is Prodigy, Moby. Have you heard of them?  It was difficult.

 

At one event I had 30,000 tickets sold and there was an event in another county that was an underground party, and just because of that event, which was unrelated but had dance music, they pulled my permits. But because of my underground roots, I found a way to make it happen. I found an Indian Reservation. It was a little like the Wild, Wild West.

 

You said at a panel at Pollstar Live that the biggest challenge of booking an event is the politics behind the bookings, such as the time slots acts are given and the billing they get on the flyers.

 

Absolutely true. It’s very hard. But now it’s only become a time-slot thing because we’re not doing billing anymore. That was just a nightmare. It was extremely stressful for my team to deal with. It had gotten too crazy. Now, time slots are the only thing that’s left. People get set on certain things and they don’t want to budge and there are these battles over time slots. 

 

But, yeah, booking is the most difficult part. And at an event like EDC in Vegas, everybody wants to play that festival, and everybody wants the best time slot, and everybody wants the best billing because they think everyone’s watching. So it made it even more difficult because everyone is so meticulous. It felt like this was the event that sets the bar on what their salary might be for sets throughout the year. So it was very difficult when everyone wants the same thing.

 

Would that be one of the factors as to why you recently said you don’t need superstar DJs at the event?

 

I said that I don’t only want to have these big names because there’s so much talent out there and we want to give others the opportunity to play. And we don’t need to have every big name. If we have someone like Tiësto, whom we love having, it doesn’t mean everyone needs to be known people. It does make it very difficult to book.

 

We can change it up – have the big guy that everybody recognizes but have up-and-coming guys A, B, C and D. 

For a second there, our lines were looking like “A” across the board. Everything was insane. I don’t think that is going to make the party better, necessarily. It makes our job tough to get everyone on those bills. It’s almost impossible.

 

This sounds like a good time to bring up the Insomniac Discovery Project.

 

It’s something that I’m super excited about. It’s not about not booking guys that are big. We’ve always had and we always will. It’s about changing things up so we don’t have the same names over and over again, giving new guys the opportunity. 

 

And that’s where the Discovery Project comes in. We set up a platform where some young producer can turn in a track that he’s remixed or made from scratch, and our fans can vote on it. We also have a group of people who take their best picks and, if they are the winners of the Discovery Project competition, they have the opportunity to play the Discovery Project Stage at our big festivals – Nocturnal, Electric Daisy, Beyond Wonderland. 

 

And then there’s another competition about who had the most buzz at the festival, who got the most people on the stage dancing during their set. Then, after that, they have the opportunity to play stages that aren’t the Discovery Project, alongside acts like Calvin Harris, Steve Angello and Afrojack. 

 

This year’s EDC fell victim to high winds. The postponement seemed to go smoothly. Who made the call?

 

It worked out great; I was really happy. Who made the call? It was our team in collaboration with fire and Metro and police. But who supplied the information for when things should be shut down? That came from the Insomniac team. 

 

Our production team had access to the wind meters at the top of the stages and the guys from the staging companies were there, and they said, “Hey, when you get gusts of wind over a certain miles-per-hour we believe is the time you should clear the front of the stages.”

 

We relayed that information to PD and Fire. They agreed that we should listen to the professionals as to what these stages can and cannot stand. We waited it out and when we got two gusts of wind that exceeded those mph’s, there was no hesitation. We went with the plan of shutting things down and allowed people to stay in the bleachers until the winds died down. They never died down enough to turn the stages back up, and people stuck around and listened to music at the artpark and attended the other activities until the event would have ended anyway. Not the entire 150,000 people, but a percentage of them. 

 

And Sunday night went great. Everybody came back and had a great time. We honored Saturday ticketholders and it was fine. 

 

It was definitely a group effort, and I guess that’s how it went with Lollapalooza. I was at that, and it was beautifully done. Those guys (C3 Presents) did a great job. And they did the exact right thing by pulling it because that weather was pretty bad. I was watching from my hotel window and when it died down they started up again. Fortunately it died down where ours did not. 

 

Electric Daisy was also held in New Jersey, same weekend as Bamboozle 60 miles away. Were there any concerns?

 

No. There was a thought that, hey, there’s another festival going on. And some people just like the festival experience so we might lose people because of that, but at the same time we had confidence in Electric Daisy coming to the market. We’re more focused on dance music and they have more rock stuff so we felt we’d get the support of the dance music fans. It’s something we’d rather not have had happen but we had success and I think they had success. But, no, we weren’t excited about it when we first found out. We’d rather avoid other events, even if they have different genres.

 

Is there anything an agent, tour manager, artist, etc., could do that would piss you off enough to send them straight to voicemail?  Or, on the other hand, anything someone does that you really like?

 

For me, either you have a relationship or you don’t. Dance music is different than rock and hip-hop, which is always about the highest bidder. I think there will always be an element of that even in dance music, but there are certain guys we have friendships with that we generally care about, that we’ve booked before they were big and afterward. I think just having that relationship, communication and mutual respect – they complement me but we also complement them. We have good shows to offer, put a lot of money into production and care a lot about the people, and we feel that’s a good partnership to have with the DJ. And we try to maintain that. It’s important to us.

 

We basically get along with everyone. There really isn’t anyone we send to voicemail. It’s not cut-and-dry. We talk things out when we want to do a show and it doesn’t make sense, they explain to us the reasons and we don’t trip on them. We just say, well, hopefully the next one will work out.

 

It’s been pretty healthy. And I’ve known a lot of the agents or managers since before this scene got so big, so there’s a lot of history there.

 

Anything in conclusion?

 

I think there’s a misconception out of there. People ask me, “How are you feeling about all these people jumping in?” I say, “Well, is there something they can bring that will make for a good partnership? That will make ourselves stronger?”

 

We do Electric Forrest in Rothbury, Mich., with Madison House. It’s not just dance music; we had String Cheese Incident play all three nights. 

 

We’re always learning. What our events are now are not what they’ll be in five years. I’m constantly trying to improve my infrastructure, my operations, the experience for the attendees. It’s exciting what’s going on with dance music right now.

 

The growth is allowing us to build. We haven’t made any decisions on selling the company or long-term partnerships, but we have worked with a lot of people in the industry – AEG, Live Nation and lots of smaller promoters across the country.

 

We’re not trying to own it all, even though we’ve been doing it since Day One. We’re looking to do good business, create events and are open to collaboration.