Features
Q’s With C3 Presents’ Amy Corbin: Metallica, Macca And More At This Year’s Austin City Limits Music Festival
– Amy Corbin
C3 Presents
C3 Presents’ Amy Corbin is the lead talent buyer for one of the massive North American festival lineups in Austin City Limits Music Festival, which now runs two weekends in Austin’s Zilker Park and this year features headliners like Metallica, Paul McCartney and Travis Scott.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg – with major acts filling out the whole lineup rather than just the top few spaces: Arctic Monkeys, Odesza, Justice, The National,
Khalid, Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello and Hozier barely take you to the end of the first line on the poster.
“I’m extremely proud and excited,” Corbin told Pollstar of this year’s lineup. About McCartney and Metallica in particular: “I can say we’ve had our eye on both for many years. The fact that were both available and ready to confirm, I was really, really, really excited about where to go from there and how to book the rest of the festival and what directions I wanted to go in.”
Here, Corbin discussed keeping ACL fresh, continuing to improve the fan experience and bringing her daughters along for the ride. She also said, a week ahead of the event, tickets were on the brink of selling out at 75,000 capacity per day.
How does ACL continue to stand out in the ever-growing greater festival scene?
Sometimes I feel like, “Ugh, there’s another one.” I would love to just be the only festival in Texas but that’s not the case. For us, it’s maintaining our identity and not losing focus of what our core roots are, for the festival and the brand. When I work on a new festival, like Music Midtown or Voodoo, I try to maintain what their core roots and values are. I don’t want to have an ACL in New Orleans, or an ACL in Atlanta. But those festivals have been successful over the years, so let’s not lose that identity. Boutique festivals serve more of a concentrated target audience, and the bigger ones try and appeal to the masses. There’s a lot of traffic out there.
With so many people on site, what has C3 done to improve the fan experience, and what’s new for this year?
Last year we put up a stage across the street. It really opened up the trees and provided more shade for fans; it took a lot of the pressure off the main park and allowed people to move around more easily. We’ve added a VIP platform viewing deck this year that I think people are really going to appreciate. Listening to the fans and what they would like to see more of – whether that’s shade, more water, production values – that’s probably been most of C3’s success. How do we make subtle changes that will make a big difference? This year, we’ve added ACL Cares programming and we’re doing some more focused discussions that will be fan-facing. We’re really proud of that and we’ll see how that goes over this year. That’s pretty new to our programming schedule – engaging with organizations and causes with interactive panels and meet and greets.
How does ACL approach radius clauses?
I feel like we’re pretty lenient on ours. We understand – when you go to two weekends, if you’re a band who is making $20,000, you can’t just sit in Austin for seven days. We’re
in the middle of Texas, where it can take 12 hours to get to New Mexico, or six hours to get to Louisiana. We try to place artists around Austin specifically so they’re not just sitting here, and those tours are expensive, and I get it. There’s overhead.
Agents generally want more for a festival show. Discuss.
C3’s based in Austin, and we book a considerable number of shows in Austin. There’s a pretty good chance that we have worked with this artist in some-capacity venue of ours. Usually we know what they can make on a club date. We know what the walkout was. That really is a distinct advantage of booking a festival. Are there offers that I send that some might find insulting? Perhaps, and that might just be that I was unaware. “Oh, I didn’t do that show (laughs).” OK, fair enough. I go with what I feel is the right price, and again, not everybody confirms. I probably have a list of 30 acts that passed on ACL this year. Yes, you do pay a little more on a festival, but the hope is that’s also an investment in their future touring, too.
If I was booking one weekend it might be different. Two weekends, you have to put that into consideration. Is it a fly-in, are they touring, how are we going to get them some additional money so they’re not just sitting here? We have a big team that works on it with me where we’re trying to satisfy a lot of those commitments. “OK, I can get you offers in Dallas and Houston, hopefully that helps.” Two years ago we had a lot of fly-ins, which was weird. Every year it changes. Some years we have a ton of people on tour and we’re trying to navigate all that. And some years it seems like people are off-cycle or aren’t out on the road.
What about billing and managing egos and placement on the poster? The billing is not alphabetical!
A lot of factors go into the billing – the social media aspect, the Spotify listens, the YouTube views, the hard ticket still means a lot and carries a lot of weight for us. Somebody like Metallica might not have that many Spotify listens, but they can sell a lot of fucking tickets. There’s no debate there. You can’t just say we only look at one thing. We try and look at it as a whole and then determine where it should go. There’s some that we simply miss, so we will adjust. It’s certainly a challenge. We try to be as fair as we can, and hopefully everybody is happy.
What can you tell us about Women Nation, Live Nation’s initiative to fund female-led organizations. You’re on the evaluating team.
There’s been quite a bit of submissions from organizations specific to our industry. The most eye-opening for me is just seeing how many are out there and the different philosophies and business tar-get that they’re working on. We haven’t made any final selections and I think that is to come, but it’s really cool to be a part of that and hear and read the applicants’ stories and their needs.
[WME agent] Sam Kirby had me sit on a panel during Lollapalooza, and listening to them on the agency side, they’ve put together a working list of women, a list of ladies who do things from tour manager, production manager, tour accountants, lighting director, and when I saw the list they had put together, I was shocked at some of the areas that had maybe two names. I thought oh my gosh.
Beyond the festivals, I promote concerts on a daily basis, so thinking about when I’m backstage, how many women are we seeing on these tours? Not a lot, and it kind of puts it into perspective. It’s cool there are initiatives happening all around us that are taking note and seeing what we can all do to elevate.
How about initiatives to have gender-neutral festival lineups?
Every year I and Margaret Galton who works with me on the festival, we really try and reserve slots. So if I feel like we are underrepresented on the lineup, we’ll say you know what, we need to add five more female artists to this lineup, and we’re not going to confirm or even consider anything else until we meet that. Booking a lineup means this spread you see publicly has changed probably 200 times before the thing was even announced. There’s a lot of different factors that go into it. There’s a lot of different factors beyond gender or even artist. Sometimes it’s just impossible.
But if I’m booking with the awareness of there’s 140 acts, let’s make sure we got a pretty good percentage that is female artists, and not just that but diversity overall is very important. We want to be very inclusive. You can look every day and there’s somebody that might fit in one of those boxes. – Brandi Carlile, Bishop Briggs, Big Thief, Alvaays – they’re there. I don’t think it’s fair to necessarily look at only top.
What has changed since Live Nation came on board with its acquisition of C3 Presents?
As far as what we do, it really hasn’t changed anything. They don’t want to come in and change anything. They want us to continue to push the envelope with the lineups and think about logistics. Safety has always been a hot topic for us as well as them. It’s great to tap into some of their resources when we’re unsure. They’re there if we need them. We have a lot of support in the organization, they’ve been able to share with us some data they have that we don’t have. Overall it’s been pretty seamless across all of our events, and we still operate as C3.
Do you bring your two daughters (Gemma, 10, and Milla, 6,) to the show?
They’ve been coming to the festivals since they were either in my belly or pretty fresh newborns. It’s just part of their life. This year my oldest is really starting to dig in to the lineup a little and picking out bands that she wants to see.
In Chicago we let her stay late and see the first half of Bruno Mars. That was totally new territory for us. Usually after about 4 o’clock it’s, “OK, we have to go home,” so she was really excited to be able to see the big production and the lights and everything. Right now just thinking about it makes me smile, having the two of them really engaging in it and not being like “Ugh, a festival,” or “Mom’s at work.” Now it’s, “Can we bring friends? Can we get passes?” They’ve made comments like, “Oh I want your job when I’m older.” (laughs) You don’t want my job. Maybe something a little less stressful, I would encourage for them.