Q’s With C3’s Joe Howard: Building A South American Festival Circuit

C3 Presents has grown from humble beginnings at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q in Austin to becoming a North American powerhouse promoter of venues and festivals of all sizes, including its mammoth annual Austin City Limits Music Festival and flagship Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park, two long-running urban festivals in major cities.

C3 has also effectively established itself as a global festival force, most notably with its now-long-running South American Lollapaloozas, which take place annually in Chile, Argentina and Brazil. Add to those two sister events in Colombia and Paraguay, along with side shows and other opportunities while on the continent, and C3 Presents has somewhat single-handedly created a major opportunity for artists eager to play for music-hungry South American fans.

Lineups just dropped for the three Lollapaloozas, topped by blink-182 and including SZA, Paramore, Feid, Sam Smith, Arcade Fire, Limp Bizkit and dozens more.

C3 Presents global festival promoter Joe Howard has had a direct hand in developing the South American events, and shared with Pollstar how it’s gotten to this point and what’s next.

Pollstar: How would you describe the growth of the Lollapalooza brand globally?
Joe Howard: For the most part, even the ones in Europe and in India, I think it’s happened relatively organically. I don’t know that there was ever a master plan to get to having seven international ones. After getting through that first year in Chile (2011), there was an obvious opportunity to do more. Certainly, Santiago is one of the core touring markets for bands that go down there. We quickly jumped to São Paulo in 2012 and then Argentina in Buenos Aires in 2014. The original very inexact science behind the thought process was that having one in each country made sense.

How big was it to secure blink-182 for 2024, after the band was planned for 2023 but ultimately unable to make it happen?
We’re super glad to have them. Blink has never, in any iteration, been to South America. It’s kind of wild to think that through their long career, they never made it down there. But we saw last year and we are seeing again just a ton of excitement and anticipation for such a multi-decade-career band coming down for the first time.

Are artists becoming more interested in playing South America as the events continue to grow?
A band that wants to maximize their global presence, to play to as many people as possible, most bands kind of have that goal. South America is a huge continent. Obviously, with the advent of streaming, access to music is so much easier. Bands are more relevant probably everywhere, but South America, you know, from a live perspective, I don’t think there’s a better live music audience than the fans in South America. I haven’t seen it.

With different countries, cultures, currencies and languages among different locations, how do you establish Lollapalooza as a consistent brand between events?
Over the years and through the progression of it all, we were always focused on that one sole event with each individual local team that we work with in each respective market. We’re kind of the glue to the three local operations, trying to build some consistency. From my perspective, talking to the international bands, it’s typically a singular conversation about the three Lollapalooza shows. We’ve been doing it long enough where we think we’ve been able to help establish and provide that consistency among three very different countries.

Does C3 help with logistics apart from festival production, such as travel and hotel?
I never thought years ago that I would have to be so involved with freighting gear around a continent, but we have to, because we want to ensure that the bands get to where they need to be for the next show, and their cargo gets there in a timely manner and all the above. There’s not much room for error in some of these moves, with doing shows on consecutive days in different cities. Having one travel day to get from Chile up to Bogotá, for example.

It is a logistically intense 10- to 12-day period and it takes a lot of the bands’ cooperation to understand what they signed up for in terms of, this isn’t just coming into town and leaving on the I-40. There’s way more layers of complexity with immigration and cargo and weather. All of the dates in South America are fly dates, right? So I would say that that’s one challenge that will never go away.

How about other challenges with South America specifically?
Globally speaking, artists and bands have a ton of options. As more markets open up, there’s just a lot of places to go, which is a good thing for new markets. But it means that every band’s got only so much time on the road potentially, and time at home and time in their personal lives and time to record. A band can only be in one place at one time.