Features
How To Avoid The Next Fyre Fest Or Vestiville
Sziget – Sziget Festival
Half-a-million people from all over the world visit the event each year
Fyre Festival in the Bahamas and Vestiville in Belgium showed the world how easy it is to create a great-looking website promising ticket buyers everything under the sun, but not following up on any of it.
Does it simply boil down to gold diggers spotting an opportunity to get rich quick, not knowing what they’re getting themselves into? Are badly executed events mere symptoms of an industry that is still maturing? And what can consumers do to avoid being ripped off by promoters making nothing but empty promises?
Pollstar talked to some veterans in the game with a proven track record of promoting large-scale fan-favourite events, to find out.
– Támás Kadár
CEO of Sziget Festival
Tamás Kádár, CEO of Hungary’s flagship festival Sziget, said bad examples like Fyre Fest and Vestiville led people to lose trust in the live entertainment industry at large. “I think it’s not good for the entire business. It’s bad for the agents, the artists, and the crowds. And I’m not just talking about the ones that have already arrived at the gates, only to be told they cannot enter, but everybody [who’s bought a ticket],” he said.
“We have 50% of visitors coming from abroad. When they are making their decision, they’re deciding in a market with a lot of festivals. They spend their money on a holiday, it’s not just the festival. So when they decide to go to a new festival and spend the money there, it automatically means they won’t spend it on another one. It takes time to get the money back, the decision can’t be altered,” he elaborated.
FKP Scorpio CEO Folkert Koopmans said, “we don’t take kindly to such incidents at all, be it the most recent or more drastic examples, like the Love Parade in Duisburg.”
The Love Parade disaster of 2010 will forever stand as a reminder of what happens when people that don’t really know what they’re getting themselves into promote a large-scale live event.
“It should be an impossibility,” said Koopmans, adding that “the problem with the promotions business is that anybody can become a promoter, without having completed any kind of training. That’s the big problem, and I think it needs to change.”
The idea would be for anybody attempting to put on an event to first show some credentials, Koopmans explained, either in the form of a proven track record or at least a document certifying that one has the basic skills to put together an event, in particular since it has so much to do with safety, security and taking the responsibility for both.
– Folkert Koopmans
CEO of FKP Scorpio
This would, of course, require some of the industry’s experts to get together and develop a curriculum. “As things stand, someone who has never promoted an event could get up tomorrow and promote an event for 50,000 people. Are you even aware of what that entails? It bothers us that there still are cases, where the answer is clearly no,” said Koopmans.
Vestiville got called off, after A$AP Rocky’s security team concluded that the festival wasn’t safe to go ahead and voiced their concerns with authorities. And while the subsequent cancellation left many fans stranded at the gates, they were at least not exposed to a major security risk.
However, it should have never gotten to the point where an event is announced, tickets are sold and gates opened, before the most important parts of it have been taken care of.
According to Kádár, the problem is new events wanting to enter the market with big lineups, and finding out they simply don’t have the financial muscle to pull it off. “This can also happen with one-off concerts, of course,” he added.
Koopmans agrees that, today, the financial backing of an event in the number one factor of success, not just in terms of paying the artists, but also hiring the right people for the other tasks that go into pulling off a great live event. “If you have the money, you can hire the right people. If you’re lacking financial backing, everything else will fall apart at some point. Unfortunately that is the case today. It’s a shame for up-and-coming, creative people, but the financial backing is the most important point,” he said.
Robin Schmiedebach – Guests enjoying fresh water at Hurricane Festival 2019
A festival needs to take care of its visitors
On the flip side, there are many reasons for the failure of an event, but, according to Koopmans, “at the end of the day, it’s wrongly judging or overestimating one’s own abilities and capacities. I don’t think Fyre Fest – without knowing anybody that worked on it – was planned as a scam from the beginning. I believe they had initially set out to do a good job, but couldn’t manage because they hardly had any experienced people with them, who could have handled such a project.”
Added Kádár: “Both cases, Fyre Fest and Vestiville, show that there are a lot of gold diggers, who believer that if they set up a good line up, the job is done. That is not the case. The production, how you set up a festival, the stages, the campsites, the sanitary facilities, everything, is at least as important as the lineup. That’s what the newcomers have to learn. And this was missing in both of the cases.”
– Marek Lieberbergat Eurosonic Noorderslag 2016
According to Marek Lieberberg, CEO of Live Nation GSA, avoiding debacles like Fyre Fest or Vestiville, “requires a concerted effort by the fans, the music industry, the artists and their representatives as well as the media in particular.”
Agents, for instance, could “help identify speculative bubbles as news travel so fast and awareness is almost immediately available via social media.”
He also holds fan accountable, explaining how, a lot of the time, fans didn’t want to hear anything critical in connection with the artists the love. “They must learn to see the writing on the wall and emancipate themselves too, just as they need to stand up to scalpers and/or dubious secondary platforms,” said Lieberberg.
All promoters agreed that the overall picture was still looking bright. In the words of Lieberberg: “While the demand for live entertainment is growing universally, the number of real players and professional presenters is not really. Despite some negative exceptions the vast majority of events and the overall experience are indeed improving. Fans can rely on experienced promoters not only with respect to the validity of announcements but especially with respect to the conditions under which concerts and festivals take place.”
Said Koopmans: “If you look at the number of events that are done properly, [the bad apples] are a very small percentage.”
One advice all three promoters had for fans, was to check the track record of any given promoter before deciding to purchase a ticket: how long have they been around, what was the lineup like in previous years, etc.
Koopmans pointed out that it was very hard for the consumer to ascertain which promoters to trust, in particular in times when it didn’t take much to create a professional-looking website.
Rock am Ring – Rock am Ring 2019
Said CEO Lieberberg: “Ultimately the fans decide whether an event is sustainable or not. And that‘s how it should be!”
According to Lieberberg, the media plays an important role in helping customers make wise purchasing decisions. The founder of arguably Germany’s most iconic festival, Rock am Ring, who was once about to become a news editor himself, said “the media often fails to ask the right questions when sensational announcements are made by organizers that have no track record or previous professional competence. An experienced promoter or organisation gives a good indication if there is merit to an event or not.”
Lieberberg’s conclusion: “Putting an event together requires imagination and inspiration, talent and serious expertise and last but not least solid funding. Ultimately the fans decide whether an event is sustainable or not. And that‘s how it should be!”
Added Kádár: “You have to keep your visitors happy, even when they are not watching a concert. If this is not the case, you will fail.”