Credit: Wikimedia Commons
British musician YUNGBLUD will make his debut at Summerfest
Piecing together Summerfest’s lineup doesn’t just take time—though to be sure, it requires plenty of that. The festival’s booking agents spend the entire year cementing its lineup, a process that begins literally the day after each year’s festival ends, explains associate booking director Scott Ziel. But first and foremost booking a lineup this large in a market this size requires resourcefulness. Over the years Summerfest has honed a variety of tricks that help Milwaukee’s flagship music festival compete with the hundreds of new festivals that have emerged over the last decade or two, while keeping admission at a price that would be infeasible for nearly any other festival even a fraction its size. Just hours after the bulk of this year’s lineup was announced yesterday morning, Ziel spoke with the Shepherd about how it’s done.
Congrats on the announcement. After all that time building the lineup and keeping it under wraps, it must feel good to finally be able to share it and talk about it.
Exactly. It does feel good. I was up still up late last night talking to all of our favorite agents and managers, trying to tend to all of their needs. So it’s good that it’s out in the world now.
It seems like over the years Summerfest has gone from being an outlier, a huge festival in a mid-sized city with its own way of doing things, to meeting the concert industry halfway, operating closer to how other major festivals do. How does that change how you do your job?
I think Milwaukee has grown to be more of a viable music and concert market, starting with Gary Witt and the guys starting the Pabst and showing bands that would normally come to Chicago or Minneapolis and skip over our market that we’re a viable market for these bands. Along with Peter Buffett having a vision for Radio Milwaukee, it’s shown that while we’ll always be viewed as a Midwestern industrial city, we’ve demonstrated that we have diverse tastes and a huge appetite for music, and that’s where we’ve kind of grown. So we’re always going to be a festival for the people and always going try to present all these different styles of music, but I think we’re a lot more diverse maybe than we were in the past. We take some more chances. And our audience is supporting us. So we’re growing that way. The festival also hired a really awesome New York music P.R. firm a while back to start doing more national marketing and positioning of the festival, because people outside of the Midwest don’t understand what we are, so that’s also been helpful.
|
|
It seems like expectations for the caliber of lineup that you book have increased each year.
It’s true. It started when physical CDs and distribution of music started to decline, and all the streaming stuff and all the file sharing happened. For an artist, recorded music, which had been a major source of their income, changed dramatically, so touring became an important piece of their career, and festivals in particular. So long story short the prices for artists have gone up. The competition for bigger names continues. I’m not a big fan of the radius clause concept, where bands can only play a festival and have a 200 or 300 radius clause to try to block everybody else from booking them. The competition has grown, the prices have grown.
So it makes our job harder to get the names people expect. That process is literally happening the day after we finish a festival. That day, we’re on the phone talking about next year. We’re very fortunate that what you saw today is a culmination of a year’s worth of work. Some early commitments are made in August or September, more are made in November and December and we’re still confirming another wave or two of shows in February or March and all the way up to the release of the lineup. Because we have so many stages and because we book so many different styles of music we can wait around and wait for an act to get a couple offers in the Midwest that go with ours to help with the pricing.
I imagine that booking the festival is difficult because you have dual mandates. On one hand, you have to keep the prices low so the festival remains accessible, but on the other hand you have to book top talent. How do you manage that?
Our business model, to go back to the thing that my boss says, is we’re a festival for the people. The reason this has grown over the last 52 or 53 years is because it’s affordable. The fact that you can walk in the gates and pay $21 on a prime weekend, and there are discounts during the week and each day there’s a way to get in for free—we’re never going to change that. That model doesn’t exist anywhere else, and we’re always going to keep the prices low. So we’re just going to be scrappy in terms of when it comes to finding the best talent.
I will say we have spent a lot of time networking with all of the other music festivals and venues that are booking talent either before us or after us, whether its Firefly out on the East Coast or the guys who book Bonnaroo. There’s also a super healthy Canadian festival circuit that takes place starting on the Fourth of July, starting with Ottawa Bluesfest, which is very similar to us—they have a big foot print and book a lot of styles of music. And FEQ Fest in Quebec City is the largest Canadian festival, and they have this massive site that’s right next to the downtown that holds 90,000 people, so they’re able to go after these super big bands, but they’re also able to do a lot of cooler developing acts.
So we were on the phone with these guys last year in August, sharing ideas, putting in offers at the same time. It’s proven itself to be very helpful. It’s the strength in numbers. If we can offer an artist six festival dates that are routed together, that brings the price down significantly because the artist has a guaranteed number of gigs, so that’s how we’re getting some of these names that we’d normally not able to get. So I think if we’ll continue that path, being smart about the process. And also the more bands you book, the more artists you book that come to Milwaukee, have a great show and see how our audience just goes crazy, building that word of mouth helps the festival and helps bring new artist in or have artists return. It’s so funny, it’s like the “we never knew Milwaukee was so cool” attitude. When an act comes into town and has a day off and you send them to a great boutique hotel or a cool restaurant or have them do something that’s very kitschy Milwaukee, we getting a lot of people who are like, “This is a great city; you have a lot of great things happening here,” and that helps, too.
It seems like the budget for booking artists has gone up in recent years. Is that the case?
Well, as you can tell, our initiative to book the best bands and keep the prices down, has allowed for a lot of great sponsorships to happen. And as those sponsorships have happened, that’s allowed us to put more money into building stages on the grounds or rehabbing stages, or doing things for our patrons. Better bathrooms, better areas to chill out and eat. The sponsors have really stepped up and been great partners, and that’s given us more money to allocate toward the bands. I think it’s been pretty gradual. And the sponsors see what they’re getting, because people come to the festival site and see their name on a stage and people have a great experience, so it’s a win-win situation for everybody.
In the past the festival has alternated between whether its objective was to try to draw the biggest crowds and put as many people through the turnstiles as possible, or whether the goal was to keep that number down a little and provide maybe a more inviting experience. Where does the festival stand on that now?
I think when Don Smiley started, there clearly was a big push. If I remember correctly, it was 1999 or 2000 or 2001, somewhere around there, we hit the million people through the gate mark. Which is awesome, but you and I both know that as much as it’s fun to be in a large crowd of people who share the same love for a band and singalongs and dancing, when there’s too many people in a crowd or in an area and you can’t move around, it’s not good for anyone. So I think our position has really been delivering more of the qualitative experience, and not really trying to jam as many people on the grounds as possible. I think we want people to come here, again going back to the improvements of the grounds, so we’re really focused on the qualitative experience.
And finally I’ve got to ask: Which acts are you most excited about this year?
A buddy of mine saw YUNGBLUD last year at Lollapalooza and said “I don’t know who this guy is, he’s playing at one in the afternoon, but you gotta check him out.” I like what that guy is doing. And I have finally caught up with how brilliant Lizzo is, and couldn’t be more excited about her. I think she’s the perfect festival act. And nobody sees or hears the behind the scenes of how things go down, but that announcement of Billie Eilish yesterday—I don’t know if you followed her, but in terms of a mainstream pop artists who have some really smart lyrics and undertones, she’s up there. We fought really hard and were very passionate about explaining to her how we saw her appeal and how our audience would really be into it. So we literally confirmed that show like three days ago. Like my boss always says, an act can say no nine times, but they can say yes on the 10th time. So we don’t ever give up.
