Indie festivals can be trail-blazers in a growing experience economy

26 November 2018 - Editorial

by Paul Reed, Association of Independent Festivals

Earlier this month, AIF hosted the 2018 edition of its annual Festival Congress. It was the first to be staged in Sheffield and the fifth consecutive sell-out since the event began in 2014.

Alongside the familiar nuts ‘n’ bolts festival topics (digital marketing and data, event management systems, business advice workshops), a significant part of the programme this year was given to speakers from outside the world of music festivals. This included talks from Fabien Riggall, Founder and Creative Director of Secret Cinema; Dan Wood, the COO of UK games and interactive entertainment industry trade body UKIE; and Dr Kerry Howell, a marine biologist with expertise in deep sea exploration and technology.

It feels like there are as many music industry conferences as festivals these days, and there can be a danger of complacency when it comes to their programming. Our members don’t have the time to sit through the same soundbites over and over again. It’s the job of events like our Festival Congress to inform and inspire with new ideas and connections that will serve delegates in a highly competitive market.

We’ve often turned to entrepreneurs outside of our own industry to do this. In previous years at the Festival Congress, we’ve had Brixton Academy Founder Simon Parkes tell his incredible story; author Zoe Cormier talk about the science of hedonism; even astrophysics professor Tim O’Brien speak about the first known sounds of the universe.

All are tangentially connected to festivals at best, but they underline the necessity for indie festival promoters to get off their own islands and think outside the box.

This year, Fabien Riggall’s presentation highlighted how the concept of Secret Cinema was inspired by both a love of cinema and his experience of festivals and rave culture. Likewise, festivals can learn a lot by looking at large scale immersive theatre in terms of overcoming challenges, environmental storytelling, and creative production.

Some, such as Boomtown Fair and Lost Village, are already leading the way alongside the likes of Secret Cinema and Punchdrunk Theatre, but there are still unexplored avenues. Picture a warehouse or outdoor space reimagined to incorporate the themes of an album for a launch event, for example, with special performances, environments, film and theatre all part of the experience. Artists and their teams often need to think beyond their audio offering these days. Not only would special, album-centric events be exciting propositions for fans, experienced festival promoters would certainly excel at them.

The numbers stack up as well: Secret Cinema’s event for The Empire Strikes Back in 2015 sold over 100,000 tickets and grossed £6.32m - only £3m less than when the title was first released in the UK.

All of this, of course, relates to the much vaunted ‘experience economy’ and the idea that millennial audiences value and ‘collect’ experiences rather than material possessions.

Communal, interactive experiences such as Secret Cinema are, alongside festivals, a powerful tonic in an age of digital overload.

Meanwhile, the UKIE presentation at our Festival Congress showed eSports to be an impressive and growing industry with the ability to sell-out 80,000 cap stadiums and attract online audiences of over 100m in some cases.

It’s predicted that the total eSports audience will grow from 395m in 2016 to approaching 600m by 2021. In 2017, European audiences reached 77 million but it’s expected that a quarter of the world’s population will be aware of eSports by 2021.

We’re starting to see some cultural crossover between eSports and live music: Wacken Open Air festival in Germany hosted an eSports arena this year, Universal Music has formed a JV label with eSports company ESL, and electronic music promoter Insomniac (yes I know, majority owned by Live Nation) will next year launch its first gaming and music festival, which aims to intertwine the “worlds of music, art, eSports, virtual reality and cosplay”.

This is the tip of a potentially very large iceberg. These events are selling hundreds of thousands of tickets to dedicated audiences - digitally connected global communities that are passionate about their shared culture. That’s an exciting proposition for any promoter, and I’m sure we’ll see more collaborations between eSports and music festival organisers in the near future.

This year, I hope that AIF’s Festival Congress demonstrated that there is no better time for our industry to capitalise on the new, innovative live sectors that are blazing a trail. There are whole new art forms out there waiting to be turned into opportunities for organisers and consumers alike. In my mind, no-one is better placed than the entrepreneurial, risk-taking independent festival sector to make the most of them.

As David Bowie once said: “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming”.