This site is absolutely horrible but if you cut these numbers in half you might have a good estimate. This is for national booking though, if you base your show around local-ish talent or artists who are going to be on tour you can save a lot of money.
When I was in college we would throw a 4 act show and spend about 15 grand total on acts.
You guys are dreaming small and realistic. Kickstarter is for big ideas.
I say we let HG curate the main stage, Pea the Dance Tent, and FD the weirdo stage. Fuck local bands and shit, let's make it a dream lineup every year. The best bands aren't the biggest, we know that, you don't need a Radiohead every year to make a bomb festival. Make it the kind of festival Tom Waits wants to play at. Get bands nobody even calls but everyone has heard of or listens to. Have bands every other festival gets play special sets. Put it in a wild and unique venue, make the tickets cheap and unscalpable. A real dream festival. That shit would go viral.
Drew knows wuzzup. We got ourselves a mission statement.
You could probably get it going without a lot of out of pocket expense. You just need to get everything booked and promoted, then you pay for everything from ticket sales. venue is probably the only thing you have to pay in advance for. artists, sound, security, and porta potties can be paid from your ticket sales. Vendors will pay you to be there. You just need good artists to commit to being somewhere at a specific time for a specific amount of money, and then "If you build it, they will come." An event like this would cost a lot, but it would make more. Also once you have major artist commitments, you would be surprised how many people will throw money at you to make it happen. Its an excessive amount of work to organize something like this, but I think if someone were willing to do the work...finding the money would not really be the biggest issue.
Having organized events, unfortunately you would need a hell of a lot of money in advance for deposits and advance payments. People won't just give you 100 portapotties on a promise. Also need to pay for licenses.
I disagree with pretty much everything rocksteady just said. You will need to put up lots of cash upfront before anyone will take you anywhere near seriously. Even if you could manage to sell tickets and pay for everything with those ticket sales, I'm pretty sure even established fests aren't profitable from ticket sales alone. Take away the $9 beers, $11 meals and all the merch from Sasquatch and it probably wouldn't even turn a profit. You would need money to start with and then make some of it back by selling stuff at the fest.
Also, the thought of a fest making money in it's first year is pretty unlikely, especially a fest thrown by a bunch of people who know nothing about it.
Start small with a budget of something like $100,000 then learn from your mistakes and grow slowly.
Having organized events, unfortunately you would need a hell of a lot of money in advance for deposits and advance payments. People won't just give you 100 portapotties on a promise. Also need to pay for licenses.
True, the deposits for something as big as Sasquatch would get up there. But you wouldnt have to pay those deposits until close to the date, and if you sell enough tickets I would imagine that you could cover those costs. Sasquatch sold out two months in advance and by my calculations made somewhere around 6 million dollars in ticket sales. Im sure they were able to pay their bills.
This is very true, i was going of the basis that you could sign a bunch of huge acts that would draw a lot of people early. I have never thrown a festival, just helped with small events. and with those it was pretty easy to pay for most everything with ticket sales. I just imagined it could be done the same way on a larger scale, but I'm no expert.
And if you are somewhat of a legitimate citizen, there are banks that will finance an idea like this as long as you have a good game plan and some good artists. Also corporate sponsors go a long way. Im sure Esurance is coming out of pocket for most of if not all of the initial cost since its advertising exposure for them, its ok if they dont recoup the money at the festival. They would spend that kind of money to put out one commercial easily. Yay for corporate america!
I disagree with pretty much everything rocksteady just said. You will need to put up lots of cash upfront before anyone will take you anywhere near seriously. Even if you could manage to sell tickets and pay for everything with those ticket sales, I'm pretty sure even established fests aren't profitable from ticket sales alone. Take away the $9 beers, $11 meals and all the merch from Sasquatch and it probably wouldn't even turn a profit. You would need money to start with and then make some of it back by selling stuff at the fest.
Also, the thought of a fest making money in it's first year is pretty unlikely, especially a fest thrown by a bunch of people who know nothing about it.
Start small with a budget of something like $100,000 then learn from your mistakes and grow slowly.
Fuck it, make the beers $4 and have it be a break-even type shindig.
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