Ocesa’s head of festivals sizes up the 2024 season

Ocesa’s head of festivals Leizer Guss has spoken to IQ about the challenges and opportunities in Mexico’s rapidly developing festival market.

The Live Nation-backed promoter organises 23 festivals across the country including Coca-Cola Flow Fest, ARRE, Vive Latino and Hera – the majority of which take place in the second half of the year.

Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), however, has already toasted a successful 2024 edition with a record 100,000 daily attendees. The 10th edition saw the likes of Steve Aoki, Skrillex, Deadmau5 and Armin van Buuren perform at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez between 23–25 February.

“We had a very solid dance music lineup – nothing out of the ordinary,” Guss tells IQ. “With an annual three-day festival with nine stages, you repeat acts every two or three years. But it was an anniversary edition and so there were fans who had been there from the very beginning of EDC Mexico and new fans who are in their prime raving years.”

Meanwhile, Tecate Emblema “took a step forward” with its 2024 edition, according to Guss, with a blockbuster lineup that included Calvin Harris, Christina Aguilera, Sam Smith and Nelly Furtado. “It’s still finding its essence but it’s always growing – even if in small steps,” he adds.

Looking towards the company’s busiest season for festivals, Guss is realistic about the fortunes of the remaining events.

“We launched ARRE festival last year and it was like catching lightning in a bottle”

“Coca-Cola Flow Fest won’t grow this year because the genre has stabilized and Corona Capital will have a decent year because it’s very well-established,” he says. “We launched ARRE festival last year and did numbers that we would never expect for a first year – it was born as a four-year-old.

“The fans are still there but it’s not sustainable to maintain the growth of last year – it was like catching lightning in a bottle.”

As Guss points out, most of Ocesa’s events are genre-driven, which means the success of an edition hinges largely on where the genre is at that time.

“It’s all cyclical. It’ll be a good year for dance music and then it’ll be a bad year – fans change their minds a lot,” he adds. But the festivals are tied to their genres for better or worse: “The worst-ever edition of Corona Capital [a predominantly rock festival] is when we started going into the DJ world and fans didn’t like that,” laughs Guss.

One advantage of organising genre-driven festivals is that the widely reported ‘headliner drought’ hasn’t had as much impact. “Getting headliners wasn’t as hard because you simply look for the biggest artist in the genre,” he says. “You don’t need the multi-dimensional popstars like Billie Eilish who are non-existent at festivals this year.”

However, the promoter has found it hard to contend with the rewards of a booming touring business, which artists are increasingly choosing over the festival circuit.

“The Live Nation acquisition has taken us to the next level”

“After the pandemic, the touring business was so wildly successful that bigger acts started taking a lot more money,” says Guss. “When they came off that cycle two years later, they decided they’ll only go back out for the same money. So they’re deciding between that and festivals. But mid-tier festivals can’t pay what new headliners are asking.

“And when you don’t have ‘real’ headliners, fans start to see it and say ‘Oh we’ll go to the festival next year’. The Y.O.L.O mentality that was present in the aftermath of the pandemic has gone.”

Fortunately for Ocesa, which has both a festival arm and a touring business, there’s potential for the two to go hand-in-hand rather than work against each other. And with Mexico’s live music market rapidly developing and the backing of Live Nation, Ocesa’s deals are more attractive than ever.

“The acquisition has taken us to the next level,” says Guss. “We can get to an artist and give them a 24-month plan for Mexico that includes touring and festivals. We can say ‘Come and do a stadium run right now with crazy money’ and do festivals next year. Even though it looks smaller, it gives them something to do in a year and a half.

“We are taking bigger risks, betting on artists now and paying them something that looks ridiculous, but in three or six months, it might be low. And some of them will want to come back and renegotiate but that’s the new part of the game.”

“We are taking bigger risks, betting on artists now and paying them something that looks ridiculous, but in three or six months, it might be low”

According to Guss, major international artists are now putting Mexico in their world tours from the get-go but there’s still some way to go until standalone tours are viable.

“Mexico City is a huge market compared to LA or New York but the problem is that touring by ground for an Anglo artist isn’t up to scratch yet,” says Guss. “You’re really talking about touring three cities: Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. Local production in these cities is getting to a point where you can ask for whatever you need and it’ll be there so now we’re developing the next three or four cities so artists can bring their production and tour like in the US.”

Looking to the future of Ocesa’s festival business, Guss says the company will “reassess” its vast stable of events.

“I think we are getting to that saturation point,” he says. “Is that saturation point because of festivals or because of festivals plus shows? We are figuring it out. Either way, we’ll take a step back and won’t launch any new festivals in Mexico City next year.

“We’ll also take a very close look at our existing festivals and ask ‘Is this really an annual thing or is it bi-annual or a once-off when the conditions are right’?

“I think, generally, festivals will have ‘off years’ where we lose some of the hype and we’ll have to work and get creative. If a fan is paying top dollar for a festival, it has to be one of the most special days of the year.”

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