Euro festivals: Mysteryland, MEO Kalorama, EOTR
Continuing our regular European festival previews, IQ gives readers a snapshot of what’s in store this weekend as August turns to September…
EDM spectacular Mysteryland returns to Haarlemmermeer, near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, boasting DJs including Oliver Heldens, Charlotte de Witte, Adam Beyer, Nicky Romero, R3hab, Joris Voorn, Sub Zero Project, Ben Nicky, Warface and Fedde Le Grand.
MEO Kalorama returns to Lisbon (29-31 August) as well as making its debut in Madrid. Kalorama Madrid will take place at the Recinto Ferial Fairgrounds, sharing the same dates as its Portuguese counterpart.
The Portuguese edition will star the likes of Massive Attack, Sam Smith, LCD Soundsystem, Jungle, Burna Boy and Raye, alongside artists such as Peggy Gou, Loyle Carner, The Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, Ezra Collective, The Kills, Gossip, Olivia Dean, Fever Ray, Soulwax and Yves Tumor.
The Spanish spin-off boasts a near identical lineup including LCD Soundsystem, The Prodigy, Raye, Massive Attack, Sam Smith, Jungle, Peggy Gou, Ezra Collective, Gossip and Yard Act.
Switzerland’s Summerdays runs in Arbon from 30-31 August, headlined by James Blunt and Rag’N’Bone Man. Other acts will include The Kooks, Scooter, Tokio Hotel, Plüsch and Gavin James, while partner festival Seaside in Spiez features many of the same names on alternate days, plus singer-songwriter Alice Merton.
Zurich Openair returns for its second and concluding weekend (30-31 August), topped by Peggy Gou, Jorja Smith, James Arthur, Kygo, Rin, Marc Rebillet, Tom Grennan, Sido, Anne-Marie, Lost Frequencies, Aurora, Sugababes and Kenya Grace.
Slovakia’s Uprising Festival (30-31 August) in Bratislava can count on the likes of Rich The Kid, Yemi Alade, Sigma, Tommy Cash, the Congos, The Orb and Black Sun Empire.
Loyle Carner and LCD Soundsystem will headline Forwards Bristol
The UK’s End of the Road (29 August-1 September) will bring Idles, Slowdive, Fever Ray and Bonnie “Prince” Billy to Larmer Tree Gardens, Blandford Forum, Dorset. It will also feature the likes of Richard Hawley, Yo La Tengo, Sleater-Kinney, Lankum, Jockstrap, Baxter Dury and CMAT.
Loyle Carner and LCD Soundsystem will headline Forwards Bristol (31 August-1 September), which has artists such as Four Tet, Jessie Ware, Underworld, Floating Points, Romy, Greentea Peng, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Yard Act, Yussef Dayes and Joy (Anonymous).
Norwich’s Sundown (30 August-1 September) will star acts including Tom Grennan, D-Block Europe, FLO, Mahalia, Kenya Grace, Clavish, Hedex, Wilkinson and Sammy Virji.
Lindisfarne Festival (29 August-1 September) on the Northumberland Coast will host headliners The Vaccines, Tom Walker, Orbital and De La Soul, plus hundreds of acts over eight stages including Everything Everything, Kula Shaker, Redlight, 808 State, Republica and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin.
German psytrance festival Indian Spirit (28 August-6 September) welcomes Tristan, Avalon, Neelix, Vini Vici, Ghost Rider, Berg, Imagine Mars, Bliss, Electric Universe and Hidden Secret, among others.
Jazz Re:Found (28 August-1 September) takes place in Cellamonte, Monferrato, Italy, topped by Ezra Collective, Glass Beams, Fink, Greentea Peng, Let It Happen, Marcos, Valle, Mulatu Astatke, Nino Frassica, Gilles Peterson, Mr Scruff and Jamz Supernova.
And Romania’s Jazz in the Park (30 August-1 September) will showcase Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, Cymande, Avishai Cohen Trio and Orchestra Baobab, to name but a few, in Ethnographic Park, Cluj-Napoca.
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.
Festivals ’24: Fuji Rock, North Sea Jazz, ARTmania
The 2024 festival season is continuing to take shape, with the likes of Fuji Rock, North Sea Jazz Festival and End of the Road the latest to show their hands.
Kraftwerk are the first headliner confirmed for Smash’s Fuji Rock, which will be held between 26-28 July at Naeba Ski Resort in Tokyo, Japan.
The first wave of artists also includes Girl in Red, Turnstile, Floating Points, Ride, Yussef Dayes, Angie McMahon, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Erika De Casier, Eyedress, Fontaines DC, Hiroko Yamamura, The Last Dinner Party, No Party for Cao Dong, NOTD, Rufus Wainwright and Yin Yin.
Taking place from 12-14 July at Rotterdam Ahoy in the Netherlands, North Sea Jazz Festival will present concerts from Sting, Raye, Corinne Bailey Rae, Masego, Sampha, Brittany Howard, Noname, Tems, Black Pumas, Benjamin Clementine, Vulfpeck, Sting, Jamie Cullum, Knower and Reuben James, among others.
ARTmania Festival in Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania will host acts such as Korn, Spiritbox, Satyricon, The Flower Kings, Borknagar, Monuments, Taine, Awake the Demons and Alpha Q from 26-28 July.
Finland’s Flow Festival, which is set for 9-11 August, has added Raye, Idles, Tinashe, Alvvays, Blonde Redhead, L’Impératrice, Miriam Bryant Karri Koira, Ege Zulu & Orchestra, Yeboyah, Vesta, Jesse Markin, Jambo, Knife Girl, Glayden and Shrty. Fred again.., Pulp, The Smile, PJ Harvey, Jessie Ware, Denzel Curry, Overmono and Kenya Grace have already been announced for the event in Suvilahti, Helsinki.
Shania Twain will make her BST Hyde Park debut on 7 July, with special guests The Corrs and more names to be announced. Twain joins Andrea Bocelli (5 July), Robbie Williams (6 July) and Stray Kids (14 July) in headlining the London concert series this summer.
Elsewhere in London, Alexandra Palace’s Kaleidoscope Festival will be topped by Ministry of Sound Classical on 13 July, alongside a supporting cast including Soul II Soul, The Go! Team, Antony Szmierek, Huey Morgan, Mr Scruff, Erol Alkan, X-Press 2 and Artful Dodger.
End of the Road Festival returns to Larmer Tree Gardens, Blandford Forum, Dorset from 29 August to 1 September, headlined by Idles, Slowdive, Fever Ray and Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Other acts will include Yo La Tengo, Sleater-Kinney, Lankum, Baxter Dury, Jockstrap, Ty Segall, CMAT, Phosphorescent, Nation of Language, Camera Obscura, The Lemon Twigs, Mdou Moctar and Gruff Rhys.
Crowded House (17 June), Paolo Nutini (18 June), Jungle (27 June) and Underworld (29 June) are the first batch of headline artists for the second edition of Senbla’s On The Mount at Wasing concerts at Wasing Estate in Reading, Berkshire.
Wasing Estate will also present Solstice At The Mount – an “immersive celebration of world music and culture” – on 20 June, starring headliners Nick Mulvey and Rodrigo Y Gabriela on the main stage, together with intimate late night fireside performances from Awarë and Ajeet.
Eden Sessions at the Eden Project in Cornwall has so far announced Crowded House (12 June), Fatboy Slim (15 June), Paolo Nutini (19 June), Suede and Manic Street Preachers (29 June), The National and This Is the Kit (2 July), Rick Astley and the Lightning Seeds (3 July), Tom Grennan (5 July) and JLS (13 July).
Plus, Nocturne Live at Blenheim Palace will welcome Chaka Khan, Sister Sledge and The Fatback Band (13 June), Sugababes, Melanie C and Shaznay Lewis (15 June) and Crowded House, Sheryl Crow and Turin Brakes (16 June).
Insomniac Events has unveiled the bill for the first Beyond Wonderland Chicago, in partnership with Chicago-based Auris Presents. Tiësto, Diplo, Benny Benassi, Kaskade, RL Grime, Eli Brown, Alesso, Chris Lorenzo, Matroda, DJ Minx, Hugel, Eli Brown, Claptone, Patrick Topping and Felix Da Housecat are among the electronic music stars lined up for the 1-2 June event at Huntington Bank Pavilion, Northerly Island.
In addition, the inaugural Dance with Me x Ahabaja festival will debut from 30 March to 1 April in San José Del Cabo, Mexico. A collaboration between promoters Austin Gavlak and Art with Me, the event grounds and gardens will be filled with art co-curated by the family behind Zonamaco, the largest art fair platform in Latin America. The line-up includes Black Coffee, Bedouin, LP Giobbi, Parallelle, Gab Rhome and Stavroz.
“Ahabaja is our tribute to a part of the world we have fallen in love with,” says Gavlak, founder of Colarado’s Powerbunga festival. “Art with Me and I want to bring our communities together on this breathtaking beachfront and pair its natural beauty with the sounds of incredible music and the sights of powerful art in nature. We want people to carry the Ahabaha energy and vibe with them long after the last set.”
Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi’s Wireless Festival Middle East has postponed its second edition, originally scheduled for 2 March. Time Out Dubai reports the festival has been pushed back to November, with an exact start date and headline act still to be revealed.
“After careful consideration and with the utmost dedication to providing the best musical experience for our attendees, we have decided to move the date of the 2024 edition of Wireless Festival to November,” says Live Nation Middle East president James Craven.
“This change aims to create an even more unforgettable and enjoyable event, allowing us to curate a lineup that surpasses all expectations.”
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.
The Message: Green House Group and End of the Road
The Message, in partnership with I AM POP, is a new monthly insight into the latest direct message and Facebook Messenger marketing methods.
For the first edition, Alex Lee Thomson from Green House Group describes how the company is using I AM POP’s Messenger platform to market End of The Road Festival, among other events.
Who are you, and what is your role in music marketing?
I’m Alex Lee Thomson, director of Green House Group, a music marketing company that works with bands and festivals to help them reach fans. Recently, we’ve worked with the Specials on their no 1 album campaign, and the Kooks’ biggest ever headline show announcements.
You’ve been integrating direct-to-fan messaging in your marketing strategies for a while now. What lessons have you learned along the way?
As it’s not a platform which sits there visibly, being engaged with day to day, it does sometimes get a bit forgotten in terms of admin. To really maximise its value though, you need to keep adding new subscribers.
You have to keep coming up with ways to incentivise signing up – it just being there is only going to provide a trickle of interest, so properly integrate its development into your wider marketing strategy. Work it into your plans every week and don’t forget about it.
You used I AM POP’s tool to market the last edition of the End Of The Road Festival. Could you tell us how you went about getting people to subscribe to the festival’s Messenger channel?
Our first mention was simply letting followers know it was there, and that it was a portal for information. Ahead of that we made sure the channel was set up to cater for all the key FAQs, so it would act as an easy to navigate version of the website’s info section.
Where we didn’t want to drag it into too much detail, we simply out-linked back to the main site for more information. It’s always good to remember the user experience. You can get carried away trying to put the whole website on there, but try to keep it streamlined… and fun to use!
After launch we included the Messenger link in standard info posts going forward. Where in previous years we would link to the site, now, we let people start their quest for knowledge on Messenger instead. It became part of the standard marketing vocabulary, so we were always adding new people as we went along.
It’s worth bearing any exclusive content in mind as an incentive to get people hooked – for instance you could offer cryptic clues as to what some of the bands are you’re going to announce in the build-up. If you’re feeling particularly ballsy, you could even announce some acts on Messenger exclusively.
Setting up a competition element is always a winner as well. Maybe give away some merch or tickets to a random subscriber each month. I’d love to say there’re some big secrets we’re keeping close to our chest, but done well it’s as simple as making sure it works, tell people to go there and give them a reason to.
“You have to keep coming up with ways to incentivise signing up”
How did you run your messaging campaign after that? How was it received?
Part of the user journey was creating-sub groups, where we could direct specific posts. For instance, if you keep a weekly updated Spotify playlist, you should segment this somewhere in your automated broadcast. Then, when you make additions to the playlist, you can let all your listeners know.
Same for travel, merchandise, stage times and anything else, really. If you think ahead to what you might need further down the line, start integrating that into your Messenger channel as soon as you can in a fluid way. Knowing that the audience is a bit more inner-circle, and very immediate, it’s a good place to run countdown messages with some element of emergency.
As an example, for End of the Road we let subscribers know that there were only a few hundred tickets left for the event. Likewise, if you’re down to only a few merch items, you can let your subscribers know first, as they’ll be more likely to buy, and it keeps some sales messages away from main channels. We also shared key information on secondary ticket selling once the festival was sold out, and directed solo travellers to a bespoke group we set up on Facebook.
You used a direct message to inform visitors of the festival to bring cash for parking costs, which was a smart move. Were the effects noticeable?
Heck, it’s often hard to gauge the real-world effect of digital marketing at the best of times. However, during the event we received, I think, no messages about this via social comments or messages. As they say, no news is good news – which I hope means that it all just clicked together well and all attendees knew what to do.
Can you share some stats from the campaign? How were the open rates and ticket sales, for instance?
Like a lot of our use of the Messenger platform, we received a much higher view rate for our posts compared to traditional social messages. After multiple posts over the last 12 months we have a 98.9% average open rate on our Messenger broadcasts. The post about car parking had a 100% open rate as this was directed only at people who over the campaign had clicked our ‘travelling by car’ segmented group.
The ability to highly target this information, which on the face of it is quite dry and only applicable to some, is for me one of the most exciting aspects of the platform. Using this as part of a wider marketing campaign, I’m happy to say that all tickets sold out.
We have launched the Messenger platform for all of our events now, which, in fact, all sold out in 2018. Considering they are all independent festivals, with modest marketing budgets, this is a huge win for us at Green House Group.
“Even if you’re not sure yet how to integrate Messenger into a wider campaign, get it set up and start building subscribers now”
Direct message marketing calls for a different approach than traditional marketing channels like socials and email. What kind of approaches do you think work best for direct message marketing in the live music space?
One of the selling points of Messenger is that it’s so instantaneous. You get to broadcast to everybody you want, directly into people’s pocket without having to work around algorithms or wait for organic pick-up or viral sharing. And then sharing something that reaches everybody you want it to.
This does however mean that we have to treat the Messenger audience differently, and not dilute the approach, upsetting fans who might feel they are being spammed. It’s very much a ‘less is more’ dynamic. It can be viewed as quite invasive, which is a big selling point, but you should be careful not to milk it. We don’t want to abuse the trust that subscribers have given us by signing up.
It’s not about daily messages and repetition – it’s about giving some inner-circle content, having useful information there when needed, and letting the users decide what content they do and don’t want.
You have the ability to hyper-target your broadcasts, rather than being broad and accessible like you would on a Facebook post. Keep it niche. From an artist point of view, you can create messages and experiences for people at each gig, maybe offering polls on what song to open with, or access to exclusive merch available for one night only. Stuff that isn’t relevant to every one of your fans. A bunch of acts now offer recordings of shows, which you can offer to people who then engage with on-the-night activations by tucking them into a segment group for the show.
How are you planning to use direct-to-fan messaging for the 2019 End Of The Road Festival’s marketing campaign?
As always, the festival has some fun tricks up its sleeve. You’ll have to subscribe to find out what, though! Needless to say that it will once again serve as a hub for important information, and perhaps the odd (very pleasant) surprise.
Any final words of advice for other people wanting to get into direct-to-fan messaging?
Don’t waste time getting this set up. Even if you’re not sure yet how to integrate Messenger into a wider campaign, get it set up and start building subscribers now.
Then really take your time to build the user journey, making sure there are no dead ends. If people go there, don’t like it and want to unsubscribe, you’re very unlikely to win them back. Or worse, the whole experience pisses them off.
Take small steps if you have to: start with a, “Hello, thanks for subscribing”, and build it from there as and when you can, never forgetting to go back and keep every arm of your flows updated as you go.
Figure out your segments ahead of time, as well, and incorporate them from the off. Even if you’re not sure how you want to speak to them yet. If you never use a segment, it doesn’t matter.
Then once you’ve built your app, keep messaging to only the most vital aspects that needs attention. The more casual posts you do, the less interested people will be – especially if it’s messages they’ve already seen on other platforms. Do not treat it like Twitter or Facebook, because it’s not them. It’s a different universe. Learn as you go along, but start now.
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free digest of essential live music industry news, via email or Messenger.
Start your free I AM POP trial today. IQ readers can claim an additional 30% discount on their first three months by emailing [email protected].
EOTR backs Larmer Tree as founders step back
Following 2018’s successful sold-out festival, Larmer Tree Festival founders James Shepard and Julia Safe are handing over the reins after 28 years at the helm of the 5,000-capacity UK event.
Larmer Tree, which began in 1990 as a 200-cap. music and arts festival, has since taken place annually at Larmer Tree Gardens, on the Wiltshire–Dorset border. Its most recent event, headlined by Jake Bugg, First Aid Kit and Public Service Broadcasting, took place from 19 to 22 July.
Lucy Babb joined Shepard and Safe as operations director in 2006, while Rob Challice came on board as a director in 2014.
Now, as the festival’s founders retire, Challice and Babb say they’re looking forward to working with new partners brought on “to secure the future” of Larmer Tree.
“I’m delighted we have gathered a group who recognise how special our festival is and want to secure its future”
Joining Challice and Bergen Live – the Norwegian promoter behind Bergenfest, and also Challice’s partner from 2010–12 on Summer Sundae – as Larmer Tree partners are End of the Road, the 15,000-cap. indie rock event also held at Larmer Tree Gardens, and James Strathallan, who take a small equity stake in the festival.
Strathallan was formerly a director of End of the Road Festival Ltd, but retired in November 2017.
“I’m delighted that we have gathered a group who recognise how special our festival is and want to secure its future,” Challice tells IQ. “We want to take the festival forward while preserving its essence: a small local festival with deep roots in the community where friends and family can have a great party weekend on a beautiful site.”
Larmer Tree Festival will return on 18–21 July 2019.
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.