Conceptualising my second festival
In case you haven’t read about putting my first festival together, please read that first. No, there’s no correlation, to be fair, but I’d love the extra reader view. This blog is here. Putting my first festival concept together taught me a lot about how to approach a concept and the things to think about. To be honest with you, after I pitched that festival, I wasn’t really thinking about another festival. Yet, in the months following, I thought about putting together something that was driven more by the venue. Think iconic venue, with one or two artists entertaining you for a couple of hours. Small enough to be low risk (or so I think), but big enough to make an impact. Somehow, I just couldn’t quite flesh this out. All I wanted to do was bring something to life.
In 2024 December, I was in Queenstown on a family vacation. It’s my home away from home. It’s where I go to drown my sorrows away and reassure myself that everything will be okay. On one of the days, I snuck out for some me time and grabbed a coffee and sat on a bench by the waterfront looking out to lake Wakatipu and the mountains behind. I’m not sure what triggered it, but I had a thought about creating something that was specific to a genre.
Currently I’m in a place where when I’m creating a concept, I want to keep the line-up as local acts or likely with Aussies. I don’t have a lot of knowledge around the visas, and keeping the line-up local makes me feel like I’m in control, whilst I give myself the time to learn about visas as I further go into this space. This concept was also something that I was going to bring to life by myself. No promoter involved, just me, myself, and I. Ambitious I know. Once again, I was in a place without a laptop or anything to write down my ideas in. So, my notes app will make another appearance.
My thinking behind this concept was that I wanted to find a city that would host the event for at least 3 years before I could scale it up and add a second location or what a natural growth for the festival could look like. To me it felt like, regional New Zealand would be a good fit. I was on the phone with councils gathering knowledge as to what could be a possibility in different towns across New Zealand. Auckland was going to be the last option.
I had gathered enough information on costs for venues and some suppliers to start building a budget. I won’t lie, building a budget seemed intimidating. I’ve seen budgets for other events, with a thousand different formulas set up on an excel spreadsheet, and I just felt like I didn’t even know where to begin with all of that. I took a step back. I decided to make a very simple budget to begin with. All it would include are the different categories of expenses for example, venue, artist costs, travel etc. and their associated costs. Always good to keep things simple when you start and then build on it.
As I started to build my budget, what was annoying me the most was that even with a small line-up of artists, and taking the event to regional New Zealand, the expenses were landing on six figures. It wasn’t something I wasn’t expecting. But I had hoped to try and bring it down significantly, to help with my breakeven. My breakeven wasn’t landing on a number of tickets sold that was realistic. In fact, the risk was a lot higher than I had anticipated. I continued to build on this. Strategised cost savings, but it seemed like an impossible task to bring the breakeven down.
I’ve been attempting to build on this since I conceptualised it. Putting this concept together taught me about budgets, and built my confidence, as I reached out to booking agents and talked to other potential stakeholders. I needed this to also learn about the kind of questions that can and should be asked when putting a festival together. Don’t get me wrong, there are still people I’m waiting on a response from, whilst a whole bunch of others who helped in whatever way they can. I guess this is part of life.
Since putting this concept together, a similar festival has come to life. But there’s nothing to say I couldn’t add my creative flair to my concept and bring it to life when the math adds up.
Until next time,
Mili
