WAM: Big Day Out Boss Wants Cooperation With Rivals

Big Day Out CEO Adam Zammit has said that he'd like a greater level of information sharing between festivals in the Australian market as the conversation on a perceived festival 'crisis' continues to bubble among the Australian industry.

Speaking on the WAM Conference panel The World Is A Festival Stage, Zammit, who was joined on the panel by Laneway promoter Danny Rogers, said he was trying to be “much more open” with rival events.

“I've been open with Richie [McNeill, Stereosonic] and AJ [Maddah, Soundwave and now Big Day Out],” he said. “If I chat to Danny today I'd want to have a very frank discussion.”

He added, “This industry's worst efforts tend to come from its fierce entrepreneurialism.”

Big Day Out has booked one of biggest line-ups in years for its 2014 event, with Arcade Fire, Pearl Jam and Blur headlining stages, but industry restructuring has dominated a lot of the discussion following the announce. In particular, Maddah joined the Big Day Out hierarchy shortly after he cancelled his own competing event Harvest, saying at the time that he wanted to bring a new ethos back to the event.

On the wide-ranging panel, which also included Glastonbury booker Martin Elbourne, Sounds Australia's Millie Millgate, Sunset Events' David Chitty and Woodford Folk Festival's Chloe Goodyear, Rogers recognised that the period when that festivals “sold out in two-minutes” is over. With festival brands no longer strong enough to sell out events, the panel admitted festivals have to react to 'buzz', which Zammit described as “catching bubbles” due to the critical nature of timing a booking right and picking the right acts to fit the few festival spots they have to gamble with.

Zammit said they have to decide, “Whether [the hype] will compound in the next seven months or whenever until we're putting the show on… some of the top people in our industry are lauded for their ability to spot it.”

He used the case study of Jagwar Ma, who played Big Day Out earlier this year and have developed a strong following since.

“With Jagwar Ma effectively we ran pre-cycle, so they may have been more value [to the festival] this year. But they've done us and so they're on Laneway [in 2014].”

In contrast, speaking to The Music's Daniel Cribb recently, Maddah said that Soundwave's success is largely down to ignoring trends.

“The best thing going for Soundwave is that it's never been fashionable; it's never been cool,” he said. “We never want it to be fashionable; we never want it to be cool. I guess part of the problem for some other festivals is they live and die by fashion, whereas, people who come to Soundwave aren't there as a rite of passage, they are not there to pose in their clothes or be part of a scene, or take 50 photos to put on their Facebook page – people come to Soundwave for the music, and that's constant. The real music fans, they come to the festival for the music and therefore they'll be back the next year and the following year as long as the lineup is good. Fashion is temporary, music is permanent.”

He continued, “We just want to keep making it better every year; we want to make the experience better – that's essentially what we want. We're in a good place – the festival's quite successful, it's sold very well every year for the past four or five year and we just want to keep investing anything that the festival makes and try to make it better and bigger.”

Ahead of the WAM Conference veteran promoter Michael Chugg told The Music, “I do think the day of monster festivals, unless they have a history and are organisationally together, is coming to an end.”

He added, “That being said – we still have a dozen or so festivals with capacities of up to 15,000 and a few even bigger. It all depends on the cities, the people and lots of other variables.”