When organizing a music festival, there are a lot of things to consider such as: planning, budgeting, finding the right venue, and booking your festival entertainment. It is a monumental task that includes a lot of working parts! We cover a lot of the planning portion in more detail in; Producing a Festival Concert: Preparation and People are Key. Today we want to dive a little deeper into what will make the difference between mediocrity and a standing-ovation success for the live entertainment portion of your festival.
When starting out on the quest for your festival entertainment, you can scour the internet and spend the time it takes to find the appropriate acts. Once you have some that peek your interest, you need to make sure they are great performers. The ideal situation is seeing them perform live. Most people can’t so you will need to reach out and request live recordings as well as recommendations from past clients and other bands.
With the number of bands needed for a music festival, this will take a lot of time and can be overwhelming. To save yourself that time and stress, you can use an entertainment booking agency to help you. Entertainment booking agencies, like TSE Entertainment, can help you match your budget and audience with the perfect blend of festival entertainment much faster and more efficiently than you could yourself.
Their services include matching your audience to the right festival entertainment; contacting the performers or their agents; ensuring that entertainers for your festival are talented, reliable and fit your festival entertainment needs; researching box office information to determine their ability to draw fans; handling the negotiations on price and riders; as well as securing a signed contract. All of these services can save you time, money and confusion as you go about booking your festival entertainment.
Matching Your Festival Entertainment to Your Audience
When it comes time for booking your festival entertainment, it is always important to consider the audience you want to draw. These are the demographics and psychographics of those who you hope to attract to your festival. Here’s a brief explanation of demographic versus psychographic profiling.
What is the profile of those you wish to draw to your festival? Consider the demographics and psychographics of the area from which you will draw. Does it match or are you hoping to draw a specific subset of people? Do you want to host a music festival for a younger audience or those with specific interests?
If you are throwing a festival for bikers it’s relatively easy to determine both the demographics (older for one) and psychographics (Motocross racing interest for one) of this target audience.
This audience as a whole is going to be older so isn’t going to be interested in seeing Brittany Spears as your headliner, no matter how cheap her booking fee was. While there certainly bikers who would like her, you job is to find the festival entertainment that will appeal to the greatest number of bikers. Your festival entertainment would more likely skew towards hard rock, metal and the like bands. You might also book top-notch tribute bands that can bring a live festival concert experience from bands that already know and love.
Regardless of you vision, working with an entertainment booking agency will provide you the expert advice needed to help you find and narrow down your target audience as well as match it with the perfect festival entertainment!
What’s Involved with Booking the Right Festival Entertainment
- Finding the Right Entertainers for Your Target Audiences
As an entertainment booking agency, TSE works to search for and locate the right entertainers for your festival entertainment. We do all the leg work to get in touch with the right person to discuss the artist’s availability and pricing. Depending on how famous you want your acts to be, this process can vary from contacting the band directly; getting in touch with their management company; or communicating with their booking agency.
Regardless, this means that the only phone call you have to worry about making is to us. We handle the rest.
- Ensuring the Capabilities of Your Entertainers
It can be hard these days with social media, audio enhancement and video technologies to tell whether your festival entertainment will be able to deliver a live performance at the level you see on their websites, EPKs or YouTube videos.
It is a devastating and downright embarrassing moment when you think you have booked a solid festival entertainer only to realize during their show that the stage presence and performance isn’t up to par, and more importantly isn’t enjoyable for the hundreds or maybe even thousands of your festival attendees.
TSE minimizes these worries by including in our research such things as an entertainer’s previous attendance, ticket pricing and reviews. We will never send you an entertainer for review that we haven’t first vetted ourselves to ensure that they will be a top-notch option for your festival entertainment!
- Handling Negotiations with Your Festival Entertainment
The services that an entertainment booking agency is able to offer you are key to relieving your stress and time. But when it comes to negotiating the costs for your festival entertainment, that’s where entertainment booking agencies can pay for themselves and save you money!
Unless you are very experienced at booking entertainment, it can be scary not knowing how to negotiate performance fee pricing. You are much more likely to end up paying the “retail” price for a artist without the experience of knowing when to make a lower offer. That’s where long-standing relationships with major agencies, agents, managers and artists makes the difference. We get the best festival entertainers for your budget.
An entertainment booking agency like TSE handles all of this for you. We work with the primary contact to negotiate pricing as well as the technical and hospitality riders that can determine your total costs. These include such things as equipment provided, travel, food, hotel expenses, etc. We do all the calling and emailing back and forth to get you the best price and contract possible. During the process, we work to ensure that your festival entertainment and their representatives are happy and excited about performing for your event!
- Securing Legally-Binding Contracts
Contracts are a critical component to averting any possible misunderstandings regarding your festival entertainment. They put you and the entertainer on the same page with the what, when, where, and how, which will save you from an array of catastrophes on the day of your festival!
As entertainment booking professionals, we are experienced in dealing with entertainment contracts so you can rest assured that everything of importance to the success of your festival will be covered and understood.
- Advancing the Show
In addition to obtaining a final, signed contract from your festival entertainment for you, TSE will make sure that everything is scheduled correctly, as well as keep in touch with the artists’ representatives for your festival entertainment from contract signing to leading up to the day of your festival to help make sure everything is in place and runs smoothly!
if you are planning or thinking about organizing a music festival of your own or you just need help booking a long-standing festival, TSE would love to help you save time and money booking your festival entertainment!
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