by Ginny Gillikin
Some of us need to do more than just watch a great show – we need to make it happen. Justin Williams, executive director for the South Carolina Entertainment & Music Hall of Fame, offered some tips to help tackle challenges you might encounter when starting or growing a production company for concerts, music events, and festivals.
First, you should design the festival or event around a major artist who can serve as an anchor for your concert. This should be someone who has a recognizable name and can draw a crowd.
Your next challenge is to decide whether it will be a free or ticketed event. If it's a ticketed event, what is your price point, and can you sell the artist that you're booking? If it’s a free event, you need to come up with a way to pay for it, which means sponsorships.
Then, you need to secure sponsors for your event. In order to align a certain sponsor with what you're creating, start making phone calls and find out who can sponsor an event. You need to have a team that has the time to dedicate to making phone calls to secure sponsorships and make your event successful.
Many corporations want to be involved with concerts or festivals.
“When it comes to sponsors, it’s definitely about who you know in the business,” Williams, senior director at Pearl Street Records, said. “Find folks who have sponsored things in the past like concerts or festivals; [conduct] research on companies and look at other festivals, events, and sponsorships. They’re all over the board, from major chain restaurants to corporate companies.”
You might not get any response from entertainment companies that you would automatically contact. Instead, you could receive responses and more interest from other corporations that you would not think of contacting. The lesson here is to broaden your horizons in an effort to reach both sponsors and attendees.
Next, you should figure out the logistics of what the event will entail.
Align all of your audio and video production teams and ticketing. Lay out the logistics of what your event is going to look like, then either find people to volunteer or pay people to work (if you have enough in your budget from the sponsorship). Look for anybody who has a passion for the arts and entertainment.
“If you're putting on a concert, you want someone who has a passion for the music business – whether they're security or they're running your ticket booth,” Williams said. “If they love music and they love that particular genre, they're probably going to be the one that you want to hire for your event.”
And finally, you must market the event to create branding and awareness.
“You're going to run into [this situation] – no one knows who you are and what your festival's about,” Williams said. “Once you get your sponsorships down, now it's getting the marketing piece of it down and building your brand, making sure you have a solid website and social media accounts. Find an artist that has a large social media following that works within your budget and negotiate in their contracts that they'll tag your event and share it on all of their social media accounts and feeds.
“You want to work with the artists that are going to be at your event, making sure that they're helping share your event and aligning with radio stations, newspapers, and social media influencers to get your brand out there.”
Then, try to cut some deals with radio stations for marketing, especially with new events that seem cool. You can do trade deals; for example, they'll give you radio time in return for placing their logo on your flyer and mentioning their name at your event.
By following Williams’ advice, you can create a successful and fun concert, music event, or festival.
Justin Williams is executive director for the South Carolina Entertainment & Music Hall of Fame, a non-profit organization. He has produced albums, TV shows, and films for over 20 years. He created, directed, and/or produced events including the Country Folks Will Survive concert, Watermelon Crawl Festival, Rhythm on the Rails, and Pickens Azalea Festival.
Photography by Eli Warren