How to hold a music festival (or not)

Yes, a music festival is a very big undertaking. And there are all sorts of special problems with trying to stage one in China, and particularly in Beijing, with the authorities making life extremely difficult.

But, you know, really, it shouldn't be all that hard to bring all the elements together. And yet, as the number of music festivals in Beijing proliferates, the standards of organization seem to fall ever lower. The long-running MIDI event is the only one that consistently manages to get nearly everything right. Almost all of the others are more or less of a shambles. The new Kama Love Music Festival held this past weekend was more of a disaster than most.

Here are the key things you need to pay attention to, music festival organisers:

1) Have a website

In this Internet age, that's absolutely essential. Kama did not have one - or at least, not one that was at all easy to find. My music-junkie pal Ruby was crowing that she had found a helpful site about the event, but god knows how. Repeated Google searches turned up nothing for me (apart from one page - on Chinese music site Douban, I think - which wasn't loading when I tried it). The Festival's flyers and posters only provided a link for ticket sales through online retailer Taobao.

2) Have some advance publicity

Now, I sympathise with the Kama folks on this one. I gather (from the Cowboy Junkies' blog - kept by their guitarist, Mike Timmins) that they were forced to withdraw all of their initial advertising because of the inclusion in the lineup of Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a Chinese musician who's suddenly found himself on the government's shit list. My sympathy, however, only goes so far. They had a fair amount of time to put out a second wave of promotional material, but it wasn't very eye-catching, or very well distributed. And there was next-to-nothing in the way of promotion via any English-language media outlets. I'm guessing the event didn't achieve very good prominence amongst Chinese speakers either, since the turnout was extremely low.

3) Make all your promotional copy bilingual

Foreigners are going to be a large component of your target audience, so you need to make sure that all the information about your event is readily accessible to them too. Most Chinese music promoters don't bother to give the English names of Chinese bands. The Kama folks don't seem to have given the Chinese names of the foreign bands either - which might have caused some problems for punters who can't read English.

4) Make sure people know where you are

The Kama venue was variously described (in English) as the 'Olympic Park' and the 'Olympic Sports Area' and the 'Olympic Sports Center' and a few other variations on that theme. Some people might well have supposed - as I did! - that this meant the area around the Bird's Nest (which is more conventionally known as the Olympic Green - although there's no greenery to speak of), or the Olympic Forest Park to the north of the Green. No, in fact it seems to mean the cluster of sports venues south of the Bird's Nest - which were originally built for the Asian Games back in 1990, but were given a hasty facelift and rebranding just ahead of the Olympics here a few years back. Their map (provided on ticketing website, Piao.com) was far too small - and unhelpfully labelled - to make this apparent.

[Notice how there are three entirely separate roads labelled Aoti Zhonglu - Olympic Sports Middle Street? It may well be - this being China - that there are three different roads with the same name. However, there are few if any signs on these roads to identify them. And they weren't called this until three years ago; I used to go up to this part of Beijing - on foot - a lot prior to the Olympics, but haven't done so since; the geography of the area is bewilderingly different now. And there are several HUGE new road junctions that have no footbridges or underpasses; pedestrian access is tricky. It's almost as if the government didn't want anyone to go to the Olympics...] I'm told that if you went to the nearest subway station - Anzhenmen - and got out at the right exit, it was pretty easy to find your way in (I'm a trifle sceptical; I walked back past that station and didn't see any signs in the vicinity). But, if you happened to go to the next subway station, on the other side of the venue, you were shit out of luck. In fact, if you approached from anywhere other than the south-east corner, you were shit out of luck. The venue was absolutely enormous, but there was only one entrance, in the middle of the south perimeter. This entrance was not very readily visible or accessible because of the even bigger outer perimeter around the 'Olympic Sports Center', which has few entry points. And there was absolutely no signage anywhere. It took me nearly 20 minutes to find my way in, after I arrived at the venue. I was not alone in my frustration at this: there were scores of people, mostly Chinese, also forlornly traipsing around the miles-long perimeter trying to find an entrance.

5) Keep ticket prices affordable

I imagine another main reason for the low attendance at Kama was the very high admission fee - 200 rmb per day. Sponsorship ought to cover most - or all? - of the costs of staging an event like this. And sponsors won't be happy if no-one comes because the gate fees are too high. 200 rmb is a week's wages for some people, a day's wages for almost anyone; a lot of Chinese are going to be deterred by prices like that (until a few years ago, you could go to all four days of the MIDI Festival for that much).

6)  Have plenty of ticket-check (and ticket sales) lines

The Strawberry Festival last year made a particularly big balls-up of its ticket sales, making people wait in line for upwards of two hours. Even MIDI hasn't always done this quite as well as it might. Kama didn't have a problem because nobody came; but there were only four or five ticket/security checks. If they'd had the 20,000 or 30,000 visitors I imagine they were hoping for (rather than the 3,000 or 4,000 I estimate showed up on the Sunday), that entry point would have been completely overwhelmed and there would have been some very long waits. [I understand the police imposed a last-minute ban on selling tickets on the gate. Although I'm not confident that these guys would have handled ticket sales any better than they did any other aspect of the event. Interestingly, though, there were a lot of piao fanzi (touts/scalpers) around, and they were offering tickets at well below the cover price. I've never seen that at a festival here before (festivals don't sell out, so touts don't have any leverage - other than to shortcut long ticket lines). I wonder if this was the organisers craftily trying to circumvent the ticket sales ban (and boost the disappointing turnout)?]

7)  Have some good sound guys

From Mike Timmins's post, it seems the soundcheck on the morning of Day 1 was more than a little chaotic, with the stage crew still setting up. The balance seemed all wrong to me, much too heavy on the bass - and very indistinct on the main 'Love' stage (it was OK if you were in the middle, and fairly near the front; but the sound just got muddier and muddier the further back you went). The sound was much crisper on the smaller 'Hope' stage, but painfully overloud (I saw people actually being driven away from the stage by this, their hands over their ears); the level was inappropriate for such a small crowd - you need bodies to soak up the sound. I'm guessing the sound crew weren't all that experienced with this kind of event. Most of the control desk engineers seemed to be slumped at their posts in a trance of catatonic boredom, not doing anything to tweak the settings, scarcely even paying attention at all (one guy actually fell asleep).

8)  Have some local bands

While the overseas performers included some interesting choices - Cowboy Junkies, Eels, and young British act These New Puritans - the Chinese end of the bill was mostly very bland soft rock. I suppose the organisers were looking for acts they thought would be 'commercial', have a broad and uncontroversial appeal to mainstream Chinese tastes. Again, I sympathise up to a point. But I do not see how you can have a rock festival in Beijing that doesn't include any bands from Beijing's lively indie scene.

9)  Run on time

More pesky interference from the police! I surmised - correctly, as it turned out - that the fact the show was running a full hour ahead of its advertised schedule was probably down to the finish time having been brought forward by the authorities. Well, OK, if you have to do that, you have to do that. But you could, you know, make some announcements to that effect, so that the audience knows what the hell is going on. You could even put some stickers explaining the time change on the billboards advertising the schedule. And you really ought to let the bands know as far in advance as possible. (Mike Timmins says he received a telephone call about the revised timetable less than two hours before they were expected to appear on stage. And one of the bands, apparently, was dropped from the schedule completely - perhaps because they didn't know when they were now supposed to be on.) And you should also try to preserve the interval between the shows on the two stages: performances are supposed to be staggered, so that people can alternate between the two venues and catch at least a little of each of the 'simultaneous' acts. With the rejigging of the schedule on Sunday, it seemed that both stages were starting and finishing at almost exactly the same time.

10)  Don't let your concessionaires overcharge

Apart from a couple of people buying ice creams from Dairy Queen, and gaggles of event staff taking their lunch at the instant noodles stall, I saw exactly ZERO people buying anything from the food court area, NOT ONE. The fact that vendors were charging 20 kuai or more for the kind of street snacks that would usually be no more than 4 or 5 kuai may have had something to do with this. Now, the organisers were making a bit more of an effort than usual in this department. The presence of international brands DQ and Yoshinoya was a welcome change to the crappy local knock-offs of Pizza Hut and Subway that we usually get at festivals here. And vendors, it seemed, were being required to advertise their prices - which is always a good thing. Overall, though, the choices were not that many, and the prices were just a bit on the high side. As with so many other aspects of this event, the ideas were laudable but the execution was half-assed - a 'Gourmet Street' with only one high-end food outlet; an art show confined to one small tent; a cinema tent which was not advertising a programme and not showing anything on any of the occasions I looked in (but was proving a popular source of shade).

11)  Have a bar

In fact, have several bars. The dratted city authorities were once more the killjoys here: it seems they've decided to outlaw booze at most of the big festivals this year. The Kama organisers had set up a large tent with seating for use as a bar, but - again, at the eleventh hour - they were refused permission to sell alcohol. A couple of thoughts on this for you, guys. One, alcohol is not the only form of drink; it was daft not to use your bar tent at all; on such a hot day, there was a high demand for cold soft drinks as well. Two, welcome innovation though the large bar with seating was...., people really don't want to have to go traipsing from one end of the festival grounds to the other whenever they want a drink. There were very, very few places selling any kind of drink at Kama, and none at all around the main 'Love' stage. You need plenty of sales points (and plenty of refrigeration) for alcohol and soft drinks (and water!) all over the venue.

12)  Have PLENTY of water available

Dispense it in bottles rather than paper cups, ideally. And make it cheap or FREE. It's not going to cut into your sales of other kinds of drinks much, if at all. But if you're running an outdoor event in the summer WITH NO WATER, you're going to make people ill. And you're going to make people leave. Dozens of people were starting to drift away from Kama as early as 3pm or so on Sunday afternoon.

13)  Allow readmission

It's really not that hard to police. Your concessionaires aren't going to suffer much lost business, because festival venues are usually too remote from anything for there to be many rival food and drink outlets nearby. And there is no way anyone is going to pay for a new ticket for readmission at those sorts of prices. I can't see any reasonable argument for a 'no readmission' policy - particularly not when your turnout is tiny anyway, and people are being forced to leave in order to buy water.

14)  Don't set up in a dustbowl

This may mean, in practice, don't set up in Beijing. It hasn't rained very much here since the Olympics, and scarcely at all in the last 8 or 9 months: the place is becoming a desert. I wonder, in fact, if the apparent 'ban' on holding events in the city's Haidian and Chaoyang Parks this year might not be justified on these grounds (retrospective sophistry: I'm sure this wasn't the reason for the ban), that the environmental degradation caused by thousands of feet tramping parched earth would be insupportable. But the earth at the 'Olympic Sports Center' wasn't just parched - it was bare. In only a few places did it appear that some grass had just recently been planted, and hadn't yet properly established itself. The rest of the venue looked as though it had until recently been a building site: lots of irregular, annoying holes in the ground, lots of hard stones to trip you up, and lots and lots of exposed, bone-dry, powdery earth - the theme tune from Lawrence of Arabia kept drifting through my head. Where there is no grass at all, spraying with water can't do much to harden the earth and limit the dust; but the organisers should at least have tried (it didn't look as though there had been any watering done at all). The organisers had, to their credit, laid down some artificial turf in front of the stages; but there wasn't enough of it, and it was wearing away pretty quickly. Many of the event staff seemed to have been issued with orange bandanas to protect themselves from the frequent mini dust storms; these should have been given to the punters as well. But in fact, in such awful, awful, AWFUL conditions, I think there's an argument for not going ahead in the first place.

15)  Don't play Bob Sinclar's Love Generation over and over and over and over again....

Honestly, this was the final straw that broke the back of this particular grumpy camel. It's a nice song, it is, very catchy. But you don't need to hear it more than once. Around 4.30 on Sunday, the stage crew were evidently running into some problems in setting up for These New Puritans - lots of anxious unravelling of cables and switching around of monitors. While this potentially alarming activity was going on, they played Love Generation over the PA to try keep the crowd feeling upbeat. Then, the crew would appear to have got the problem sorted, and retire from the stage. Love Generation would be cut off before the finish, and we'd begin to hope that this silence betokened the imminent appearance of the band on stage. But then more techies would hurry out and start fiddling around with the equipment again; and Love Generation would resume, cycled back to somewhere near the beginning but not to the very start of the song; it would play almost all the way through, then be cut off again; then, a minute or two of silence and hushed anticipation; and then, Love Generation once more. We got a partial play of that damned song at least 5 or 6 times in quick succession. I began to think I'd died and gone to hell.... Honestly, chaps, if you're going to play music between the sets, you need to have a variety of tunes, not just the one; and you need to play them all the way through. The music that you play to soothe potential crowd discontent should - well, how shall I put this? - not add to their discontent!!  Really, by about 4.50pm the crowd in front of the 'Love' stage had dwindled to a few hundred people - and it was Love Generation that was largely to blame, even more than the dust storms and the lack of water.

Above the exit gates of the Kama Festival was a banner welcoming us to come again 'Next Year'. A nice touch! But, after the complete pig's ear you made of this inaugural event, you'll have a very hard time persuading anyone to give you another chance next year. The cantankerous attitude of the police and the authorities certainly didn't help matters; but the more serious headless chicken problems clearly would have happened anyway. I'd give this event a 2 out of 10; and that more in recognition of good intentions and sympathy over external difficulties than for actual delivery. IT SUCKED DONKEY BALLS!!