After the Headline Acts, Big Event Promotions are a Font Size Free-for-All
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Nashville Scene, April 2014
Willy Mason is a 29 year-old singer/songwriter who’s always garnered more press in Britain than his native New York. Anna Lunoe cut her teeth DJ-ing in Australian dance clubs before opening for M.I.A. in 2006. And Nashville’s own Plastic Visions are an up-and-coming noise-rock band pushing a debut EP. What do they have in common? For lack of a better term, “product placement.” All three acts are currently bottom-liners-- the smallest font sizes on the promo posters of three major American music festivals (Bonnaroo, Coachella, and Lollapalooza, respectively). And while it’d be absurd to judge any musician by their position on a marketing team’s totem pole, it’s also hard not to wonder how they got there.
Coinciding nicely with the collapse of the traditional record industry around the early 2000s, the rise of the non-touring, super-giant music festival brought with it the internet’s annual guessing game of “who’s gonna headline where?!” It’s sort of like the festival circuit’s answer to fantasy sports. Long before official line-ups start leaking out in the early spring, eager beavers start tracking the tour schedules and rumored reunion plans of A-list bands—Nate Silvering the logistics into astute predictions of which acts will top all the bills of the various mega-fests. It’s how the “surprise” return of Outkast at this year’s Coachella turned into a foregone conclusion.
Spoiler alerts aside, though, there’s actually a far more interesting brand of “festival poster analytics” that exists beneath the much-ballyhooed first row. The stylistic arrangement of the remaining 50 or 60 performers, the subtle cascading assessment of their relative worth to the marketability of the event-- it’s a high school “who’s cutest” list full of endless intrigue. The pecking order of the almost-theres and the also-rans; the fading greats and the next big things—the seemingly arbitrary and yet weirdly scientific system that decides whose name will catch your eye first on the side of a bus or an internet banner ad.
According to the Lollapalooza line-up, for example, Lykke Li is now roughly four rows more marketable than ex-Rilo Kiley siren Jenny Lewis. Ms. Lewis, however, still sits four rows above the far more buzzed-about hip-hopstress Iggy Azalea. And over in the Bonnaroo line-up, Damon Albarn gets prime real estate two rows above Lauryn Hill. Is Albarn getting credited more for the success of Gorillaz in the U.S. market than the relative failures of Blur? Also, who the hell is making all these decisions anyway?
Well, the Scene found one of them. Bryan Benson is the Vice President and Producer at AC Entertainment—the Knoxville-based promotional company that runs the mighty Bonnaroo in Manchester as well as Knoxville’s own experimental Big Ears Festival.
“Obviously, with different events there are going to be different approaches to the design of the poster and layout of the line-up,” Benson explains. “But the standard model is the headliners on top, and then from there, it’s kind of the next biggest artists on down to the bottom where you have more of the developmental local and regional acts. You can usually attribute it to where an artist is going to perform at the festival. So, as an example, an artist who’s playing the main stage right before a headliner on a given night will likely be listed up near the top of the poster, as well.”
Sounds simple enough, but there is also a chicken-and-the-egg factor at work, here, since companies like AC Entertainment are also involved in booking those stages in the first place. So what really goes into determining the pecking order?
“The initial booking process is really a collaboration with the artists and their teams and managers,” Benson says. “With Bonnaroo, we have a team that works on booking the lineup, and it definitely can take some back and forth to make sure each individual talent is in the best possible place. Obviously, if we have an artist who sells a certain number of tickets across the country—say they’re playing to 1,500-2,000 people every night—they’re probably going to get a higher billing. You’ll also have certain artists that are sensitive to where they are on the poster, and others where it isn’t that big of a deal to them, as long as they aren’t completely misplaced.”
So there are, in fact, occasions where an artist is directly pushing for a bigger font size?
“Yeah, it happens all the time,” Benson says. “Sometimes when you’re working with an artist, their representative will say, ‘Where are we going to be in the billing?’ before we have even done that step. So, as a buyer, it’s important for us to take that kind of a comment and say, ‘okay, this is going to be a sensitive kind of subject for this act.’ We’ll make notes along those lines. And sometimes it happens the other way; where we announce the lineup, put the artwork out there, and then I will inevitably--as any other talent buyer will--get a couple of calls that day with questions of ‘hey, why am I down there?’
There must be occasions where you do have a half dozen artists who basically have “equal claim” to a certain spot based on their agent’s requests, ticket sales, etc. So what’s the tiebreaker, so to speak?
“Well, for Bonnaroo, you have to consider that we’re showcasing so many different types of artists-- across all genres, really. So we look at the billing or poster order for Bonnaroo sometimes along the lines of-- we don’t want to group a couple of the EDM acts right next to each other, or a couple of the rock acts right next to each other. Because as the fan reads the poster, we want to show the diversity of the types of programming that we’re showcasing at the event. So that’s another thing that factors into it. But other than that, there’s not a whole lot more to it. You know, we’ve been doing this a long time. And as curators, we take pride in making sure we present our lineups in the right order as best we can.”
Basically, Benson could have just gone with the standard axiom: You can please some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time. And in the end, maybe all this obsessing over musical power rankings is a bit silly anyway. Sure, there’s a chance Willy Mason, Anna Lunoe and Plastic Visions could have leapfrogged some people with the aid of an attack dog agent. But when the Scene asked Plastic Visions frontman Kane Stewart how he felt about his band’s billing at Lollapalooza, his answer was telling, if brief.
“Fucking stoked!” –Kane Stewart
Turns out that getting to play at one of the biggest music festivals in the world might still matter more to some artists than their position in the line-up.
A Bonus Philosophical Take
Richard Harper, Jr. is the drummer for the Nashville band Fly Golden Eagle—which can be found in row 27 of the Lollapalooza line-up. In stark contrast to Kane Stewart, Mr. Harper had some thoughts on this issue. And they are as follows:
My thoughts on festival line ups and their usage of band names and their sizes, while still rather infantile in scope, has not been without attention and a growing interest. For instance, I've noticed the typographical and design aspects of festival posters in the modern American era generally started with a pyramid shape pointed up or down. Now, with the advent of social media and the general air of progressivism, more liberal and in-tune designers use an equal sized font for every band name, a notion I find rather distasteful and spineless. A pecking order should most certainly be established to remind both the general public and the bands themselves who's the top dog. But with one caveat: that any band could become the largest-fonted-band on a festival poster if they be willing to set their sex aflame, as it were. Or perhaps just get way into occult imagery.
There's a whole discussion to be had on visibility, style, and "underground music" (how our consumerist society - a consumer of styles - can be whipped into a frenzy based on the size and kernelling of a random assembling of letters). However, I generally find that art and words make for soggy logs: a union better suited for a recently renovated Burger King or a well-honed advertising firm.
In my mind, when I see Fly Golden Eagle, our band name, or any other band for that matter, on a festival poster specifically, I am more persuaded to purchase a double cheese burger or a pair of locally-sourced denim jeans than to have my creative energies agitated. However, my whole thoughts on the matter cannot be summarized here. A complex discourse to say the least, one that is both my torment and my delight.
Peace
Richard Harper Jr.
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