This summer, Cindy Moraitis will take a $2,100 gamble on Eaux Claires, the music festival founded, curated, and organized largely by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The morning the tickets went on sale late last year, the 52-year-old Pilates instructor grabbed a pair for $600, plus a room at The Oxbow, the boutique hotel Vernon co-owns in his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Only then, she laughs, could she begin to plan the rest of her 2018.
For Moraitis, Eaux Claires—located on a verdant expanse not far from Vernon’s sprawling recording studio—comes first. It didn’t even matter that, for the first time in the festival’s four-year history, the lineup won’t be announced until the event kicks off in July, requiring a leap of faith for Moraitis and the thousands who will flock to Eau Claire. “There was no hesitation,” admits Moraitis, who lives in Los Angeles and makes a habit of seeing Vernon-approved bands when they’re in town. “There have been very few things that he has recommended that I haven’t liked.”
That is the animating spirit of Eaux Claires, a working summit for the enthusiasms of Vernon; his co-curator, the National’s Aaron Dessner; and a cohort of collaborators, confidants, and artists they both ask for help. So far, the festival has presented one-of-a-kind attractions like a massive tribute to the Grateful Dead, the premiere performance of Bon Iver’s 22, A Million, and a set of John Prine covers from a wide cast of artists including Jenny Lewis and Spank Rock. The grounds have brimmed with art installations, like a symphony of amplified crickets, a cave made of moss, and a massive metallic pipe organ sculpture that the city subsequently placed alongside the banks of the Chippewa River. Equal parts summer camp and music festival, it is meant as a playground of discovery for artists and attendees alike.
“It’s not just having bands come, play their sets, and get a paycheck,” says Vernon. “That’s what is not cool about something like Lollapalooza, which says, ‘Hey, be what you were, and we’ll pay you.’ This is about people coming together and creating something new for themselves. The audience gets something out of that, too.”
Vernon is just one of many musicians to establish their own music festivals in recent years. From JAY-Z and Metallica to Chance the Rapper and Wilco, marquee acts have stepped fully into the festival market by conceptualizing, curating, and producing events that they own. Some of these festivals fill stadiums, while others overrun modern art museums or transform farms and desert mesas into short-term venues. Almost uniformly, they move beyond music to incorporate visual art and activist partnerships, modern dance performances and poetry readings. And they are almost always reactions to an American festival landscape that has grown flooded and faceless. If most music festivals simply seem to self-propagate in every mid-size city across the country, drafting at random from a pre-approved pool of bands, many of these artist-run events are honest attempts to break the stasis.
“It’s this cut-and-paste arms race of headliners,” explains Aaron Dessner, who, alongside his brother and National bandmate Bryce, has helped program nearly a dozen festivals in the United States and Europe. “More and more, that’s not what people want. We want to cultivate a sense of possibility.”
Or, as Moraitis puts it on behalf of the growing number of attendees who are choosing these artist-curated events, “When you go to other festivals, it feels like a continuation of the rat race: You are waiting for the bathroom; you are waiting for drinks; the vibe isn’t right. This is manageable.”
But these festivals aren’t sure commercial bets, and they often raise some of the oldest, ugliest questions about the music industry at large: How do you maintain a pure artistic vision while also balancing the books? And in a model that requires pre-existing political and financial capital, how do you ensure that the decision makers are a diverse cultural lot?
“There is something artist-driven happening with festivals, even if I don’t think it’s clear where we’re going with it yet,” says Adam Voith, a longtime booking agent for the likes of Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend. “Artists are much more excited about these events than standard festivals now, because there’s a recognition that it’s music-forward and collaborative from the jump.” Voith pauses, then sighs. “But it’s going to take a lot of smart people to figure out how to make these viable long-term.”
Jeff Tweedy never understood music festivals. As a kid in Illinois, he avoided bigger shows, opting instead for the intimacy and urgency of punk rock in clubs. When he eventually began playing sizable gigs, first in alt-country standard bearers Uncle Tupelo and later in Wilco, he didn’t think he was good enough to cut it. Projecting for an outdoor crowd didn’t come naturally, and preparing your gear onstage in a rush on a hot summer day didn’t happen easily. Even as Wilco adjusted to the festival regimen by building a crew strong enough to make even the worst experiences tolerable, Tweedy remained bewildered by the entire arrangement.
“As far as festival experiences go, I have generally hated them,” he says with a chuckle. “They are hot and dusty, and you are a mile from other bands you want to see. My go-to line is: ‘I wouldn’t be here unless I was getting paid.’”
Over time, though, Tweedy learned there was more than one way to shape a festival. Wilco began playing fall fests that offered merciful shade along with others that moved at least some of their sets indoors. Since his days in Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy had dreamed aloud to his manager, Tony Margherita, about an event he and the band programmed; now, they recognized how it could work.
After buying a home in western Massachusetts in 2007, Margherita had occasionally visited MASS MoCA, a sprawling modern art museum in the former mill town of North Adams. The space’s broad scope and sharp curation impressed him, so he and Tweedy pitched a partnership to the museum’s management in 2009. A year later, Wilco was onstage at MASS MoCA, headlining the first Solid Sound. “We tried to make a festival I wouldn’t be miserable at,” Tweedy says. “Well, not just me, but mostly me, since I am the most miserable.”
For two years, Solid Sound was an annual event, anchored by Wilco and buttressed by a panoply of friends, comedians, and artists. In 2013, they pivoted to a biennial format, which allowed Wilco not only to dream bigger and plan better but also to reserve enough bandwidth to be productive when it came to their own records and tours.
The festival has blossomed accordingly, hosting curious art exhibits and serving as a platform for Wilco’s new ideas and interests, from guitarist Pat Sansone’s vast Polaroid archive to drummer Glenn Kotche’s immersive sonic collages. The members bring their side projects and compile a massive wish-list of bands they’d like to see. In 2017, fabled outsider-art sisters the Shaggs played their first full set in 40 years at Solid Sound—a particular thrill for Tweedy, a moment where music festivals clicked.
“I think Solid Sound is the purest expression of what this band is,” he says. “Trying to create an environment for a weekend of music feels like a much purer goal than some piece of plastic.”
What’s more, Solid Sound has transformed MASS MoCA’s image and vitality, according to founder and director Joe Thompson. Before the festival, the museum was bringing in about 10,000 people per year for concerts and performances. In a single weekend, Solid Sound can double that number. And in the eight years since Solid Sound began, MASS MoCA’s concert calendar has ballooned to include the likes of Blondie and Grizzly Bear, and overall museum attendance has gone from around 100,000 to more than 300,000.
All of that isn’t due to Wilco, of course. But the band fills nearly every nook, cranny, and rooftop of the museum’s 16-acre campus with music and art during Solid Sound, showing first-time visitors just how active the space can be, and prompting bands and their booking agents to consider a visit. “A lot of museums talk about finding ways to reach new communities, and these artist-curated festivals do it in ways I haven’t seen before,” says Thompson.
But financially, producing a new festival often gives the community or institution that hosts it a bigger boost than the bands that produce it, at least at first. For years, Margherita says Solid Sound was essentially a loss leader for Wilco, a fulfilling production that expanded the band’s mission but shrank their bank account. Then, in 2013, the festival’s bottom line turned black, where it’s stayed ever since.
For others, that process toward sustainability hasn’t been quite so smooth. In 2008, Texas rock band the Black Angels launched the Austin Psych Fest, a low-key, low-budget preamble to South by Southwest. For years, it bounced among various configurations, dates, and downtown clubs before finally adopting the name Levitation and landing at a bucolic ranch alongside the Colorado River. Levitation has become the rare artist-curated festival that has outsripped the reputation of its creators—an international psych magnet on a level the Black Angels never quite matched.
But it is a cautionary tale, too. In 2015, the threat of floods forced the festival to reconfigure everything just before it started. The next year, severe storms and more flooding forced them to cancel the festival altogether, scrapping a lineup that included Beach Boy Brian Wilson, Animal Collective, and Flying Lotus. The disaster led to a cataract of debt and lawsuits from former partners, forcing Levitation to scrap a planned 2017 comeback and nearly can the entire organization.
Instead, they recognized the larger issue: If they continued to book an outdoor festival alongside a river in the Texas spring, weather would forever render Levitation vulnerable. They rebuilt the model, moving to four days of concerts in eight downtown clubs. Current projections suggest this year’s edition may be the biggest one yet. Still, Levitation’s saga points to the tenuous nature of major productions that are backed by artist enthusiasm instead of endless corporate cash. The margins for error are thin.
“We’ve had a few successful years, but they’ve mostly gone to pay off losses from unsuccessful years,” says Levitation producer Rob Fitzpatrick. “But we’ve eliminated a lot of the risk involved, and we’re developing a template that can work long-term.”
That longevity is the crux. In the first year of Eaux Claires, when Bon Iver returned to the stage after a three-year hiatus, the festival was instantly profitable. Then Eaux Claires lost money for the next two years, Vernon admits, requiring organizers to make some changes. But the bottom line is not the primary focus.
“You can’t just sign up for profit every time,” says Vernon. “But we’re not blindly throwing money down the toilet—we’re adjusting to a more sustainable model.” He compares the festival’s balance sheets to the decades he spent toiling in groups that never made much money, long before he found fame with Bon Iver. “You have to be committed,” he adds. “This is a 20-year thing.”
Music festivals attempt to make money largely through three fluctuating revenue streams: First, they sell passes that may range from, say, a $50 general admission ticket that gets you a patch of grass in the middle of a field to a multi-thousand-dollar package that earns you access to amenities and a sense of importance. Onsite, festivals hope you will spend money on beer or burgers or branded T-shirts, the concessions that form the second chunk of change. The often-vital third source is sponsorship—large sums of money that enable brands to get their logos on posters, their banners on stages, or tents full of samples and street teams on festival grounds.
At artist-curated festivals, that sponsorship money is frequently limited or absent altogether. During the first few years of the Roots Picnic, for example, the Roots largely forewent sponsors, and they only began to break even several years into the event, says co-founder Black Thought. And for its Norður og Niður festival in Reykjavik at the end of 2017, Sigur Rós acquired just one sponsor at the last minute, an Icelandic brewery that donated beer. Their manager, John Best, admits they lost a substantial amount of cash. So far, they have no plans for a follow-up.
Some festivals seem so focused on programming and managing logistics that seeking out sponsors simply falls by the wayside. By and large, though, there’s a real reluctance to link a band so directly with a brand, especially at an event the band owns. Playing in front of someone else’s Coors Light banner is an altogether different proposition than hanging it at the festival you designed from your dreams.
“It has to be about the experience as opposed to the cash,” explains Aaron Dessner. “We want the audience to have time and space to not be bombarded by a ton of things.”
For Solid Sound, Margherita talks about “curating” sponsors as if they were bands. At Eaux Claires, local breweries and businesses are some of the most prominent partners; this year, they’re also promoting IKEA’s initiatives to increase product quality while nearly erasing the production’s carbon footprint.
“How do we get away from walking in and seeing 14 Budweiser signs and seven Uber signs?” says Voith, the booking agent, adding that the answer to such a question “is a huge driving force for these festivals.” But the motivation to avoid crass or out-of-place advertising is secondary to a much more audacious and personal aim—to create something that doesn’t already exist and fill a meaningful artistic gap.
In the late ’80s, the boundary-shattering new music group Bang on a Can launched its long-running Marathon performance series in New York City because, as co-founder Julia Wolfe remembers, “we wanted the scene to be different, and we wanted a new energy for our own music.” In many ways, Bang on a Can aspired to puncture the divide between high-brow classical music institutions and the city’s emerging D.I.Y. artists, to build a common platform for exploring uncommon ground.
That concept of pushing worlds together resonates for the National’s Bryce Dessner. In his hometown of Cincinnati in 2006, he wanted to foster “a space apart from the big commercial rock festivals and the elitist classical institutions, where you could mix things up and get close to the music.”
The idea led to MusicNOW, which has grown so much over a decade that it now features two components—one for contemporary classical performances in grand theaters, another for indie rock headliners at a riverfront park. Dessner built MusicNOW for years by directly asking bands to participate, foregoing the usual bureaucracy of booking agents and managers.
“When artists are touring a ton, I encourage them not to come,” he says. “It’s not the high-paying gig you do just because you’re out on the summer festival circuit. It’s a creative choice to do these shows.” By working directly with friends and peers, Dessner could advocate for his vision and convince his friends to try something new—often for less money than they would make elsewhere. The National has since returned such favors.
These sorts of friendly deals are standard among artist-curated events and a testament to the common desire to reimagine the festival experience. When Sigur Rós asked Jarvis Cocker and Kevin Shields to play in Reykjavik last year, they didn’t say yes because of the money, manager John Best says, but because they trusted the band’s vision. And when Solange arrived last spring at Arcosanti, a futurist architectural wonder just north of Phoenix, it was because her friend and fellow songwriter Moses Sumney helped convince her that its FORM festival was special, even if they couldn’t afford her.
“She would have never played had it not been for Moses talking to her directly and forwarding a note,” says Zach Tetreault, who started FORM when his band, Hundred Waters, wanted to create a different kind of album-release party. “That was purely because of his relationship.”
At their best, these festivals are about relationships and presenting the most complete picture of the artists behind them—multi-dimensional portraits of the people who make the music, reflected through their actual interests. In Charleston, South Carolina, the country-rock duo Shovels & Rope recently launched a festival that links the best of their roots music peers with the cream of the food city’s crop. Blink-182’s Travis Barker now curates two festivals—one that flashes back to the Orange County ska of his youth, another that pairs tattoos, hot rods, and loud music. These are reminders that the musicians you love have loves of their own.
The clearest spiritual antecedent for this modern festival mindset seems to be Bill Graham, the legendary San Francisco concert promoter whose magpie business model meant he might place the Grateful Dead on a bill with bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins, Miles Davis with roots rocker Leon Russell.
In fact, decades later, Graham’s vision partly inspired Jane’s Addiction leader Perry Farrell to launch the earliest version of Lollapalooza. Farrell’s traveling festival gathered several alternative rock bands on one bill, allowing multiple mid-sized acts to escape clubs and theaters for a summer and play enormous amphitheaters. After working with Lollapalooza, Graham liked the experience so much that he told a young band he was managing, Blues Traveler, to borrow the template. This led to the H.O.R.D.E. festival, which became one of the most consistent tickets of the ’90s, eventually hosting the likes of Neil Young, Primus, and Beck on the same stage.
The model slowly faded, and, in the late ’90s, the stateside festival market languished, maintained only on the fringes of the jam-band scene until ambitious upstarts like Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Austin City Limits arrived. They first drafted bands that played those early editions of Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E.—or would have, had they still existed.
“We were pretty young when that happened, and it spoiled us,” says Blues Traveler frontman John Popper, who still longs for the sense of adventure and wonder he found with his own festival. “But that’s what happens to dreams: When they’re allowed to grow, you seek out that wonderland, that place where you can do whatever you want artistically.”
But everyone hasn’t been able to share in that wonderland quite so easily. In the late ’90s, the songwriter Sarah McLachlan launched Lilith Fair, which hinged on bands led by women. Though not led by an individual artist, the Smokin’ Grooves tour put hip-hop, reggae, funk, and soul into the same kind of traveling package. Both were pointed responses to the lack of consistent inclusion within the ranks of Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E. And 20 years later, for all their talk of transformative experiences, artist-curated festivals have yet to transform one of the music industry’s most pernicious problems—a structural lack of diversity.
Sure, Mary J. Blige and M.I.A. have programmed editions of extant music festivals, and Chance the Rapper and Tyler, the Creator have launched their own. But these are exceptions that suggest a broad rule: If you want to create your own musical utopia, being a white man (especially one who has won the Best Alternative Music Album Grammy) remains your best bet.
Both onstage and in the audience, music festivals have historically lacked diversity. Recent figures suggest that nearly 70 percent of festival attendees are white, while women often comprise less than one-third of festival lineups, despite buying half the tickets. Those gaps stem from several factors, says Gina Arnold, a University of San Francisco professor whose upcoming book, Half a Million Strong, traces the rise of American music festivals, as well as their payoffs and pitfalls.
Festivals are an extension, she says, of a music industry largely dominated by white men who focus on events and experiences that fit their own needs. And the fabled festival framework that’s familiar from Woodstock and its legend-cementing movie—a magic, rural garden of free love and free drugs—hasn’t traditionally appealed to people of color beset by police brutality and disproportionately high arrests rates for drugs or women threatened by sexual assault.
“Rock festivals cast themselves as this utopian form, but they re-create the problems of our society—they naturalize a lot of patriarchy and whiteness,” says Arnold. “Even though black pop idioms are very popular at festivals and create some of the most compelling moments, African-American bodies are used as spectacles, even though there are very few African-Americans historically there.”
This disparity is not lost on Shawn Gee, the longtime manager of the Roots, co-founder of Live Nation Urban, and a partner in a firm that manages the likes of Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne. A dozen years ago, the Roots, Gee, and his late business partner, Richard Nichols, recognized that the band essentially paid its bills with the money it made on the European festival circuit. But there were few stateside counterparts, especially ones that focused on hip-hop or soul. Together, they launched the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia. It has since spawned a second edition in New York, and both have become summer-music institutions.
The Roots Picnic embodies the best of what artist-curated festivals can present—massive celebrations where Alicia Keys has performed an unannounced set, the Roots have backed Usher and Pharrell Williams, and Black Thought and Fat Joe have traded lines, all for ecstatic crowds. In recent years, they’ve added a stage for producing podcasts on the spot and another for gadgetry and gamers. Its success may suggest that there would be many other festivals led by hip-hop stars on the rise, but they have yet to materialize.
“The perception has been that, since most of the people putting these festivals together are white, those are the only people capable of pulling together the resources to do so,” says Black Thought. “We were ahead of the curve in breaking that misconception, and we set a precedent.”
When Chance the Rapper wanted to turn Chicago’s U.S. Cellular Field into a one-day festival grounds in 2016, he seemed to run into the problem Black Thought identifies: Most traditional promoters said he was crazy, as his fanbase wouldn’t deliver the necessary numbers. Those promoters even tried to steer him to a run of theater shows or an arena, remembers Mike Luba, a partner in the production company Madison House Presents. But when Luba heard about Chance’s proposal, he jumped at the chance.
“All bands say they’d love to have a festival, but finding bands that are truly motivated enough to do it is rare,” says Luba. “Chance put his money where his mouth was.” In the end, the likes of Kanye West, Skrillex, John Legend, and Alicia Keys joined Chance for that triumphant Chicago Saturday. He sold nearly 50,000 tickets, smashing all of the stadium’s attendance records.
For Black Thought, Chance’s success and the long reign of the Roots Picnic can help dismantle the lingering notion that white men already ensconced in the music industry are best equipped to manage festivals. “The perception is a little disappointing, but it’s all smoke and mirrors,” he says. “You’re seeing more festivals put together by women and people of color. Do I wish there were more? Absolutely. And do I think you will see more? Again, absolutely.”
Indeed, Gee is currently working to build those opportunities for artists of color through Live Nation Urban. On Memorial Day Weekend, gospel legend Kirk Franklin will present the first Exodus Music & Arts Festival in Dallas, in conjunction with Gee. That seems to be only the start. If the rise of festivals in the United States is, to date, primarily one of white artists and fans, Gee knows there is room to replicate the model with a fundamentally different outlook on behalf of the globe’s biggest concert promoter and with the help of artists themselves. “The idea is to build unique live platforms within gospel, hip-hop, and R&B,” says Gee, “to look within those genres and fill the void.”
This is the kind of incremental change that could eventually overhaul a system still dominated by traditional power brokers, even if, as in Gee’s case, it happens from inside the establishment. Recognizing and speaking to the imbalance—especially at a moment when artists have such direct access to their audience through social media—can slowly help correct it.
The possibility of these small, steady shifts represents the ultimate promise of artist-curated festivals. By their mere existence, they can compel other festivals to be more imaginative, to think about programming outside of the buzz bands and radio stars du jour. And because they come with the automatic collateral of marketing power and built-in audiences, they can take risks with challenging artists and nebulous concepts that don’t need to carry the same commercial weight on a hierarchical concert poster.
With Eaux Claires keeping this year’s lineup a secret until the festival begins, they’re betting they don’t even need a traditional promotional poster at all. For Vernon, his team, and, it seems, most every artist risking their own time and money to build such an idealistic event, the risk seems to be a test worth taking. The broad goal is to push back against entrenched festival rules and change the tone of a conversation in which, sooner or later, they all participate. These bands still play major festivals with corporate boosters, after all, because those outsized paydays help fund everything else they do. But that doesn’t have to be the only option.
“Why does it have to be about maximizing profits every time there’s a question about everything? That bugs me,” says Vernon. “We’re not trying to be the biggest festival in the world. We’re just trying to be the best we can be.”
