THE FIREFLY LINEUP
In the music festival industry, every opportunity starts with the lineup.
Firefly entered the landscape with a bang, but to grow beyond a singular event into the annual cultural institution we imagined,
we would need to grow our audience.
Here's how we booked a radically fan-centric lineup and grew Firefly to nine stages and over 100 acts.
Before you can be Something for Everybody,
you have to be Everything for Somebody.
We launched Firefly with a lineup catered specifically to our target audience of young, urban professional music fans.
We sought to deliver a debut lineup accessible to the average music fan in this category, counter-acting some barriers to entry they may have encountered with other festivals (like music too niche) while delivering the variety that makes music festivals unique and reflects eclectic interests in the digital era.
Our final poster reflected the long scope of our philosophy:
"before you can be Something for Everybody, you have to be Everything for Somebody". Our headliners read like the dream lineup for a specific music fan, while the rest of the bill showed a harbinger of where we intended to build.
As we looked to build the next lineup, and all the lineups to follow, we knew we would need to continue to serve our new brand evangelists, while expanding the base to become a serious draw for fans of other musical genres.
2013 LINEUP RELEASE
Early Firefly artists and their management became believers on the heels of a successful inaugural festival. The word of the Firefly experience was making its rounds in artist communities.
When Firefly called, suddenly everyone answered. When the dust settled, Firefly's sophomore lineup was even bigger than the debut. Behind a developing understanding of our fanbase and growth opportunities, the lineup featured Rock and Roll legends Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tom Petty alongside some of the hottest current names in music.
We commissioned festival act The White Panda to create a custom mash-up featuring bands on the lineup, and combined it with footage from the previous festival. The lineup announced the arrival of Firefly as a major festival player, and days later our ticket site struggled to keep up with demand when tickets were released to the public.
By the end of our on-sale date, we had sold more tickets than all of 2012, and would more than double attendance in year 2 to nearly 65,000 fans by the time of the festival.
BETTING ON BREAKOUTS
Early on, we realized the festival benefit of booking a rising band and watching their public profile grow
leading up to the festival and beyond.
"Breakout" bands helped grow buzz for the festival, built the belief Firefly was a source of music discovery,
drew fans into the festival earlier, built loyalty with acts that would go on to become major ticket draws,
and provided excellent value to the festival on their contracts.
We adopted the strategy that our undercard should be used for intentionally placing bets on who could break-out in a major way over the coming year. In our pitches to each other, we made it a policy to pitch the business case why each band could break out to a much bigger audience, beyond being incredible musicians and performers (this was a given).
Because of this focus, through the years Firefly has been one of the first major stages for many of music's biggest stars.
(Pictured: Imagine Dragons - 2012)
BOOKING FOR
THE FANS
To find out who our fans wanted to see, we did something
radically different: we asked them.
As we became more entrenched in the music festival industry, we observed there was a mystique applied to the role of talent booker: bookers for other festivals were viewed as artists and savants. A perfectly acceptable and commonplace explanation for any booking was, "I book the bands that I would like to see."
While we deeply respected those festivals and bookers, we rejected that ideology for Firefly. We decided we would book every artist collaboratively, with a core team of four aligning on every offer, and a pipeline of a dozen researchers bringing pitches to the table.
More importantly, we sought to apply science into the artistic equation: we envisioned an opportunity to use data and analytics to be the Moneyball of music festivals.
The first step was data collection. We asked fans to tell us who they wanted to see at Firefly, and they were happy to help. Thousands responded to the call, providing an enthusiasm rating for 40 randomly selected artists from a pool of 600+, and also providing their dream lineup through an open-ended field.
ANALYTICS
The earliest applications of our data gathering were two ranked lists:
one, a list of all the bands polled in order of average rating, and
the other, a list of open-ended responses by frequency.
From there, we parsed the data to help answer tough questions:
which artists were most polarizing?
which bands were safe but unexciting?
which bands were lesser-known among our fans?
which bands were a value at their quoted price?
which bands were worth spending big for?
These early tools provided critical background to key decisions, and over time our data set grew until we counted 1,000,000+ data points, fan personas, and a lineup simulator in our talent considerations.
GROWING THROUGH THE YEARS
All of our talent strategies and philosophies helped us grow Firefly season over season,
expanding the fan base every year while retaining and deepening our core audience.
Legacy headliners helped to grow the festivals draw and status, and by the time we landed Paul McCartney to headline the 2015 festival, Firefly had grown to 90,000 daily attendees and one of the largest festivals in the world.
With our 2016 lineup, my final booking with the team before joining the Vikings, our tools and strategies were fully developed. We delivered a broad and deep lineup delivering on our long-term ideals to join the ranks of the
multi-genre mega-festivals counted among U.S. cultural institutions.
And continuing the year-over-year trend from the previous four seasons, my final lineup on the team produced the most profitable festival yet.
