Loading...
Answers
MenuIf I build all of the operation expenses for a music festival, how should I request to be paid?
Should I be paid a flat fee or percentage?
Answers
Hello I am Priyanka.
In this I would like to share my personal experience with you.
Being profitable goes beyond booking the right bands, picking the right location, and driving a successful marketing campaign. Even if the fest is popular, it won’t matter if you’re losing money by pricing your tickets too low or racking up overhead costs.
It all comes down to revenue and expenses: Your biggest revenue boost comes from ticket sales, and the best way to reduce your expenses is through sponsorship. With that in mind, here’s how to ensure your music festival is profitable year after year:
Build a solid ticketing strategy.
You’ve got eyeballs on your ticketing page, but not all of those visitors are buying tickets. If your conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who buy tickets) is low, you may need a more streamlined ticketing process.
It also could be that your ticket prices just seem too high for the bands you’ve lined up or your fest’s reputation. Or consider the opposite scenario: You’re worried you won’t sell enough tickets, so you set them at a price point you think will sell. It works. But you’re not making enough from those sales to turn a profit.
“Ticketing is the most important part of the festival from a business standpoint. It has to be right,” says Tom Russell, cofounder of Founders Entertainment. With a value-based ticket pricing strategy, you can find the pricing sweet spot that’s appealing to fans — and good for your bottom line. There are also some sure-fire pricing tactics that will help you make more money.
Early sales are a great tool. Our research shows the average music fest has five to six different early-sale tiers, offering an average discount of 10%. A discount like that should be small enough to not compromise revenue — and appealing enough to early bird buyers to give you a nice boost in sales.
If you’d like to offer a more limited discount, quantity-based tiers, in which the first X number people to use a certain discount code get a better price, might help drive early sales and cultivate scarcity.
You can also send last year’s attendees discount codes that can only be used by new attendees, so they have an excuse to invite more friends — and widen your fan base.
On the other end of the ticketing spectrum, premium packages like VIP passes are an easy way to bump up revenue without pricing out lower-spending attendees. Recent research shows some events bring in 25% of their revenue from VIP sales alone. That could mean anything from exclusive areas to drink discounts to backstage passes to free merch.
Now that you know these revenue-boosting tricks, how do you go about reducing your expenses?
Get sponsors to help you out.
More festivals than ever doesn’t just mean more competition for fans; it also means more competition for sponsors. More than a third of event organizers surveyed by Eventbrite said they struggled to stand out to sponsors. Among those who organize fests with less than 5,000 attendees, nearly 2/3 struggled.
But securing those sponsorships is critical to putting on a great show without driving up ticket prices.
To stand out from the crowd, offer ways for brands to build real relationships with fans. A logo on the stage isn’t enough. Fans need to interact with the products or brand in new ways. From an interactive exhibit or social media photo opp to bioreactive wristbands, there are lots of ideas out there on how to get brands on board with your fest.
The most important step in this process, though, is to know who your fans are and what they want. Why? Because you need to be able to sell the brands on your fans. They know who their customers are, and they want to know they’ll be at your show.
In addition to demographic info like age, gender, geography, and income, you should be able to provide some idea of your fans’ spending habits, lifestyle, and why they choose to come to your festival. Gather this info through custom questions in your purchase flow, or with surveys before or after the festival.
For more tips on selling tickets, cutting costs, and using new data to make your festival efficient and profitable,
For further queries you can consult me.
I have been both an event planner (designing and implementing the concept from scratch) and working with existing events in business development or sponsorships, for events during major film festivals and others.
The answer to you question really depends on a few factors:
- have you worked with this festival before? Do you trust them?
- Are they funded or are they seeking funding?
- Have you discussed amounts for the fee or percentage?
I personally would suggest a hybrid of reduced fee plus percent if it's reasonable that you should share in the success of the festival.
To do it on percentage alone has a risk of not materializing if for some reason the festival does not get funded or doesn't go ahead - then you will have done the planning work, yet receive nothing.
I believe I've already answered this when you phrased the question differently.
To recap: 33% upfront, 33% at setup of the event, and the balance at the conclusion of the event.
Related Questions
-
What is the most creative way to introduce myself (and therefore my service) to 100 key decision-makers without selling or pitching anything?
You've answered your own question. Reach out to your prospects with the question, such as "How would you...". Ask what people want then give it to them if you can with integrity and thoughtfulness.DI
-
How did Snapchat boast a solid user base within a short period of time, compared to Facebook and Twitter?
I've been in the picture messaging space for a while now with my apps Lutebox (voted one of London's top ten most loved apps) and now Click Messenger. I've written a few articles about the space including a recent post about the Future of Mobile Messaging. Snapchat started out as an app called Picaboo, which pretty much did what it does now (prior to the latest update with chat and video calling). They quickly rebranded but saw a little uptake in user numbers and had quite low downloads for several months. Then around Christmas 2011 one of the founders' mom had told her friend about the app, who told her kid and her kid basically then spread the word throughout their high school in L.A. That was what really blew up their download numbers as it spread across teenagers at local high schools. As far as I know they didn't advertise in the early days, relied solely on word of mouth. Also it is assumed that they have a solid user base. Comparatively speaking, their user base may be in the low tens of millions, which may a great base of users, but nowhere even close to being as big as Facebook or Twitter. I'd be happy to speak about this in more detail or about the picture messaging landscape and what I believe to be the future of mobile messaging.AA
-
What are average profit margins in Ice Cream store business?
Hi! I am owner of an ice crean chain with 45 stores in Chile. We have stores in shopping centers, streets and also karts that you can put in events and parks. The average cost margin of ice cream (depends on the amount of materials you use in producing the ice cream) is around 40%. This is italian gelatto where you serve the ice cream without a specific measurement so your costs can vary due to the size of each portion you serve. About the brand you should focus on your unique value proposition and what kind of ice cream you are selling. We import the pastry from Italy and the fruits and milk from our country. Your ROI depends on your sales price and costs. If you focus on high market ice cream you can charge high and keep costs down.MF
-
About to launch our new eCommerce website selling well priced unique watches. What is the best initial marketing strategy to use with minimal cost?
Here are some answers for you that I believe will help you. 1. You should implement a long term and short term strategy right at the beginning. What I mean is that there are essential parts to your marketing like SEO and content marketing that you need to implement right in the beginning, but will take a while to filter through, but these are essential if you want to have organic traffic. That would be L-T. The best for Short term for a newly launched site is ad's. Word of warning though. Know your customers demographics such as age, income, education etc, know your competitors demographics and then find the platform (such as social media channels) where your ideal customer is based on those researched demographics and then roll out targeted ad's for them. 2. You have to implement social media strategies right from the beginning of course, based on your demographic research. 3. Get busy Blogging - start with content marketing now. 4. Sweepstakes - start a giveaway to get traction with clients and create awareness. 5. Make sure you collect emails as these are like gold dust for future email marketing. 6. Video marketing is essential for competitive retail space and very powerful to get found on search engines like Google. Prior to me launching my digital marketing business 5 years ago, I built an online retail business and made many expensive mistakes. And they can be costly if not implemented correctly from the beginning. So in summary: SEO - very important, Ad's, Social Media, Sweepstakes, Blogging, Video & email marketing. I trust this will assist you. Let me know if you wish to have a call to discuss these or have follow up questions. Regards KennethKT
-
How does my startup hire an affordable marketing expert?
I don't even know how to answer this. Do you know what the difference between McDonalds and the local burger joint that is filing for bankruptcy is? It's marketing. McDonalds is worth billions of dollars not because of the quality of their food, but because of their marketing. Marketing is not an expense. A janitor is an expense. Your computer is an expense. Marketing is an INVESTMENT. Would you shop around for the cheapest heart surgeon? Of course not. Because you would likely end up dead. Why, then, do you shop around for a marketing expert? Are you ok with your company going bankrupt? Is that worth the small savings to you? No. Of course not. Hire someone who is good at marketing. Hire someone who knows what they are doing. Buy yourself a Lamborghini with your profit the first quarter. Get a beach house in hawaii. Grab a yacht. Or, try to find your business the cheapest heart surgeon you can and then spend the next five years wondering why such a solid business idea failed in the first 6 months. I'm passionate about this exact topic because all those statistics you read about "70% of businesses failing in two years" are solely because of horrible marketing.AM
the startups.com platform
Copyright © 2025 Startups.com. All rights reserved.