Initial Concepts and Opportunity Areas

Although music festivals are discrete events produced by different organizations, music festival audiences always complete a similar set of planning and coordinating tasks in order to attend them, and the anticipatory and reflective, post-festival experience of attending any music festival is similar to any other.

While there are similarities between the support services many larger music festivals provide to their audiences in the planning and anticipatory phases of the activity cycle, such as informational documents or instructional guides or FAQs, few music festivals provide substantial support to the post-event experience beyond a message board or an active social media page. The average festival producer must look instantly to the next year or next event in order to make the next profit and build the next experience for new customers – but the audience member’s experience with past events do not end instantly after they’ve returned home. Exactly what happens and how audience members feel in between events isn’t in the interests of festival producer, but to festival fans, these in-between times are almost as important as the events themselves.

 Currently, there is no substantial umbrella service or online community that successfully supports the ongoing processes of music festival experiences of planning, communication, anticipation, reflection and sharing. There is no collective music festival knowledge repository, or any service that successfully connects and archives content relating to different music festivals for the larger music festival enthusiast community, over time. Generally speaking, once a festival has graduated from a future event to a past event, the content related to the event is lost to the wilds of the internet for festival enthusiasts to harvest or dig up on their own.

According to my research, a large majority of individuals who are interested in music festivals attend more than one per year, and many hope to continue attend them in to the future, even as they move through new life phases. This means there will be lots of anticipatory and reflective festival activity phases to support and many festivals attended over a lifetime. My design concepts will aim to support the ongoing experience with multiple music festivals and the times in between them, in order to make the act of attending music festivals easier, more meaningful, enriching, educational and ideally, even more fun for audiences everywhere.

Concept 1: Support three levels of sharing and reflection around music festivals: personal, small/social group, and larger festival community

Concept 2: Connect disparate music festival experiences with one umbrella service (making note of similarities and differences)

Concept 3: Support basic festival needs and activities for festival-goers with an online community (that encourages active participation)

An interesting rant on the limits of data bandwidth and mobile device use at large music festivals:

"This all left me wondering – what if? What if there was an open pipe, both up and down, that could handle all that traffic? What if everyone who came to the show knew that pipe would be open, and work? What kind of value would have been created had that been the case? How much more data would have populated the world, how much richer would literally millions of people’s lives been for seeing the joyful expressions of their friends as they engaged in a wonderful experience? How much more learning might have countless startups gathered, had they been able to truly capture the real time intentions of their customers at such an event?"

"But I also like to take a minute here or there to connect to the people I love, or who follow me, and share with them my passions and my excitement. We are becoming a digital society, to pretend otherwise is to ignore reality. And with very few exceptions, it was just not possible to intermingle the digital and the physical at Coachella." - John Battelle

http://battellemedia.com/archives/2012/04/a-coachella-fail-ble-do-we-hold-spectrum-in-common.php

The Festival Experience Survey, by the numbers:

330 total respondents 

from 40 different states in the US

and 6 countries including Canada, Mexico, Germany, Thailand, Australia, the UK and Thailand

 98% of survey respondents were planning to attend another music festival in the future.

96% of respondents reported positive changes in their outlook or felt more optimistic about life in general after a music festival.

94% were willing to travel even farther than they ever had before for a music festival.

84% had experienced festival ‘comedown’ or post-festival depression.

84% felt proud that they attend music festivals and wanted other people to know.

75% discussed events beforehand online on message boards or social media.

75% did not plan stop attending music festivals at any point in the future.

67% shared photos and media they collect after an event.

55% were between 22 and 30 years old.

39% had traveled between 300-1000 miles (one-way) for a music festival, and 33% had traveled even farther than that!

A draft conceptual model for a music festival - as experienced by an audience member

A music festival acts as a crucial space of displacement from the everyday, where many brains and bodies come together to attempt to sync through a shared, larger experience. The primary syncing agent is music, and the secondary syncing agent is the venue. Music provides a common thread to unite people and different social groups within the space of the music festival.

My model is the following: a music festival, as experienced by an audience member, is fundamentally about physical and social displacement followed by alignment (or re-alignment). This displacement affords a new space for learning both about the self, one's social network, other people, and of course, about music and the event itself. 

This model illustrates my theory that that the novel foreignness of the music festival environment  provides individuals with a a crucial space for growth and reflection - and can be an agent for positive personal change and increased music appreciation and understanding.

First forays into ideating. Solutionizing? Conceptual model interventions?

I think at this point I've developed a fairly nuanced understanding of the music festival experience from the point of view of audiences, the activities that surround them, people's motivations for attending them, and how they can enhance people's lives. I am working on developing visual/conceptual models for most of these areas, which should allow me to better explain them to other people.

So of course, the next step will be to step in to the spaces I've identified and start to build something that supports the experiences of people operating in those spaces (that is, planning for, talking about and going to music festivals!). 

My initial ideas are of course, currently web or app-supported experiences. (Unfortunately I can't ideate quite so far out in to the future where people aren't using their laptops or other personal computing devices to interact with the services I build.) The metaphor of a social media network comes quickly to mind when I think about how to begin to explain the service I'm starting to envision, but the the primary difference between the current social media models currently in use is that my idea, other than some planning and coordinating tools, will not be about the ever-changing present, not 'now-centric', but more about sharing, memory, personal reflection and of course, music. Ideally this will support the three levels of music festival (human) experience I've landed on conceptually, which are your personal experience, your immediate social group's experience, and the larger festival community.

Given these initial visions, I've started reading about design for behavior change and persuasive design (and have rapidly become a fan of BJ Fogg and The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab).

Also happy to announce that I'll be attending the International Music Festival Conference in Austin this December! I will be there to absorb everything I can from current festival industry professionals and get another hefty dose of the business and artist's perspective on the current state of music festivals.

Ideas never come out neatly the first time.

The Music Festival Activity Cycle

 

A Plethora of Sketches.

...and that's not even all of them.