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!