Why I Don't Announce Artist Lineups for Our Music Festivals Anymore

We just sold out our latest music festival, “R&B ONLY FEST”, in Dallas, TX and a lot of people have asked me how we did that with no artist lineup announced. I thought this would be a good time to share the reason and framework behind this concept as I know this is relatively unheard of in the live music industry. The capacity/ticket numbers I’m including throughout are rounded in an effort to simplify the explanation.

Let’s start in 2019. I was trying to raise awareness about the R&B ONLY brand which at this time was holding shows in 500–1,500 capacity venues. Our approach to live shows was simple but unique compared to typical concerts. An entertaining host coupled with a talented DJ would take fans through a journey of R&B music from past to present in front of incredible stage production. I was always intentional about our event being recognized as a “show” and not a “party” even though there was no traditional artist present. One approach was attempting to get us booked to play our DJ sets at well-known music festivals. A lot of agents and talent buyers didn’t see the vision and that route didn’t really work out so I decided to produce my own festivals and book my damn self.?

It was somewhere around this time that we made the decision to stop calling our touring show “R&B ONLY” and change it to “R&B ONLY LIVE”. That distinction may sound subtle, but if we were going to be producing outdoor festivals (R&B ONLY FEST — all day with supplemental R&B artist performances alongside our DJs/hosts), we needed to differentiate the experience from our touring show. R&B ONLY LIVE is typically held at indoor concert venues, occurs at night, and is primarily DJ/host driven.

The idea was to have one brand and two live shows (for now). R&B ONLY LIVE and R&B ONLY FEST.

FESTIVAL #1: R&B ONLY FEST — ORLANDO, FL (SEPTEMBER 2019)

Capacity: 10,000

Tickets sold: 1,250

The first R&B ONLY FEST was a good test run but we were severely undersold just barely cracking 1,250 tickets.?

We had been consistently selling out a venue in Orlando that was around a 2,000 capacity room. To now have artists, more production, and activations at this show but sell fewer tickets than our R&B ONLY LIVE shows was an early indication that my plan to scale the business was not working out how I envisioned.?

Even though the first R&B ONLY FEST’s numbers were smaller than R&B ONLY LIVE’s at the time, there were some valuable lessons our team learned.

We had to coordinate with larger production companies for sound, lights, and visuals as the venue was just an open space where we had to bring all of that equipment in. We learned to work with vendors on everything from concessions to activations so that fans had an amazing experience outside of just the music on stage.?

We were so green to the festival space and so eager to make a huge impact that we spent far too much money on a ridiculous activation where fans could take a helicopter ride over the festival grounds to see it from above. As I laid in bed after the show, I can vividly remember myself calculating the damage of the hole I had just burned in my pockets thinking, “Who the hell is coming to a festival to watch it from the sky?!” ??

Needless to say, I lost a ton of money on that festival, and then 8 months later as R&B ONLY LIVE shows were starting to gain more awareness across the country…Hello Covid-19! ???

What happened after that is enough for a Hulu documentary, but this is a piece on why I don’t announce artist lineups for our music festivals so let me stay on track.?

Another lesson learned from our first festival was how to book more well-known artists (Ashanti, Queen Naija, and YK Osiris played alongside our DJs/hosts in Orlando) and incorporate them into our existing format.

While there were ups and downs like any first time festival would expect, our team came out on the other side excited and eager to begin working on the next R&B ONLY FEST. We could have never imagined what was to come as we made the attempt to grow the festival in a stronger market and were introduced to the nightmare of festival billing, lineups, and set times.?

FESTIVAL #2: R&B ONLY FEST — ATLANTA, GA (MAY 2022)

Capacity: 19,000

Tickets sold: 11,000

Since the first R&B ONLY FEST was heavily undersold we decided to partner with the biggest live entertainment company on earth to help us book talent for the ultimate R&B experience in one of our top markets, Atlanta, GA. The thought here was that maybe the artists at the Orlando festival weren’t “big” enough or there weren’t “enough names”. I thought we needed to get a huge list of heavy hitters to bring the fans out. The venue capacity this time was nearly 19,000 and we were just coming off the heels of Covid-19 shutdowns so this attempt was an audacious one, to say the least.

I learned a hell of a lot about billing, lineups, and set times through this process. I’m going to define some key terms below for those that may not understand the jargon us folks in the live music industry speak.

“Billing” is pretty much the placement of an artist’s name listed on the festival’s artwork. That artwork includes the full “lineup” which is the list of all the artists performing at the festival. The more well-known/in-demand artists are typically displayed in a larger font size and placed at the top of the artwork signifying their “headliner” position. Headliners are usually the last act to perform at a festival and in some instances, there can be co-headliners (both billed at the top of the artwork on the same line left to right but one having to perform penultimately).?

Sidebar: As a solo founder/CEO who has many facets of a growing business to run, spending months on the minutia of font sizes of artists' names was excruciatingly painful for me.

Lastly, the moment an artist’s performance time is scheduled to begin is known as the “set time”. Typically, more well-known artists get longer set lengths that happen later in the show.

The above are all key factors in an artist’s booking but the granddaddy of them all is the “appearance fee”, the amount of money paid for the artist to perform at the festival.?

Now, of course, anywhere there is a fee in business, a negotiation is not far behind no matter the industry. I’m no stranger to negotiation and try to be fair with our offers while still protecting the profit margins of the show.?

It’s the festival talent buyer’s job to make sure the show doesn’t go over budget while promoting a lineup that will entice people to purchase tickets. It’s the artist’s agent and/or manager’s responsibility to provide high-quality opportunities that compensate the artists they represent. Understandably, the appearance fee dollar amount plays a huge role on both sides.

Mix these two sides and you can have a recipe for disaster between a festival producer and an agent/manager (typically receiving anywhere from a 10%-20% commission on a booking) when trying to agree on a fair appearance fee.

Although we live in a numbers-driven society, predicting concert ticket sales is one of the hardest things to do in the music industry. Some artists announce a tour, blow through their on-sale, and add multiple nights wherever there is a high demand to see them live. The reverse can also happen and even some of the “biggest” artists in the world can be humbled by overestimating their ticket-selling ability. I noticed that Drake recently downsized his “It’s All A Blur” tour with 21 Savage from stadiums to arenas. Although I can’t confirm the reason behind Drake’s scale back, the probability of an artist’s team admitting publicly that any downward shift in venue sizes is due to low ticket sales is unlikely (arenas are still arenas though, congrats Drizzy).

Streaming numbers, social media followers, individual opinion, and everything else under the sun is brought up when an artist’s representative is trying to justify what their client’s appearance fee is quoted at.

In my opinion, the closest metric connecting how many tickets an artist will sell for an upcoming festival is how many tickets they have sold in the same market at a previous show. I’m aware that this isn’t the greatest rubric as there are so many variables (relevancy, artist’s own show vs. a festival slot, time of year, competing experiences, etc.) that might make their previous sales history more or less impactful to the ticket sales of the festival booking.

Without going into too much detail on our experience booking Atlanta’s R&B ONLY FEST, I got a first-hand look at how a festival’s planning progress could be stuck for months on end. So much time was spent going back and forth with artist’s representatives on not just the dollar amount we needed to agree on for the appearances but other more subjective matters. A few included, who an artist should be performing after or before, their recognition as a headliner, and my favorite thing to argue over (please excuse my sarcasm) the font size of an artist’s name on the festival artwork. I got so tired of all this that at some point in the middle of the process, I decided to just display the bulk of the talent listed in alphabetical order on the festival artwork.

Another lesson learned outside of the masterclass on billing, lineups, and headliners was that there is also another price you pay when using an artist’s likeness to sell tickets. When dealing with high-level talent, many artists have elevated performance standards they want to uphold when people are paying to come and see them live. This could include backline requirements, very specific sound and lighting equipment, extra staging, and unique hospitality needs. I’ve been in the entertainment industry for a long time and all of this is expected to a degree, but many agents and artists like to push the “requirements” needed to perform to the extreme. We quickly found ourselves trying to accommodate each and every need of the R&B ONLY FEST talent roster and not equally prioritizing the most important people at any live show…the fans.

We agreed to a lot of production requests from artists and the mistake of not hiring the right production team was one that cost us. This one wrong move sent us down a disastrous path, running into a litany of problems with the artists as well as our fans.

Our second attempt at R&B ONLY FEST in Atlanta started almost three hours late, had a dysfunctional video wall, and a lack of communication with our fans on what the problems at hand were. With the show running so far behind, I had to make the executive decision to cut all of our in-house R&B ONLY DJ sets or risk not having the time for all of the artists to perform their sets. Since their names had been plastered all over our festival artwork, the mere thought of one of them not actually performing was not an option. Also, the risk of not making curfew would have resulted in a $1,000 penalty for every minute the show ran over (the show ultimately ended an hour late but luckily this $60,000 fee got waived by the city later on). Shoutout to Live Nation and the great people that work at Lakewood Amphitheatre.

While we made it through that day, we had to navigate a social media firestorm of hate (there is a seven-part TikTok series of how bad R&B ONLY FEST in Atlanta was) which was abnormally high.?

At the level we’re at now, we don’t expect to please everyone but this type of negative energy from our fans was different and we knew the show didn’t live up to our standards internally. We had worked on serving our fanbase for years and to see them so disappointed in our DJs/hosts not being able to hit the stage was an indicator of what people truly value at our shows, the entertainment our brand provides. What transpired in Atlanta negatively impacted team morale for months after the show and it was time to think of an alternative festival model. We needed to be able to inject artist performances into R&B ONLY FEST that complimented our DJ sets, while not interfering with the unique experience our fans connect with at an R&B ONLY LIVE show.?

FESTIVAL #3: R&B ONLY FEST — DALLAS, TX (MARCH 2023)

Capacity: 8,000

Tickets sold: 8,000

After Orlando’s lack of sales and Atlanta’s dysfunction, I decided to turn the traditional festival model on its head and commit to not announcing an artist lineup for the next R&B ONLY FEST.?

At the top of last year, we retooled our R&B ONLY LIVE marketing strategy (take a look at our Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube) and in the last half of 2022, our tour started to sell more tickets than ever before. We went into 2023 announcing 35 shows in Q1/Q2 and shortly after we needed to increase that show count to 47. For the first time in R&B ONLY history there was a demand to add multiple nights in many markets like St. Louis (four shows), New York City (three shows), and Atlanta (two shows) just to name a few.

Our homegrown DJ/host-driven show was now selling more tickets than some of the most well-known R&B artists across the nation. A lot more.

This focus on further developing our own brand identity for R&B ONLY LIVE shows while finding product market fit allowed us to imagine the possibility of selling tickets to R&B ONLY FEST without announcing well-known talent. I had never heard of a music festival taking this approach so the thought of being an example of change in an industry where people continuously follow trends was enticing.

We went so deep with this concept that even the festival artwork itself had pictures and videos of our fans experiencing our previous shows instead of famous artist names. This was a subtle signal of how important our fans are to us.?

We let our fans in Dallas know that surprise-guest artists would be alongside us at the show, just not who they were. It was important to prove to ourselves, and the music industry at large, that our audience trusts R&B ONLY’s curation of talent, our DJ’s music selection, and our show’s overall production. After selling out the festival completely just a few moments before the doors opened, our fans ultimately proved their commitment to R&B ONLY. We are so grateful to have the support of our community and are committed to serving them the best R&B vibes in the world.

In Dallas, we tried to over-deliver on the experience for both the fans and the artists. We booked a roster of seven extremely diverse R&B artists (Lucky Daye, Bobby V., Sunshine Anderson, Tweet, Xavier Om?r, Vedo, and Tone Stith) to join our DJs/hosts (Tiara Monique, GabSoul, Apex Laurent, and myself) on stage. Judging by the screams of fans throughout the show and the tears of joy my team and I shed, I’d have to say that R&B ONLY FEST in Dallas, TX was one of the most memorable days of my life.

As an event producer, planning a show’s unexpected “moment” is an art form. There is something very special about the element of surprise at a live event that hits differently than an expected performance, especially when the artist crushes it.

I’d like to thank Lucky Daye, Bobby V., Sunshine Anderson, Tweet, Xavier Om?r, Vedo, and Tone Stith for believing in our vision and leaving everything on that stage in Dallas. It was a pleasure to work with each of these artists and their teams.?

At the beginning of explaining this unorthodox music festival model to a large talent agency, an agent emailed me, “…you must really believe in your brand”.

I then sent this picture back and thought, "seeing is believing".

We’re working on more festivals, the upcoming Fall/Winter R&B ONLY LIVE tour, destination experiences, international events, media content, merchandise, a compilation album, and producing more incredible shows with R&B superstars.

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