Music Festival Out to Snag Tourist Bucks

Music industry big wigs get together to bring tourist dollars to the Sea-To-Sky corridor and rock the west coast.

B.C.’s biggest music festival has ambitions that stretch beyond bringing great music to the Sea-To-Sky corridor: Squamish Valley Music Festival (formerly Squamish Live) organizers brand.LIVE also want to increase tourism to the province and provide Squamish with a shot of economic activity, and have been reaching out to destination marketing organizations to do so.

Paul Runnals, senior vice-president creative and production for brand.LIVE, says the organization is trying to replicate Europe’s festival energy and culture, which is a massive economic driver for tourism across the pond, in particular for smaller communities that explode for a week or two each year when these über-concerts come to town.

“We’re taking that model of diverse programming and trying to develop a sense of festival culture by bringing it into a contemporary strategy in aligning ourselves with the tourism associations,” he says, citing destination marketing organizations Tourism Vancouver, Tourism Squamish and Tourism Whistler.

While funding for the festival, now in its fourth year, has been done entirely privately through a partnership with global concert promoter Live Nation and billion dollar holding company T&M Management Services Inc. (parent company to brand.LIVE, Boston Pizza, Mr. Lube, Frog Box and others), the festival has also attracted considerable sponsorship funding, including Virgin Mobile as title partner. At a cost of about $2 million to put on the event, organizers expect this year to see revenues from the festival for the first time.

Brand.LIVE has doubled both its overall programming and production budget for 2013, expanding its site capacity from 13,000 per day (in 2012) to accommodate 17,000 attendees per day. Tickets for the three-day event went on sale March 2 and have already sold more than three times the number to date as last year.

According to brand.LIVE, of the 100,000 visits to this year’s festival website, analytics show that 34 per cent of the traffic is coming from outside B.C., 16 per cent from Alberta and Ontario and 10 per cent from the U.S.

“This is a huge hike as most of our visitors came from the lower mainland last year,” says Greggory Hegger, director communications and partnerships for brand.LIVE.

Camping at the show is already 80 per cent sold out, and accommodations in Squamish for the August weekend are also almost at capacity, resulting in a need to push beyond the town’s boundaries to accommodate concertgoers.

“We’re starting to penetrate deeper into the Whistler market and offering shuttles and commuter service up and down from there, with the same thing starting to happen in Vancouver. We’re trying to create a west coast identity that is unique to the region and certainly to the site,” says Runnals.

While the heavy-hitting lineup that includes Vampire Weekend, Queens of the Stone Age, Band of Horses and indie darling Dan Mangan confirmed to play this year’s Squamish Valley Music Festival (formerly called Squamish Live) is certainly the initial draw for concertgoers, Jordan Melville, president of T&M Management, says that the location is what seals the deal.

“Other festivals might be doing it bigger because they’re more established or they’ve got the population or just by being around longer, but I don’t see anyone doing a festival better than we can—or more beautiful for that matter. We deliver a fantastic experience in a beautiful setting.”

This year’s festival dates are August 9 and 10 at the Loggers Sports grounds in Squamish.