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Warped Tour's beat goes on
Music fans keep coming back to big bang for small bucks
from: rockymountainnews.com
by Mark Brown, Rocky Mountain News
Not long ago festival tours were the future - a way for fans to cheaply see a number of unknown bands, find something they liked and embrace it.
Nine Inch Nails and Pearl Jam broke out in the early '90s on Lollapalooza tours, turning that festival into the gold standard for musical adventure and discovery.
But a decade after its heyday, the national festival is all but dead in most cases.
Lollapalooza tried a disastrous comeback that saw the cancellation of an entire tour; it now confines itself to two days in Chicago.
Ozzfest is gearing down from past years, with its namesake Ozzy Osbourne doing only select dates along this tour. The Lilith Festival, headed as a personal passion by Sarah McLachlan, is on indefinite hiatus. The HORDE tour of jam bands is gone, as are plenty of other attempted festival tours that never made it.
In the middle of the wreckage, however, stands the Warped Tour. In its 12th year, it has seen unprecedented growth every year, mainly by sticking to its core values. When the show is here Sunday with 52 bands across two main stages and several smaller ones, fans will find tickets still priced at just $27.25.
Ticket sales are down slightly this year, though still strong. "It'll still be our second or third largest year. I don't look at 600,000 tickets as a failure," Warped founder/producer Kevin Lyman says.
"Honestly I don't know how Kevin Lyman does it. He's averaging 7,000 or 8,000 (tickets) per city," says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar Magazine.
Promoters and industry insiders chalk up the success to a handful of factors. Beyond the low ticket prices, they say, Warped also offers a consistent product, a safe environment, an unwavering ethos, a smart approach to sponsorship and unparalleled access to the bands.
"It's consistency with the brand. On the Warped Tour, you have a lot of new up-and-coming bands" along with veterans such as JOAN JETT and NOFX, Lyman says. "You can learn some history of what this music is about as well as what's current."
Big draw in Denver
While Warped may average 8,000 tickets in other towns, in Denver it has sold out the past two years with 20,000 attending.
After early years set up on the University of Colorado's Boulder campus and then the Adams County Fairgrounds, Warped has found a bigger audience after moving to the parking lot surrounding Invesco Field at Mile High.
"Moving it down to Invesco Field was key, because we got transportation with the light rail," says Doug Kauffman of local promoter Nobody in Particular Presents. "Since we moved it to that location, we're into the 20,000-plus range. It has built into the youth lifestyle event of the summer."
No matter the location, the price tag has remained a key selling point for the tour in Denver and across the country.
"People know they're going to be able to see 25 bands for what it would cost to see one," Kauffman says (acknowledging that it's physically impossible to see all the 50-plus acts on mutliple stages).
Warped's average national ticket price is $27.14, "and that's the story right there," Bongiovanni says.
"That's extremely affordable. Given the volume of bands, fans recognize that that's an incredible bargain," he says.
Safety amid the mosh pit
One key is making Warped safe; despite its edgy reputation, plenty of security, medical help and other safety issues are paramount to its success, as organizers are looking to pull in the mid-teen crowd.
"If I have people coming to the Warped Tour after 20, it's a bonus. I want the brothers and sisters to go home and say, 'I had so much fun at the Warped Tour,' " Lyman says. "I'm trying to get that brother or sister who's 13, 14 or 15 to have their first music experience at the Warped Tour."
"Obviously the bands participate in it because they want to play to that crowd," Bongiovanni says. "For an act like JOAN JETT it's a great career move - putting her in front of all these kids who have heard of her but would probably never go to one of her shows."
"The Warped Tour is never gonna be a huge payday. It's a payday for the exposure you can get and the merchandise you can sell," Lyman says. "There's no way I could pay JOAN JETT what she gets paid on her own. This was a great opportunity. She's looking at this as a promotional tour as much as anything."
The continued growth of the Internet has changed the way the tour proceeds. Word of mouth via MySpace.com from early shows piques fans' interest in bands they had previously never heard.
New acts also get a boost by the tour's longstanding practice of shuffling the line-up each day. No one knows when the top acts will take the stage until the day of the show, so fans must show up at the start to ensure they don't miss the "headliners."
Fresh bands see "their crowds grow every day," including newcomer Every Time I Die. "First few days, it's a couple of hundred people. Now you're starting to see thousands go to see them," Lyman says.
Corporate sponsorship, once the bane of boomer-era artists, is what keeps Warped alive, with sponsors for cell phones, energy drinks, online music services and other youth-oriented activities key in the mix.
"The tour couldn't exist without the sponsorship dollars that Kevin cobbles together," Bongiovanni says. "He has a proven track record that makes it a lot easier."
"We use our corporate sponsorship money to offset a good chunk of being on the road," Lyman says.
By carefully choosing sponsors and making sure many of them do cool giveaways, "we try to integrate them into the show, and that's what we've done well. The kids will feel they're part of the show, and we're not just pitching them," he says.
On regular rock shows, he notes, "sometimes you go to the amphitheater and it just doesn't connect with what's going on."
Surviving where others failed
And that's why other tours have failed - the disconnect.
"I think they lost their focus. I worked on the first few Lollapaloozas," Lyman says. "When they started getting Metallica and those bands on there . . . then HORDE had the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Neil Young. You alienate your core audience."
Bongiovanni concurs: "Metallica was almost a nail in the coffin for Lollapalooza. The tour did worse business than a solo Metallica tour. The core Metallica fans didn't want to sit through the other bands. And it was a more expensive show. It lost some of its indie vibe.
"It's difficult to put that many bands onstage and still make money unless it's something the artists themselves want to play. Austin (City Limits Festival) has that going for it, for example. It's a cool place to play, just like Bonnaroo."
Some defunct tours, such as the Lilith Fair, succeeded only with a sense of purpose and a definite shelf life.
"Lilith was successful because it was an artist-driven tour. You couldn't have afforded to put that talent onstage if you were a commercial promoter buying all those artists. All the artists got behind Sarah (McLachlan) in a big way," Bongiovanni says. "It's an awful lot of work, and it is financially fairly risky."
Denver is a strong Warped market in part because - despite fans' complaints - local radio is truly more vibrant here than in most markets
"Anytime you play as much new music as we do you're not gonna be able to ignore the Warped Tour," says Nerf, program director and afternoon DJ at Channel 93.3, KTCL-FM. "They have some of the most innovative acts . . . (that represent) where music is going."
Channel 93.3 not only sponsors and helps publicize the show but has an interview stage set up on the grounds where "we try to get as many of the bands as possible to come by," Nerf says.
Many of those musicians wander through the crowd during the day.
"That's what the Warped Tour is about - connecting on a different level," Nerf says. "On most shows these days the artists are untouchable. It's pretty cool to break down that wall."
As long as the wall - and ticket prices - stays down, Warped should have a future.
"I've just always been a fan of what Kevin can do with that tour. And he's not milking it for every penny he can make. It's a labor of love," Bongiovanni says. "There are easier ways to make money than baby-sit 40 bands around the country."
The Warped Tour
• The lineup: Features more than 50 bands, including JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS, Less Than Jake, NOFX, Billy Talent, Bouncing Souls, The Academy Is . . ., The Living End, 30 Seconds to Mars, Hit By A Bus and Secret Lives Of The Free Masons
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