Seattle’s Bumbershoot Arts and Music Festival, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and sandwiched between big, self-important Boomer-era landmarks like Woodstock and flashy Millennial-era upstarts like Bonnaroo and Coachella, is the crusty GenXer of music festivals. After hitting its stride in the 90s and early 2000s, the show settled into a more conventional mode and started showing its age even before the pandemic put the brakes on live events. Now, under new management, Bumbershoot hopes to kick off a new Golden Age with a streamlined two-day event this weekend featuring an eclectic lineup of festival-grade headliners, indie sweethearts, old favorites and a revitalized cultural and community focus.
The 2023 edition of Bumbershoot features the Northwest’s own Sleater-Kinney, a rare appearance by UK-based producer Fatboy Slim, explosive punk and alternative rock from AFI, Grammy-Award Nominee and vocal powerhouse Brittany Howard, rootsy rockers The Revivalists, a body-moving electronic set from globally known producer, Zhu, and Seattle hometown heroes Sunny Day Real Estate. The festival also just added hard-edged Russian performance art dissidents Pussy Riot and several other acts to round out a lineup more reminiscent of the show’s indie and local roots than its more recent incarnation as a top-heavy showcase for big touring acts. Acts perform on five primary stages around the Seattle Center complex, at the base of the Space Needle.
The refocus reflects the philosophy of the show’s new management, a collaboration between festival producer New Rising Sun and nonprofit Third Stone, who signed a 15 year license agreement from the City of Seattle (which owns Bumbershoot) during the pandemic. Bumbershoot itself is a 501(c)3 organization.
“The number one thing we wanted to do when we started is to put an arts lens on everything,” said Steven Severin, Co-President of New Rising Sun & Director of Music Programming, in a phone interview. “We wanted to bring back the feel of the old Bumbershoot from the 90s, where there was all this visual and performance art along with the music. When you run a festival by spreadsheet, you lose that.”
Severin said another priority is to keep the ticket prices affordable, with the goal of someday getting Bumbershoot back to its original mission of being a free end-of-summer celebration for the city of Seattle and fans around the country. Single day tickets for Bumbershoot are $75; the two-day weekend pass is $130. The early bird tickets ($50/$85) available earlier this spring sold out.
“This was all about us bringing it back to the community,” he said. “Making it so that, it’s Labor Day weekend, this is what you’re doing. Tickets to any of our headliners would have cost you more than $50, and we’ve got ten of them for you. So we really wanted to take away every excuse that people have made over the last 10 or 15 years so folks can just come check it out.”
Hitting that goal is even more challenging as costs are 30-35% higher post-pandemic. As a result, the organizers paired down their inaugural event from the traditional four-day Labor Day Weekend extravaganza to a compact two-day festival Saturday and Sunday only.
“It’s our first year, so we wanted to do a few things really, really well instead of a bunch of things mediocre,” Severin explained. “We needed to make sure that we nailed what we did. And while we’re creating all the programming, we’re building our companies. We had to hire everybody, raise money to be able to make tickets affordable, create the education program, and do all the other things at the same time. We wanted to simplify things and I think we did that. And we’ll expand over the years.”
He said the organizers approached Amazon
AMZN
“We would like to have them support it so we can keep these prices down. The last thing we want to do is go back to raising prices. We’re doing everything we can to keep them as low as we can as we want to make it free at some point,” Severin said. “There are enough people here in Seattle who could do that, like it would be a rounding error to them. We’re just starting to have those conversations. As concert promoters, we don’t hang out with a lot of millionaires and billionaires, so we’re learning.”
Severin said the event costs in the neighborhood of $10 million to put on, and that musicians do not discount their rates to play at festivals, so the money has to come from somewhere. He said support from the City of Seattle and the Seattle Center venue, which both stand to benefit from a revitalized Bumbershoot, has been excellent.
One compelling part of the new management’s pitch is the focus and investment on economic development. Co-owner Third Stone is a nonprofit with the mission to “foster an inclusive, energized, and sustainable arts economy in the Pacific Northwest through youth education, festival, spectacle, and community driven programming.” Ahead of this year’s Bumbershoot, Third Stone launched the tuition-free Bumbershoot Workforce Development Program in partnership with The UC Theatre’s Concert Career Pathways program (CCP-X). According to the organizers, this tuition-free, hands-on training program “removes the barriers of entry into the live music business for young people 17 – 25-years-old from historically marginalized communities, supporting the next generation of music industry professionals and laying the groundwork for a more equitable and inclusive music industry.”
Severin said the program proudly graduated its first cohort of 16 earlier this summer. “These are kids who are getting paid gigs around the city, which has been really exciting to see.”
Severin said the new management does not have access to historical ticket sales data, so it is hard to predict the current trajectory of ticket sales and revenues. However, he expects somewhere in the neighborhood of 45-50,000 attendees through the gate over the course of the weekend – enough to fill the venue without creating the kind of frenzied overcrowding that soured some locals on Bumbershoot during its boom years.
“Rolling Stone, once called Bumbershoot the mother of all festivals,” said Severin. “We have the chance to do that again. And we’re putting everything we have into doing that.”
Read the full article here