The Ins and Outs of Starting A Festival

Maybe you’ve heard; festivals are pretty popular nowadays. While seemingly effortless to concoct, the abundance of all this new festivage has led music fans to take for granted the grandiosity of work involved in building a festival from the ground up.

Think about the nightmare of just planning a Super Bowl party for example, where you had to coordinate keeping the Party Ball cold, picking up the Chicken Wings from Pluck U early enough to make kickoff-but not so early that they’d be cold-and making sure there were places for everyone to sit to see the television. Kinda puts it in perspective, when you realize that building a festival is kinda the same thing only you are arranging the party for anywhere from 500x to 5,000x more people, with the addition of high profile musicians, outdoors with nowhere to take a deuce, with food for everyone… And you have to get the A-ok from the community and the cops. You getting the idea? It’s awfully hard work to build a festival and run it smoothly. So, we got in touch with Jimmy Hunt and Wes Hight (despite being Appalachian State fans, grrrr), the founders of the first-ever Music on the Mountain festival in Boone, NC to talk about the challenges and of giving it a go for the first time. Music on the Mountain takes place August 23rd in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains featuring Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, and Perpetual Groove. The mission of the festival aims to raise awareness as well as donate a majority of the proceeds to the cause of renewable energy. We are planning to run this as part of a two part series: before and after. So, we’ll check back with Jimmy and Wes after the festival to see how it went. READ ON for more about the making of a festie...