Osheaga : A field trip for the masses

MONTREAL - If you’re from out of town, good luck getting a hotel room in Montreal this weekend.

“We (just) got the numbers for occupancy, and it’s 98.6 per cent on Saturday night,” said Nick Farkas, director of the Osheaga Music and Arts Festival. “Almost every single room in the city is booked. Try finding a room now, and it’s impossible. There’s nothing left.”

You may have noticed it last year, if you were among the 40,000-per-day attendees as the festival sold out all its days for the first time in its seven-year history: this was major-league stuff. Throngs of people, everywhere, all day and all evening long. It was a far cry from Osheaga’s early editions, some of which made do with a modest 10,000 fans on slow days.

“Last year was just crazy,” Farkas said. “I think the big turning point was getting Eminem (in 2011). Last year it went exponential. Our sales quadrupled over the year before. … The first day that tickets went on sale, I was in Toronto for Canadian Music Week. I saw the ticket counts and I said, ‘This can’t be right. Somebody’s pulled a bunch of tickets for stores or something.’ It didn’t make sense compared to the previous year. Nobody expected it.”

Days away from Osheaga’s eighth edition, which runs Friday to Sunday, Farkas was still coming to terms with just how big his baby has become. Saturday and Sunday have been sold out for a couple of weeks already. As of last Tuesday, there were only about 500 tickets left for opening day. By Thursday, those too were gone.

The festival’s numbers are actually up this year, as the site has been expanded to accommodate 42,500 people each day.

So how did it happen? What put Osheaga over the top? It may well have been Eminem. But previous headliners included mainstream attractions Coldplay and Jack Johnson. Ultimately, it may have come down to what author Malcolm Gladwell calls the tipping point — the moment when something goes from being a thing to a phenomenon, carried by word of mouth, hype and an inexplicable surge of momentum that takes on a life of its own.

“Eminem put us on the map — we got a lot more international notice from Americans and Europeans,” Farkas said, trying to quantify the fest’s success. “That took us to another level in terms of people having heard of (Osheaga).

“Last year, we built on that. We got love right away from (highly influential music website) Pitchfork, which went a long way toward making word spread across the Internet and various social media platforms.

“(News of) the lineup spread really, really, really fast and wide, in terms of page views and hits. We were trending on Twitter across Canada. It had a big impact. I don’t know what exactly happened. The fest always had good credibility, in terms of the perception of the lineup. I think it just finally hit the point where … all of a sudden people were buying tickets. Before, people were talking about it but not coming.”

The biggest difference in attendance has been from tourism. More than 60 per cent of last year’s festivalgoers came from outside the province. Alongside North American rock festivals such as Coachella in California and Lollapalooza in Chicago, Osheaga has become a destination event, drawing music fans from near and far. But Farkas explained his fest’s success has been earned.

“From the start, when we embarked on this, we had five stages and spent a lot of money on production, to optimize the fan and band experience,” he said. “We knew it would never work as just a Montreal or Quebec festival. We had to get people to travel in order to make it viable.”

Last year, the formerly intimate Green Stage was moved to a near

y field, effectively creating a mid-size venue that could accommodate approximately 10,000 people, in contrast to the previous location, which held a fraction of that number. A victim of its own success, the change led to foot-traffic jams as fans migrated back and forth to catch different shows.

The problem was quickly fixed, however, as organizers reacted to feedback on the fly. This year, they have added an extra bridge (leading over a road on the way to the Green Stage area) to ensure a smooth commute, and again moved the stage, which can now accommodate 17,500 people.

“We’re (also) focusing our programming on scheduling acts, so as to avoid massive influxes of people in either direction,” Farkas said. “Adequate flow patterns are something we never thought of before. We were always focusing on the lineup, and making it better than the last year.”

This year’s roster is one of the heaviest-hitting yet, with an impressive depth of talent led by some nifty top draws.

“We’ve got Mumford & Sons (on Sunday), which is one of the biggest acts in the world right now,” Farkas said, “The Cure (Friday), and Beck (Saturday), who we’ve been trying to get for the past eight years. It all fell into place.”

Source: montrealgazette

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