Sturgis (S.D.) Pool Party inside the Broken Spoke Campground.
The annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota is already a feast for the eyes and ears. The annual gathering of nearly 500,000 (Aug. 5-11 this year) has brought motorcycle enthusiasts together for 73 years for a week of pub crawls, contests, bike shows, parties and group rides, not to mention plenty of live entertainment.
This year, the Broken Spoke Campground has partnered with Live Nation to put on four major concerts inside the campground for the first time. The initially announced shows include The Black Crowes (Aug. 4), Queens of the Stone Age (Aug. 5), Gary Allan (Aug. 7) and one more as-yet-unannounced show on Aug. 6.
Stacked with plenty of amenities, the 600-acre scenic Broken Spoke campground complex has a 5,000-sq.-ft. swimming pool, two 10-person hot tubs, eight bars and a 30,000-sq.-ft. ride-thru biker bar. A day pass ticket to the resort, which includes general admission to the shows and use of all the facilities, ranges from $53-$58 ($160 for an all-inclusive that also has camping privileges for the entire week), and can be purchased online through Ticketmaster or LN, as well as at participating Walmart stores.
"We always had music, which we did on our own," said Tom Schneider, chief marketing officer for the site's management company, Target Logistics, which specializes in temporary workforce housing of the type seen in oil and gas mining camps. "But this is a property that only really gets going for two weeks out of the year and we booked it ourselves —not national draws, but we did okay."
Those $10-$20 shows allowed the campground to make a little extra coin from the campers and day trippers, but after chatting up a contact at Live Nation last year, Schneider said he had a vision for expanding the site's musical offerings and creating a one-of-a-kind mini-festival.
LN's director of theater and club bookings for New England, John Innamorato, said he visited Broken Spoke last year and watched how good Target Logistics is at taking care of its patrons on the site and saw a lot of potential to expand in the future. "As a festival, there's a lot of possibilities there," he said. "There are a few venues there with entertainment, lots of bars and sites that offer camping, but this [has it all] and it's a start for us and we want to expand it after this first year and grow it."
The event is booked by LN and while Schneider declined to talk specifics, he described the revenue sharing as "pretty even" and said it was a fair deal all around. LN is providing a full-sized stage, complete with rigging and lights and, because the site is so large, he said the space available for patrons at the shows is "elastic." "We can judge it based on ticket sales how big a fence we need to put around it," said Schneider. "We're looking for it to be more intimate than a massive festival, somewhere between 7,500 and 10,000."
He wasn't able to speculate on potential grosses this early, but Schneider said he expects to be in the black in year one and definitely plans to make it an annual event.
While the rally has its own mix of headlining acts, which skew toward country and heavy metal (Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Queensryche, Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert), Schneider said he hopes the campground's lineup is complementary. Besides, the idea at Broken Spoke is to give patrons a full-day experience.
Ticketholders and campers are encouraged to show up early, lounge at the pool, enjoy happy hour and dinner from the high-end catering service, then the concert and a late-night DJ set. "We're bringing in a lot of additional infrastructure, but it's all basically here," Schneider said of the amenity-packed site. "It's truly a resort and we treat people like that."
Innamorato said the booking philosophy was to shoot for a bit of a younger crowd than the other Sturgis headliners, aiming for a (mostly male) 20-45 demographic. "With a lot of the classic rock acts that make their way through, we wanted to try something different and go to a younger demo," he said. Ticket prices were also kept low to appeal to a first-time audience and Innamorato said LN is looking at Broken Spoke as an opportunity to expand into a new, untapped market and source of new festival business.
While much of the marketing for the shows will be done online through social media and by tapping LN's massive existing e-mail database, Schneider will also do some local print, TV and radio and, most importantly, buys in national biker magazines that are guaranteed to reach a big audience of potential Sturgis attendees.
"We'll use traditional media and social media, but also digital, on biker websites and affiliated sites," said Innamorato. "We'll also datamine our [e-mail] databases for an affinity list we work from."
Interviewed for this article: Tom Schneider, (317) 602-7137; John Innamorato, (617) 547-0620