Walk the Moon and Snoop Dogg are set for the inaugural PromoWest Fest in Columbus, Ohio.
In a highly consolidated world, PromoWest Productions has been proudly flying the flag of independent promotion from its Columbus, Ohio, homebase for more than three decades. With more than 400 shows a year and ownership and operation of nine venues, the company just announced its latest growth initiative: the July 15-17 PromoWest Fest.
Scott Stienecker
"The wave of this industry is the festival game… all the major promoters are in it now and I've been concerned for a while that someone might come along and do a rock/alternative festival with the kind of acts we work with," said PromoWest President and CEO Scott Stienecker of his first original hometown festival offering.
The move comes a year after the company's 2014 purchase of the Cincinnati-based Bunbury Music Festival and its festival. The PromoWest Fest will take place in Columbus' Arena District, with three stages spread out across McFerson Commons and North Bank Park, with sets from Walk the Moon, Modest Mouse, Snoop Dogg, Brand New, LL Cool J, Mac Miller and All Time Low, as well as a number of local and regional lower-bill acts.
"I've thought about it for years and there have been attempts to do this in Columbus, but after doing Bunbury last year in Cincinnati, the powers that be here called a meeting and asked me why we weren't doing a Bunbury in Columbus," Stienecker said of a high-powered get together with representatives from the Columbus Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Columbus Foundation and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. "I said, 'I've thought about it for a few years, now is the time!'"
With a $3-million outlay for talent and production, PromoWest Fest is a big gamble, but Stienecker said the positive response he's gotten from agents and managers who've played Bunbury convinced him that 30 years of good will and good bookings could help him expand his festival portfolio.
"Bunbury is definitely a template for it," said the festivals' founder, Bill Donabedian. "There's no magic to doing events. A lot of it is can you do those things and be organized… The magic comes from what's that brand going to be like and what kind of talent can you get? Scott has built a great business over the years and has a lot of leverage."
Frankly, Donabedian said for years he was surprised that the Midwest didn't have a big festival before Bunbury. Not in Indianapolis, Columbus or Cincinnati. "Why is that? You have to have leverage in the marketplace to procure those artists and put together that lineup," Donabedian said. "He's built a hell of a brand over the last 30 years and now he's applying it to the festival business."
The move will put Stienecker in competition with a number of other local festivals, including June's long-running ComFest, September's Independents' Day and the Labor Day's Fashion Meets Music Festival, which has taken place in the Arena District since 2014. It will also go up against another nearby event, early June's growing 12-year-old Nelsonville Music Festival, which will feature sets from Randy Newman, Courtney Barnett, Lake Street Drive and Gary Clark Jr. in a bucolic setting just 60 miles southeast of downtown. (Nelsonville is the same weekend as this year's Bunbury).
While he said those Columbus-based events have different audiences and mostly focus on more local and regional talent, the bigger trick for Stienecker is standing out from such established big players as Live Nation's Lollapalooza and AC Entertainment's Bonnaroo. With both of those events expanding their former 250-mile radius clauses to 350 miles – encompassing, respectively, Cincinnati and Columbus – Stienecker said he was practically forced to buy Bunbury so a competitor wouldn't snatch it up first and start his own event to have some skin in the game.
With the addition of PromoWest Fest, Stienecker's portfolio now numbers nine venues, including Lifestyle Communities Pavilion (5,000-capacity outdoor, 2,200 indoor and a 10,000 capacity festival grounds), the 2,000-capacity Newport Music Hall, as well as three other venues in Columbus and three in Pittsburgh.
For more than 30 years, Stienecker has built a quixotic business by building up the music appetite in his hometown with efforts like EXPRESS LIVE! and Stage AE, promoted as the fist indoor/outdoor venues of their kind with a reversible stage. The self-described ninth-largest promoter in the nation prides itself on helping to do the old fashioned footwork necessary to grow acts, grooming them in the tiny Basement venue, then moving them up to the 350-capacity space just above, the A&R Music Bar, and then through the ranks of its other holdings.
In 2009, the company launched the weekly locally produced live music show "PromoWest Live," which features concert footage shot at PromoWest venues and airs after "Saturday Night Live" on NBC stations in Columbus and Pittsburgh.
It doesn't sound like Stienecker is done, either. He said he was asked to steer clear of the other Columbus-based events this year, but plans to switch up the timing of PromoWest Fest in 2017 to avoid getting scooped by the European festival circuit. He is also considering launching another festival in 2017 in keeping with PromoWest's core proposition: price consciousness.
"Bunbury will sell out for sure at 60,000 and we think PromoWest Fest will do around 15,000 a day (for a total of 45,000) and with the huge social media following we have, we think it will be a good launch," he said. "We've always worked to keep the prices down and at $169 for a 3-day ticket [for PromoWest] it might be one of the cheapest festivals in the country. It's all about being independent and not coming off as a corporate money grabber."
Contacted for this story: Scott Stienecker, (614) 461-5483; Bill Donabedian, info@eskpresents.com