The Flaming Lips perform at Moogfest in Asheville, N.C., Oct. 29-30, 2011. In 2014 Moogfest is expanding to a five-day event.
When most festivals take a year off, it’s a sign that things are not going well. But Asheville, N.C.-based Moogfest is taking a 12-month break to go bigger. Much bigger. After pausing to regroup in 2013, the annual celebration of the pioneering analog synthesizer from Dr. Robert Moog will expand to five days in 2014, stretching from April 23-27 in order to house a beefed-up series of events, concerts and talks about all things synthesized and technological.
“In the past, Moogfest was a three-day festival with 99 percent of the music at night, which was great, but we felt that in order to give the festival more of the Moog ethos we had to expand it another couple of days,” said Emmy Parker, senior marketing and brand manager for the event. “But most importantly we had to do as much daytime programming as nighttime programming.” In the past, very little went on during the day at Moogfest aside from the odd panel discussion. But with the expansion to five days, the 2014 reboot will take place at venues all over town and have a heavy daytime conference component focused on how people use technology in their creative pursuits.
Feedback from attendees convinced organizers that they needed to look at the South By Southwest model for their event. “For us at Moog Music, we spend our day doing the same thing Bob did when he started his company, figuring out how to use technology to make more expressive tools for our audience,” Parker said. “And we’re not the only ones. We have a lot of partners engaged in the same pursuits and a lot wanted to be more involved in Moogfest. So we thought, ‘Why not create a festival more in line with what Bob did?’”
Moogfest has long celebrated the pioneering technology of the Asheville-based Moog Music organization with an experimental lineup of nighttime shows curated by a group of respected cultural, artistic and technological luminaries as part of its celebration of the confluence of music, art and technology. When the festival first touched down in Asheville in 2010 after a five-year run in New York, it was a three-day affair with multiple stages. After scaling back to two days in 2012, Parker said organizers decided to take a year off to regroup and expand and move the gathering from Halloween weekend to the spring, which is a beautiful season in the area.
Many of the same Asheville venues that will house the as-yet-unannounced music acts will also host the daylight gatherings, including Asheville Community Theater, Young Men’s Institute, Diana Wortham Theatre, Fine Arts movie theater and Masonic Temple, which range in capacity from 125-2,500, with Thomas Wolfe Auditorium serving the top end of the capacity range.
The upcoming event will greatly expand Moogfest’s footprint, not only stretching it to five days of music, but also to conversations with the leading futurist thinkers, inventors, entrepreneurs, designers, engineers, artists and musicians. The days will be filled with gatherings across seven venues in downtown Asheville with displays of new media art and interactive technology experiences/exhibitions, as well as film screenings and an open source hardware hackathon.
Parker said the target audience for Moogfest is anyone involved in creating technology, from music producers to graphic and video game designers, film scorers or someone in firmware or hardware design. When night falls the music will kick off in 10 venues, include arena shows at U.S. Cellular Center in Asheville, home to Thomas Wolfe Auditorium and a 25,000-sq.-ft. exhibit hall. In the past, Moogfest has drawn such headliners as Brian Eno, Massive Attack, the Flaming Lips, Sleigh Bells and TV on the Radio.
“For us it’s great going from one electric music festival a year to two,” said Chris Corl, general manager of U.S. Cellular Center, which also has the Mountain Oasis electronic music festival on the venue’s calendar. “Now we’re sitting on a three-day festival and a five-day festival in the spring, which shows how Asheville attracts music fans all year.” Outside of a pair of trade shows, Moogfest and Oasis are also the only events at U.S. Cellular Center that stretch beyond two days. Moogfest will also use the building’s 7,200-capacity ExploreAsheville.com Arena.
Corl said the upside for the building is that Moogfest brings in some of the highest per caps of any event he hosts all year. “It’s a young demo with a lot of discretionary income, including young professionals just out of or still in college,” he said. Though he couldn’t predict what the per caps would be for 2014, in the past three years Moogfest has brought $8-$16 per cap per day, depending on who is performing that night. That number is a bit higher than the take for a typical concert in the building, which is from $7-$11, a figure that’s the same for most trade shows.
Working with the local CVB for years to get more tourism dollars into Asheville, Corl said the aim has always been to get young professionals to come visit the town and return at other times of year. And with the recently completed third phase of a $12-million renovation to U.S. Cellular Center that includes an update of all its bathrooms, Corl said he expects the venue will impress Moogfest attendees. If projections are accurate, they could bring from $4-$5 million in economic activity to the city during their stay.
Also included in the programming are free events open to the public, such as a four-day street festival with new media art installations and live music, an event-long new electronic instrument pop-up shop and a two-day North Carolina Tech Expo & Interactive Job Fair. The latter is a partnership with the North Carolina Technology Association (NCTA), in which innovative tech companies with a presence or headquarters in the state will meet and network with those looking for employment opportunities in the field.
Because Moog is a small company that produces between 20,000-40,000 hand-built instruments a year, Parker said her team has to cast a wide net to draw the 10,000-plus attendees who are expected to show up for each day’s events (a number that could rise to 20,000 thanks to the free events). “We have people who purchase our instruments, then a wider group who are fans of what we’re doing and who check in with us through various social media platforms,” she said. “We’re used to talking to people who are interested in music, technology and new media art, but who aren’t necessarily buying our instruments.”
The plan is to target messages to different interested groups, partially through the festival’s programming and through its media partners, including the NCTA, which has a direct line to all the tech companies in North Carolina. Among the other partners and sponsors with local ties are IBM, Facebook, Red Hat and Epic Games and others taking part in the tech expo and job fair not based in North Carolina, including craft beer companies, Starwood Hotels and Google.
While Moog Music fronts 100 percent of the money to put on the festival, Parker declined to discuss how much partnerships could help defer costs or what the total talent and production budget is for 2014. The next tier of tickets goes on sale Nov. 14, after a near-instant sellout of 250 $99 tickets aimed at three groups: Asheville locals, registered Moog instrument owners and those who’ve signed up on the Moogfest mailing list. The next on sale coincides with announcement of the keynote for the daytime conference. There will also be a VIP experience that will include expedited entry to venues, exclusive cocktail parties and a rare synth-building workshop with Moog engineers.
To help get the word out about 2014, festival organizers will rely on their close relationships with a diverse group of mainstream, technology and music media partners, as well as musical instrument manufacturing, music lifestyle and DJ and electronic music outlets and magazines like Make, Omni and Wired and Fast Company.
Interviewed for this story: Emmy Parker, (828) 251-0090 x 230; Chris Corl, (828) 259-5452