Festival organizer Alvaro Prol has five weeks to go before about 20,000 people are expected to roll into Surrey’s Holland Park for the third-annual FVDED in the Park music fest.
Prol, the co-founder of Vancouver-based hospitality management company Blueprint, and his company help put on 600 live music shows each year.
That sort of week in, week out grind makes him confident FVDED (pronounced ‘faded’) won’t go the way of the Pemberton Music Festival, which filed for bankruptcy last month and left patrons on the hook for the cost of tickets.
“We’re able to have a sustainable festival and they weren’t able to make that one work,” said Prol, who emphasized he wasn’t involved with Pemberton and couldn’t speak to the specifics of its failure.
“The festival market now is getting to the point where there’s issues across the board in different places and different cities where there’s too many festivals, [it’s] too competitive, [it’s] too hard to get these artists, it’s too hard to mobilize 20,000-30,000 people.”
Prol said the decline of the loonie in recent years — one of the factors cited in Pemberton’s demise — has been tough for everyone in the business.
“The U.S. exchange [rate] is very damaging to all Canadian show producers,” he said.
“So we pay for it and ultimately you have to adjust. You have to adjust your ticket price up a little bit, and little things to still produce the same value for the fan. It’s challenging.”
Prol said Blueprint has been able to make it work through “a lot of negotiations with agents” and lots of lead-time booking artists. He spent seven months negotiating with FVDED’s co-headliners The Chainsmokers before he could land them.
“I was talking to them in November of last year, they weren’t where they are today … with those guys we definitely landed a major, major headliner to our festival.”
He said history with the DJ duo helped a lot.
“The first gig we ever hired them for was for like $2,000 at Celebrities [Nightclub].”
Click here for the full interview on Business In Vancouver on Roundhouse 98.3 FM.
