Q&A: Festival Director Brett Robinson on Future Music 2015

As organisers of Future Music Festival bathe in the aftershock of their first artist announcement for 2015, the festival’s Director Brett Robinson chats to TMN about the its target audience, its partnership with Mushroom Group, the large chunk of the budget that was afforded to production and designer James Klein, and why landing Drake as a headliner was reassuring.

:: VIEW FUTURE MUSIC FESTIVAL’S FIRST ARTIST LINEUP

Were there any hiccups on the way to getting Drake over the line?
When you’re dealing with really high-profile artists like Drake, there’s definitely, I wouldn’t say hiccups, but there’s a hell of a lot of work that’s involved in delivering them, whether it be the financial commitment, whether it be the planning… I mean he hasn’t been to Australia ever, so he’s going to be very particular about what he wants from this particular tour and how he’s going to present himself to Australia for the very first time.

I think the way that the festival’s grown, Drake feels like Future Music Festival is the best way to debut his music live in Australia. It reassures us in a way that we’re doing the right thing.

At this point, will any of the big three (Drake, Avicii, The Prodigy) do sideshows?
At the moment we haven’t confirmed any sideshows whatsoever.

When Drake does return for a headline tour, will he use Frontier as his exclusive promoter?
Yeah, I’m sure he will.

It could be argued that certain festivals have hit the chopping block because they lost sight of their core demographic and its music taste, who is Future Music’s target audience?
We’ve obviously started with a dance core but we’ve broadened. I mean when you’re doing the numbers that we’re doing across the country, you need to provide more than electronic dance music. It’s been evident for many years that we’ve broadened our focus to include what we like to think is anything that’s dance friendly in its tempo and its idea. You love to dance to Drake, you love to dance to Prodigy, you love to dance to Avicii, Afrojack, Nero and so on. Future is dance but dance takes on a whole world of different genres. So what we’re trying to do is interpret here what people are looking for from an interesting and diverse music festival, and interpret what a group of ten friends might want to see throughout the day.

We’ve really tried to understand that people want something fresh, something new, something different. They don’t want the same old names and the same old sound. I think what’s happening in the EDM world at the moment is that it’s all sounding the same. We’ve tried to represent a unique perspective on what a festival can provide this year.

Have you changed the sound of Future Music Festival over the past few years to represent the average festival-goers music taste?
I think if you check the music player of the average person walking down the street, it won’t have the same music genre. We’re not saying we’re a dance festival or we’re an EDM festival or whatever, what we are saying is we’re a big festival that represents all of the most popular music that everyone loves today.

I know The Prodigy have got a new album in January and a new single in November, but people don’t care so much about that, they care about how amazing they are live and the fact that every time they come to Australia all of their shows sell out because they’re just unbelievable in a live environment.

From the idea of Drake, every big American and Canadian artist has been to Australia, he’s probably the biggest Canadian artist that hasn’t been to Australia, despite selling 5 million albums and more Billboard #1s than any hip hop artist in America.

You’ve enlisted James Klein for production design, what percentage of your budget would you say was spent on production?
Maybe about 30% of our budget. It’s actually increasing from last year; you’ll find there’s not as many artists on the lineup this year and we’re a lot more focused on what we’re delivering. We’ve got all the big names on the page but we don’t have a lot of other things that we would have loved. Usually we start off with 60 or 70 of the best acts in the world in our opinion and we set out to book half of them. But you’ll see that this first round is about 25 acts and we’re going to add to that as we go but I feel like the festival looks as good as it’s ever looked. It’s not cluttered, it’s not too overwhelming, it’s going to be an easy day for people to plan.

The idea for us is that we have secured one of the best designers in the world and he is designing a bespoke stage with the brief from us that we want to put ourselves on the global map […]. We’re definitely focused on delivering an amazing experience for people over and above the talent and the brief for the stage is focused around summer and a blazing big sunshine. He’s going to design something that’s the size of a huge concert stage but it’s heavy on pyrotechnics and video and lasers. It’s designed to go through a series of programs that will take you through a journey from midday when the sun is up high to about 4 o’clock when it will start to set, and there’s a huge production finale at the end.

Why is the Adelaide festival leg 15+?
We want to make the festival as accessible as we can to everybody […] Big Day Out and Soundwave and pretty much every festival in the country are 15+. In four capital cities – Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth – we also run a sister festival called the Goodlife festival for under 18s. We use a lot of the talents for the Future Music Festival and that’s been a great format for us. We sell about 90,000 tickets across the country for the Goodlife festival. In Adelaide, we don’t have another weekend date left so the only way we can provide 15, 16, 17-year-olds with access to go and see a guy like Drake or a guy like Avicii – which we know they want to see – is by lowering the age limit a couple of years.

The ultimate thing is, the bigger the festival can be in Adelaide and the more people that can attend, the more the artists are going to be willing to support and the less likely we are to be leaving Adelaide like the Big day Out has. In a touring sense Adelaide always complains because the tour never goes to Adelaide. We’ve been true to Adelaide for many years now and we’ve consistently presented the full lineup. […] There’s no point excluding 4 or 5,000 people or more that want to go and see Drake, it makes no sense.

What’s your view on one-day Australian festivals extending to two days, like Soundwave has done for 2015?
We’re really happy with the format of our festival. In terms of what I think Australia wants, I think Australia wants one great day […] I don’t think they want to do it and then do it again the next day. If we did think that we’d probably expand to two days as well.

Since 2006, our festival has grown from a 10,000 event in Sydney at Randwick Racecourse to doing 200,000 people across the country, annually. So we feel like our festival is just fine.

This is your second festival with Mushroom Group and its Frontier Touring, what are you able to do with that kind of backing that you weren’t prior to the partnership?
The amount of resources and staff and experience that we’ve got between the two buildings. It’s great to be able to have experienced people who have done this for years, helping to fine-tune things and allowing us to see the vision of the festival grow without being bogged down with all the nuts and bolts.

On the front end they’ve got a very clear focus on improving the production of the event and we’re working hard to change the experience of the festival to be a lot more forward thinking, something that’s really a leader in the market and I’m proud to be a part of that vision.

On the talent front with Frontier being able to reach out and approach artists about playing our festival, we’re the first choice for every artist now.