A Year On: Sugar Mountain festival organisers discuss the Mushroom partnership

It’s been more than a year since Sugar Mountain organisers Pete Keen, Brett Louis and SimonHuggins inked a partnership deal with Mushroom Group. The four-year-old music and arts festival took a necessary year off in 2014 and this weekend, the fruits of the partnership will debut at a venue three-times the size of its previous housing with acts including Nas, Ariel Pink, Odesza and How To Dress Well.

In this extended Q&A, TMN chats to Pete Keen, Brett Louis and Mushroom Group’s Adam Jankie – who is event manager of Sugar Mountain and Director and COO of Illusive – about why the festival wasn’t staged last year, how the success of the team-up has been measured thus far, and how they’ll maintain its niche appeal.

Mushroom Group announced the partnership with Sugar Mountain in late 2013, why was the festival not staged in 2014?

Pete Keen: We’re at a new site now and it’s a lot bigger – the site’s definitely three-times the size – we wanted to take the year off, we needed to start from scratch and just see what had worked from the past and what we could change in the future. Also working with a new site and new people, it was definitely starting from page one again and we needed to give it that time it deserved.

Has it taken the year to sort those things out?

Pete Keen: Definitely. With new people involved we needed to recraft it, and also because of the bigger space [at Victorian College of the Arts]we’re working with the Council now. So everything has changed, we still have the same ethos and it still comes from the same creative place, we’ve still got the same creative drive and vision, but the infrastructure and foundation [has changed].

Is this the first time Mushroom Group has partnered with a music and arts festival?

Adam Jankie: This is not the first time the group and its various companies have partnered with festivals or events of this nature. But it’s certainly the first arts driven festival we have been involved with in recent years. It’s been really interesting and exciting over the past few months to engage with Pete, Simon and Brett (Sugar Mountain founders) on how we find that balance between the arts side of things with all the installations and the live music element.

We have put together a great site and production team who have been able to bring many –I would like to say all but I would be lying –of these unique elements together and ensure we have an event that encompasses the best of both worlds.

The VCA is three times the size of The Forum, how do you know this year's punters will fill that space?

Pete Keen: It’s just about making it more comfortable. It’s spread out. With The Forum it was two large rooms with a couple of tiny spaces for installations, whereas the VCA is a lot more vast spaced but then it has a lot more options to use in the space. We don’t really want to cram people into small spaces, we want to stay boutique but we want people to be comfortable.

It’s hard to say coming from my role (laughs) but I don’t really enjoy going to many festivals and the ones I do enjoy going to are those that are not sandwiched between a thousand people. I want a comfortable experience. I’m reaching my mid-30s now, I don’t want an elbow in my face or to be grinded from behind by a dude (laughs).

How much of the festival’s execution and approach to marketing has changed since Mushroom came on board?

Adam Jankie: Us coming on board and bringing the expertise and resources of the group has been significant in terms of what can be achieved with Sugar Mountain. The guys have previously done an amazing job building up the festival and the brand, but due to the time and resource limitations someone like us needed to come on board and take it to the next level.

The three original founders have incredible ideas, and coupled with our programming and marketing team they have been able to come up with a festival that is unrivalled in this space. Programming the event has been a group effort which included people from a number of different Mushroom companies such as Illusive, Frontier, Future and I Oh You. The execution level of the actual event has been immense.

Initial discussions with the VCA and other Stakeholders commenced over a year ago so we are talking about something that has had 12 months of logistical planning which still continues until the last truck leaves the venue. Going into a location like this is not like taking a blank canvas greenfield site and installing all your infrastructure. This has been a collaborative effort involving a number of different stakeholders that include, VCA, Melbourne University, Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne Theatre Company, City Of Melbourne, Victorian Arts Centre, Creative Victoria and many more. The nature of its location situated in an arts precinct and encompassing the internal and external spaces of the university grounds with residents 50 meters away has certainly kept our site and production teams on their feet. The end result of this iconic location and all the planning that has gone into Sugar Mountain will be an amazing outdoor arts and music festival where the patrons and the artists will have an equally good time. Hopefully the local residents enjoy the experience as well as we are already planning 2016.

Brett Louis: There has been a greater focus on the overall execution. The level of expectation that we have placed on our team has been lifted to a higher level. Mushroom Group has provided the management support necessary for all elements of the festival to continue to develop and progress to where we need it to be.

Watch a promo clipdirected by Keen with Sydney artistKirin J Callinan

Has the success of the partnership been measured yet?

Pete Keen: We’ll know after the festival I’m sure but at the moment, myself alone, I can say that my working style has matured and even our interpersonal relationships have strengthened having those kind of, mentors there helping and assisting us through all of this.

Adam Jankie:With the event just days away we certainly feel like the Sugar Mountain brand has really been pushed to a new level. If our current ticket sales and marketing performance indicators are anything to go by then I would say it has been a huge success so far. The social media campaign spearheaded by our brand and marketing manager Tom has had massive results with high engagement rates and major growth across the digital assets. From an event perspective I think the fact that we have been able to take peoples artistic and visual dreams and turn them into a reality is reflective of the success of the relationship up until this point. I think everyone involved in the event has learnt a lot over the past few months, both from our side of things and the guys on the arts side and as a result we are going to pull off something pretty spectacular!

Brett Louis: Sugar Mountain’s growth in every capacity is a great measurement of the teams cohesion. What we have managed to achieve in the past 16 months shows that this has been a very successful collaboration. The capacity has increased 300%, we have founded a new site and established our place in the festival market.

How would you describe Sugar Mountain’s target audience?

Pete Keen: We try and reflect the tastes of Melbourne’s creative communities. Now that we’ve expanded, we need to take on board the tastes of those outside of those communities, which only makes us much better and more diverse.

What plans are in place to maintain Sugar Mountain’s niche appeal?

Pete Keen: We have full creative control still. The Mushroom team are really supporting in helping us maintain that curation and that creative vision. Also they’ll help us grow and sell more tickets in a more of a business sense but they’ll keep the taste there. We were definitely new coming into the festival game and we’ve learnt on our own; having Mushroom involved brought so many years of music industry experience and knowledge – they offer a lot.

Adam Jankie:We can’t go giving away everything yet, let’s let people enjoy the 2015 event before we tell them too much about what’s next. I can certainly say that this art’s precinct centered around VCA has some huge growth opportunities when it comes to Sugar Mountain and events. By running a successful event like Sugar Mountain we are hoping it instill confidence in the stakeholders and local community to further engage with us and build upon what will be a one of a kind festival in 2015.

Brett Louis: Sugar Mountain will always have a niche appeal. We will always look to push the boundaries in how we curate. As a curatorial team firstly we look to what interest us and then secondly how we can make the environment as immersive and convivial as possible.

Watch a teaser forMidnight Juggernauts'audiovisual show for Sugar Mountain titledMJXPty Ltd

The big touring festivals are beginning to take a backseat, while boutique one-dayers are selling out, sometimes pre-lineup announce, will the niche festival market ever eclipse the juggernauts in terms of popularity?

Adam Jankie: I would like to think there is space in the market for both the smaller niche festivals as well as the larger mass appeal ones. I expect that with the recent decline in the top end of the festival market we will see more prominence in the headline touring market, as well as smaller festivals and events. Music and the Arts are universally accepted and there will always be a market for the many genres and cultural aspects of festivals. People in Australia love their live music and there is no doubt that the scene will continue to thrive, we have our up’s and downs but from a holistic perspective they are just little bumps in the road of what is and will continue to be a thriving industry.

Brett Louis: Depends if you measure popularity by ticket sales. There is a place for both big touring and boutique one-dayers, as long as we continue to offer a different experience as they are two very different markets.

Pete Keen: The big festivals will always have the money behind them to be able to cater to a wider audience. I think they’ll exist in their own alongside one another. I haven’t been to a lot of the bigger ones but I guess it also comes down to curatorial choices; the bigger you get the more commercial you have to go with your choices to an extent. I think there still needs to be a tasteful curation in there. People aren’t stupid, they don’t need stupid music thrust down their throats – I’m not saying they’re putting on stupid music or that ours is better than theirs.

It’s like promoters sometimes have to pick the artists that chart well or sell records in Australia over acts that are great live performers.

Pete Keen: Totally. There’s certain bands that are probably great performers that have never sold a record and hardly any people will go to see those artists. But that’s the kind of acts that would do so great on the day. Even for us at a smaller level it’s getting that balance right of what bands are going to sell tickets and also giving people an exploration in music to discover new things.

Sometimes with the bigger festivals when they tour the same acts, a lot of festivals have regurgitated the same lineup across the board and that’s probably where we’ve seen people back off a little bit.

Sugar Mountain 2015 takes place at Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) on Saturday 24 January, the Australia Day long weekend. Melbourne radio station and event partner 3RRR will be conducting a six-hour live broadcast from VCA on the day from 4-10pm.