Tackling Communication Breakdowns Between Music Festival Functions.

Music festival organisations can be complex operations that require numerous functions to work together in order to produce a successful event. Timely and accurate communication between these different functions is an essential part of this process. How can organisers handle communication breakdowns between functions to ensure delivery of an event.

A large multi-day music festival usually operates with large numbers of different functions each with a specific purpose and leadership style. This can include artist curation, marketing, finance, IT, production, operations, hospitality, vendor management, sponsor management, and artist management, plus many more in some cases. Each leader of a function will know what tasks they need to manage but sometimes they can be too focused without considering the implications of their actions on other functions. Inter function communications have shifted from phone calls and pen and paper to a fully digital environment which allows key messages to be relayed instantly to the right individual. Why do breakdowns in communication still occur and how can they be rectified.

Communication is Key.
Without fast and accurate communication between music festival functions, an event can quickly collapse, leading to safety and security issues or poor artist performance delivery. Safety is a priority for festival organisers so those responsible for functions like security, crowd control, medical facilities and stage performances must work together to quickly identify potential issues like crowd crushes and take appropriate action. Artist line-ups and running orders can be significantly impacted by late running artists or cancellations causing confusion and an unplanned break in performances. Communication between stage managers, artist management teams and marketing teams is essential to provide accurate updates to festival-goers about unplanned changes, so they feel fully informed about circumstances. The marketing team and operations functions must constantly update each other about potential issues so that social media channels and festival apps can be updated to help direct festival-goers away from any on-site issues like a scanner failure at a specific entrance gate for example.

Silo Mentality.
Each music festival function could consider themselves the most important part of the organisation which can lead to a silo mentality. This can be true when a function prioritises their own goals over the festival’s collective success which can result in ‘knowledge gatekeeping’ leading to safety and operational failure. Typical examples can include production teams that are sometimes so focused on artist performances (the show) they may ignore requests from security to delay set times. Or security teams that are so focused on crowd density issues that they forget to inform marketing teams who should be creating related alerts for festival-goers.

Technology Helps.
Using a sophisticated event management software solution like Festival Pro can help to keep the activities and communications between functions on a single platform. This provides great transparency between functions enabling everyone to be informed in a timely manner about key operational changes. Emerging technology is using Agentic AI on a festival site to monitor all communication channels like radios, WhatsApp, Slack, SMS plus others and when a specific condition is met, it automatically notifies the relevant function. Rather than replacing traditional communication channel monitoring, this technology could be used as a backup solution when a particular message gets missed by staff. Other advances in technology are seeing use of Real-Time Heat Mapping & Auto-Redirects where LiDAR sensors detect crowd density; if Security triggers a "Gate Pause," the Festival App automatically updates the map for festival-goers for example.

Overcoming Common Communication Failures.
Event management software now enables all tech specs and advances to be maintained electronically, which can be dynamically updated in real time whilst being available to all relevant functions. When changes are inked to notifications, it ensures that appropriate staff are updated. This digital communication platform has mostly replaced paper advances, which have now largely disappeared. This software can have dynamic performance schedules and calendars allowing artist set times to be moved or changed instantly; this can trigger alerts to relevant functions. Some festival organisers now insist that function heads spend time with other functions in the planning phase and during the live event dates. This cross-functional behaviour can help promote greater understanding and highlight potential communication issues that can now be resolved. Regular functional collaboration and meetings (physical and virtually) are opportunities for function heads to provide updates and discuss the implications of changes, for example.

For festival organisers planning their next event using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, site planning, cashless payments and contactless ordering.

Image by geralt via Pixabay

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