Organisers Take Note: Before You Live Stream Your Festival, Read This.

An Account of Our Experience at Beverley Fringe, by Phil Simpson

I’m one of the organisers of a small, town-based festival which happens each year in the beautiful, historic market town of Beverley, UK–Beverley Fringe.

Beverley ‘Fringe’ was the smaller, music session-based contender that historically ran the same weekend alongside Beverley Folk Festival; the long-standing (it was established in 1983) folk event of the year (and one of the most successful in the North of England) up until its sad demise in 2018. Upon hearing the late news of its cancellation, myself and an army of enthusiastic volunteers decided to ‘step up’ the Fringe efforts and present a single, unified continuation of the festival in the town on its usual midsummer weekend.

Things were going so well. The ‘first’ year was a resounding success; 12 dance teams, 4 ticketed concerts (mostly all sold out), charity busking, and pubs overflowing with musicians—our aim was to make the streets alive with music, and alive they certainly were. We were subsequently awarded ‘Outstanding Small Festival’ at Yorkshire Gig Guide’s Grassroots Festival Awards, and we were grateful to be granted some funding from the Town Council to be able to start planning (with much more than 3 months’ notice!) next year’s event.

The second year was, as we’d hoped, even more successful. With an extra 6 months’ worth of planning, we managed to secure more venues, more ticketed concerts (including the legendary ‘Folk Rockers’ Lindisfarne), more sessions, more dance teams, and as a result, attracted an estimated 2000 people to the festival. We also now had a superb team, all working cohesively, and driven by the shared aim of retaining our rightful place on the UK festival map whilst promoting the wealth of fantastic talent our town and its surrounding areas has to offer.

Our third year was set to be the best yet. Just as we had done in the previous year, we booked a stellar lineup of artists based both locally and nationally, and had confirmed our biggest contingent of dancers to date. Tickets were selling, our advertising campaign was reaching people in their thousands, and we were just about to get our merchandise stocks ordered.

Then struck Covid-19.

In early March, the virus affecting us and our festival seemed like an unlikely prospect. By the end of March, we’d cancelled the entire event.

As with every other festival in the UK at that time, we watched months of hard work disappear overnight, and we were heartbroken to come to the realisation that 2020 would be the first year our town would not see a festival in over 30 years.

As the monotonous lockdown routines of April and May (what would become the ‘covid era’) slowly ticked by, our committee started talks about taking our festival online. We had seen festivals doing this (with mixed results, it has to be said) and although we were skeptical, we felt we had to at least do something to keep the spirit of the festival alive and give our community (and ourselves) some sense of ‘normality’ to look forward to amongst the grave statistics and further festival casualties each day’s news brought. Festival season may have been cancelled, but along with the countless organisers across the globe, we knew the spirit certainly was not. After all, gigs, museums, art, and opera had all moved online: why couldn’t a festival?

We explored various ways of presenting our event online. Facebook seemed the natural choice, but how could we satisfy the mutual desire for engagement from both artists and audience? How could we actually involve people with what we were proposing, rather than just hope to be able to reassure ourselves and our performers that people will be watching?

We knew it had to be predominantly live. Both artist and audience would need to feel like their involvement (whether it be performing or watching) was actually playing a part of—and could have an influence on—the overall story, as opposed to just being simply a contributor or an observer.

Some of the festivals we’d seen online were live, some weren’t. Sure, the ‘live’ ones had their issues, but that made them feel real. The curated presentation of polished prerecorded video after polished prerecorded video? Not so much. I believe that like a gig, a festival depends on having a community and a shared experience—a kind of positive hysteria that manifests as we all absorb the electricity of a live performance that touches us; that makes us laugh, makes us cry, and crucially, keeps us teetering on the edge of our seat, curious and excited for what the next few bars could bring.

We opted to just do one day (the Saturday) and to use Stage Ten to host our event. Though eye-wateringly expensive for the ‘Professional’ package (we opted for ‘Starter’), we found it to be just what we were looking for and easily capable of doing everything had envisaged. You essentially appoint someone to line up and ‘mix’ (we called them a ‘VJ’) your content sources behind the scenes, before broadcasting to Facebook Live and/or YouTube. It all happens in the moment; intrinsically off-the-cuff, there and then. You can prepare and practice all you like, but when you’re live, you’re live. Sound familiar?

We had 20 artists booked, and we supplemented our programme with pre-recorded video interviews from our publicans and host venues, with clips of Morris dancing (impossible to do any other way at the (socially distant) time), and 2 workshops, which we conducted via Zoom. We also hosted an open music session in Zoom and broadcast this live on Facebook.

It was set to be an action-packed day, and although a good chunk of it was prerecorded, the majority was to go out live, with news-anchor style links and introductions from the committee (including yours truly—a prospect that terrified me!) to keep things flowing.

On the week running up to the event, our committee ‘Zoomed’ (another, now becoming common ‘post-covid era’ semantic shift) each and every night, practicing using Stage Ten in all scenarios; testing all devices and operating systems, perpetually scratching our heads, and constantly blaming each other for the lag causing the resulting presentation to be choppy and asynchronous. I have to admit that on one of the occasions, I’d completely forgotten to turn Netflix off in the other room—that time, I suppose it could have been me.

The day of the event quickly was upon us. We kicked off the stream early with our minute-long video trailer we’d been using all week to promote the festival on-loop just to get us into the swing of things and iron out any early technical issues. Our ‘VJ’ Jessie was ‘on deck’ and had the first of our prerecorded presentations ready to go at 9.32am on the dot, which would follow a quick welcome from our appointed first presenters Rob and Brian, who had obviously drawn the short straws.

At 9.25am, we all got a notice from Facebook that the music on the video had been flagged up (by someone in China!) as in violation of copyright. We had the permission and had credited the source, but in an instant our stream had stopped and was removed from our page. Panic struck us all as Jessie quickly tried to restart the stream. The twenty-odd watchers at the time must have been awfully confused.

The stream was started again and our fearless presenters were thrust straight to screen, somewhat flustered, but brilliantly glossing over our first hiccup, getting the housekeeping chat out of the way, and the introduction to the next piece started. All was going well again.

A word of warning to the would-be virtual festival organisers out there: it’s surprisingly stressful work being stuck behind a computer all day long whilst frantically communicating with your team on WhatsApp, lining up the next video, and communicating with the next artist behind the scenes — all while ensuring your frame rate indicator remains green (once you’re in Stage Ten, you can’t switch windows because the frame rate will plummet), wondering why your presenters’ microphone has suddenly stopped working (or why they’ve left their chair!), and trying to visualise your next bathroom break—and hoping you can hold out until it.

We had got through the first section fairly unscathed, and it was time for the Zoom workshops to start. I was running a workshop (Alternative Guitar Tunings Introduction) and though it did in the end go well, I was very aware throughout it was rapidly approaching my shift to be anchorman, and I still hadn’t had the time to grab a quick bite to eat for lunch.

We had set up a virtual ‘tip jar’ for the duration of the event (to be split between the artists involved) and money was coming in thick and fast as we started to encounter our first serious technical problems.

We had struggled to get connected to the very first live act of the day, but this was quickly resolved by the artist switching to a laptop instead of using her iPad. Later in the afternoon we encountered this problem again and again—regardless of our (successful) vigorous prior testing sessions and assuredness that the system performs well on iOS and Android mobile devices. Artists were sent a link; all they had to do in theory was to click on it 15 minutes prior to their set and ‘check in’ to our system, where we’d make sure they looked and sounded good, before placing them ‘LIVE’ for their performance–but for some reason (and without any obvious common denominator) this problem kept happening.

We found ourselves drifting further and further behind schedule; our now VJ Rob was desperately trying to solve the issues and get the artist going behind the scenes while myself and co-presenter Timmy became experts at filling the (at one point near-20 minute) void with relentless—often awkward—babble and regurgitated artist biographies. During the afternoon, we sadly had to decide to move on and not feature 2 of our scheduled artists simply because we couldn’t get them connected behind the scenes.

Thankfully, our watchers could see we were doing our best and offered nothing but support in the comments. Some of them could also see the funny side. In the heat of the moment I remember grimacing under my headphones at ‘Jane’ (not her real name) after her helpful offering: “ok so how about some more music now?” … she meant no harm.

Things improved as the day went on and not only had we made up time, but we had enjoyed a solid run of around 4 hours without any hitches. The sound was good, the viewer comments were complimentary, and the tips were still bouncing into our digital Beret. We swapped around team shifts (credit to Rob who had VJ duties from 2pm until 11pm!), and discovered an unlikely double-act in our new presenters Alex and Richard who offered excellent socially distanced comedic rhetoric (from the same garden) and ingeniously devised the concept of post-gig interviews with the artists (buying us even more time to get the next artist setup behind the scenes!), giving us all a chance to learn more about their art, their influences, and on one occasion, their favourite type of guitar—and how this would relate into their touring plans later in the year (yes, yes we were having problems again!).

After 14 hours, a kind of screen-ingrained delirium had set in, and the day was coming to a close. We were overwhelmed by the generosity of our viewers, the kindness of our artists in being part of our festival, and the mental (and physical) toll it had taken on us all to deliver it.

It was a seriously long day, and presented significantly more challenges than I, or any of our team would have ever expected, but as we fixed our hair, our ambient lighting (it was now dark!), said our thanks and signed off, I reflected on the similarities between this and the real-life event: I was left feeling tired, emotionally drained, life-affirmed and somehow totally hungry for more. Just like the real thing.

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Phil Simpson is a booking agent and music industry mentor. He released ‘The Booking Agent’s Book of Secrets for Touring Musicians’ in June 2020. It is available on Amazon.