In an age when over 32 million people attend at least one music festival every year, Tom Russell works to make sure The Governors Ball Music Festival still stands out from the rest. Russell, co-founder and partner of Gov. Ball, said that music festival lineups nowadays can be very similar to each other, so the team looks for acts that would be a unique addition to the festival.

The first Gov. Ball took place in June 2011, with the goal of “bringing New York City a music festival that it could call its own, and one that would feature music of all shapes and sizes,” Russell said. This year, Gov. Ball will take place June 1-3 at Randall’s Island Park.

Gov. Ball was only a one-day festival during its first, but the response was so positive that the year after, it lasted for two days. The festival has been a three-day event since 2013, with four stages and 66 bands performing.

Booking artists for the festival usually starts a year to a year and a half in advance, Russell said. They reach out to artists who are planning to either release records or go on tour during music festival season — gauging what’s new and relevant about each potential performer. If the artist is touring, they’re given a financial offer.

“We go to great lengths to put together a lineup that’s incredibly diverse and really indicative of music culture,” Russell said. “In the days of Spotify, when people have a music library with so many different genres, we do our best to have a little bit of everything.”

Russell uses that same ideology when deciding which artists will perform on each day of the festival, aiming to have an equal amount of several genres for every day.

However, planning each day can be difficult because you have to work with artists’ touring schedules, which can be very complicated, Russell said. An artist could be playing in Syracuse on Friday, Gov. Ball on Saturday and Atlantic City on Sunday, and it’s up to the organizers to make that work.

“It’s a bunch of moving targets,” Russell added.

The rest of the planning begins about a year out, Russell said. Since Gov. Ball uses a
considerable amount of the city’s resources, the team works to make sure the festival is on the radars of people like the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the New York Police Department and the mayor.

People have tried to organize other large music festivals in New York, Russell said, and there have been smaller events over the years. What has made Gov. Ball successful is due in part to several factors: timing, location and talent booked.

“We launched the event at a very interesting and important cultural time,” Russell said. “The U.S. festival culture was just starting to mature and music streaming was becoming more popular.” There’s no better way to consume as much music as possible than at a music festival, he added.

Most Gov. Ball attendees are between the ages of 18 and 35, Russell said, although it does vary a little bit by day based on who the talent is. When Chance the Rapper performed, the audience was younger, whereas with The Strokes, the crowd was slightly older.

Because of the age of the typical crowd, part of Gov. Ball’s marketing campaign is directed at college students. This year the festival will take place in June, right as students are coming back home from school. Russell said a lot of people equate the festival with the start of summertime.

Despite Gov. Ball’s success since the very beginning, Russell is still looking for ways to improve the experience.

“We always want each year to be better than the last,” Russell said. “And we want each year to have something for everyone.”

Published on April 11, 2018 at 11:56 pm

Contact Sandhya: ssiyer@syr.edu