Samuel Meyers has never been one to think small.
On his first-ever visit to Coachella in 2016 he looked at his friends as they walked in and thought, “One day I’m gonna own this.”
“From there I’ve just kept this ignorant belief that I’m gonna run my own music festival,” he smiles. “So here we are.”
Here we are indeed.
Since 2021 Meyers has been the Festival Coordinator and Director of Ticketing at BeachLife Festival, an independent, boutique event in Redondo Beach, Southern California. Founded in 2019, this year’s festival will play host to headliners such as Sting, Incubus and My Morning Jacket, with fans offered an array of ticket packages that range from GA to VIP and, for those looking to really go large, Captain and Admiral (in which you can even moor your boat – it’s sold out).
Independent in the true sense of the word, the organizers hold town halls where fans can raise any issues or suggestions in person.
“We give them an opportunity to meet us so they can see… It’s me answering your question, it’s me taking your phone calls, and it’s me in front of you telling you why and how we can make it better,” says Meyers.
Here, he discusses his innovative approach to ticketing tiers, future trends in festivals, marketing a country music festival, the downsides of RFID cashless, and more.
How have your ticketing strategies changed over the past two years?
We're very local. 60%, sometimes 40% depending on the show, are people that [live] within a five mile radius of the festival.
So we introduced GA+, which is essentially GA, but you get to go in and out. From the festival standpoint, we want you to stay and spend money on food and beverage, merch, whatever. So to let you go out into the world and get a $5 cheeseburger down the street isn't in our best interest.
But a lot of the locals are like, well, I want to go and feed my dog, I want to go get a sweatshirt or whatever. So we just introduced a new tier. We talked about it as a team – what is [the] value to us? – and $30 a day seemed fair. If you want to go in and out, you pay $30.
And then as it's gone on, our VIP has gotten a lot more popular – it used to be about 21% of ticket buyers, now we're looking at 25%.
This year we're doubling the size of our VIP areas.
Has GA+ been popular?
Yeah, totally.
There's buckets of how many people [we can fit] in each section. VIP, I can only allow 3000 people a day. GA to GA+ it's the same people. So, if you leave the festival, or you want to leave, we'll just upgrade you for $30.
So it's been a good revenue stream for us to have that as an option. And it's an interesting little bubble, because we're not pulling from a Captain's Area or VIP. They are the same people. So there's no limit to how many upgrades we can potentially have.
This is the first year that you've introduced price transparency…
It’s been a long time coming. Rebates, which are fees, have been a trigger word in the business for a long time. Just listening to people in the industry, and our customers, of which 50% are GA, and then you have another 25% that are GA+. So the ones that are price sensitive, they were making some noise about it. So we decided to go fully transparent.
Does that mean you got rid of ticketing fees, or does it mean that the first price you see is the final price?
We did a little bit of both. So we raised the VIP pricing, and we raised the GA+ pricing, more to get GA where we wanted it to go. That's what we had to do. But it's not really black and white, where you get rid of ticket fees or you don't. It's more, can you absorb it? So as a festival, can we make the money we need to make to absorb these fees? And if not, then it's going to be a price increase.
So GA is lower than it's been in the last two years, while GA+ and VIP are a little bit higher.
Do you think the cost-of-living crisis has made it tougher to sell three-day tickets?
I think the three-day festival is tough. Going all three days is just a big commitment. I think single-day tickets is going to be where it is.
And I also think you're gonna see your GA fee dropping, and then your premium products, just more of [them]. There are companies out there that will essentially work as a third party. And if someone pays enough money, they'll just create their own festival outing. I think that's where it's gonna go. If you have enough money to create your own world, someone will make it for you.
How far in the future is that?
I'm already seeing it kind of happen now. Coachella, although their ticket sales are down, have been working with On Location, a third party where you can buy glamping, and you can do shuttles and you can do after parties or meet’n’greets. And as long as you're paying money, you can do it. So I think the industry is primed for it. I just think it hasn't made it to the masses yet. Over the next two years, I think we'll really see it starting.
"I think the three-day festival is tough. Going all three days is just a big commitment. I think single day tickets is going to be where it is."
Do you get any feedback on what's most important to your VIP buyers? What they really put a big premium on?
Yeah, shade and seating. It's as simple as that. The viewing stages are good. The elevated food is good. But when you're at a festival, you're sometimes too drunk to appreciate the food. And you're just trying to get some chicken tenders or a corndog.
You added a country festival, BeachLife Ranch, under the BeachLife umbrella. How does your marketing and messaging differ from BeachLife festival?
I think it's more group oriented. Country people like to travel together, so we do packs of tickets. So we did like Four Pack Friday, which is kind of alluding to a beer, right? Like your [four] pack of beer, get your [four] pack of tickets.
And then we'll do a lot more activations at bars and karaoke clubs, where those people are. And digital marketing, we're going more inland, we're going to Indio, we’re trying to take Stagecoach [Festival] people, we're just looking at where country people live. Because it's not in Redondo Beach.
Earlier you mentioned that one of the trends you expect to see is single-day tickets becoming more popular than three-day tickets. When you go on sale for BeachLife or BeachLife Ranch, do you launch just with the three-day packages? Or do you also launch single days at the same time?
Three days is for presale. If you want to go to BeachLife and invest in us before the line-up’s out, there is no point buying a single-day ticket. You're gonna buy a single-day ticket based on who's gonna play, right?
The single-day tickets have historically come out when the line-up’s come out. So we'll put those on at the same time, and then let you choose what day at a 100% rate. So you're not going to get a discount.
Some argue that you've got to push as many three-day packages as possible, so single days shouldn’t be available until closer to the event. But you see real value in making those single days available from line-up announce?
Yeah. So for us, 20% of our audience is three day, and I give them a 15 to 20% discount for buying a three-day pass. In terms of the financials, three days is just a discounted ticket. All it does is allow me to sell more units, right? Three days, three units, single day, one unit.
But if you're trying to build a financially viable festival, single-day tickets is what you want to sell. And so if you can have your days and your genres be so different that different people come [each day], if you can sell 12,000 single-day tickets a day versus a mixed bag, you make more money, period.
"20% of our audience is three-day, and I give them a 15 to 20% discount for buying a three-day pass."
What are the most effective ways of creating urgency among ticket buyers?
The biggest way to push tickets is FOMO, which is fear of missing out. And it works.
The trade secret is most festivals don't sell out clean. And there's always a ticket tier that you don't project that you cut loose. And that's your loss leader.
So whether it's GA, GA+, single day, three day, you find the thing that you projected based on data that isn't selling as fast as you hoped and you go, we're going to cut our losses, we're going to sell this tier out, and it's going to push forward the tiers that are doing well. Just cutting off dead weight.
So if you had 1000 tickets available in a tier that wasn't really selling, you'd sell it out at 400 tickets and take the remaining 600 tickets and put them into other inventory. Is that right?
Exactly. And the only caveat of why that's hard, especially for an independent who has smaller budgets, is we order our wristbands based on what we project, and we have to place our wristband order two and a half months [early], because it comes from China.
But when I cut one of the tickets out and I say we're going to sell this out because it's going to push forward everything else and we can use it to market FOMO, now I have an inventory crisis potentially during the show.
Do you find that RFID wristbands have impacted spending on site?
We don't do cashless RFID. So we’re cashless in the sense that we do credit cards. We don't accept hard cash.
And I know the future is the cashless RFID. Our audience is older, so they don't know. And then the banks as it stands right now, cashless RFID is a Card Not Present transaction. They charge you almost double the service fee for a Card Not Present transaction versus, here's my card, I want a drink.
So instead of getting charged 2.5% or 2.6%, which is what most people get on the credit card, the banks are charging festivals almost 4% and 5%. So unless it changes or unless there's hard data or case studies that show with our demographic we’d make more money cashless, there's no real reason for us to move.
Do you get a sense of which channels most of your ticket buyers come from?
Yeah, there's a couple of different channels. There’s Facebook, Google, those are all ad based, that'll probably get you one sixth of your sales. So if you're selling $6 million worth of tickets, a million of that will probably come from your Facebook and your Google.
And that's assuming you have a ROAS of four or five – that's you getting money back times four, times five – that's probably what you're looking at, because you're not going to have a budget larger than that for a $6 million ticketing show.
The other side is the organic stuff. So it's people that have just heard about it, people that see our billboard, people that see us at different shows. It's hard to quantify that because it falls into this almost global digital marketing umbrella where you can't track it.
And then for BeachLife, our bread and butter is email. We do almost half of our sales through email blast, which just shows how strong and loyal our fan base is, and that's how we can also sell emails to sponsors.
And so it's a good revenue stream for us, just including it in their partnership level to increase the price point but also give them ROI on their investment.
Visit BeachLife Festival here. Follow Samuel on LinkedIn.
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