Hotter, hipper performers and a new mid-summer date on the calendar weren’t enough to spur ticket sales for Winfield’s Country Roundup, a chief organizer for the three-day country music festival said Wednesday.
Final numbers are still being determined but Roundup chief Gary Foust thinks the festival got less than halfway to its goal of selling 4,000 tickets for shows that ran from July 15 to July 17.
"I don’t think we sold 2,000 tickets, and that’s including the one-day tickets," he said. "It wasn’t as good as we’d hoped it’d be. Maybe it was the weather, the rain or the heat, we don’t really understand it."
A lackluster turnout of paying customers is bad news for a festival – in its sixth year – that spent $230,000 to bring this year’s acts to the Winfield Fairgrounds. Foust said investors will meet at some point to figure out if there’ll be a next year.
"We don’t know about that yet, we’ll still have to get together and discuss how things went," he said. "People are still tired just from putting on the show."
While the crowd may have looked thick at times, some of that had to do with the 400 to 500 free tickets the festival gives to workers, the media and others. Foust counts those tickets as part of the price of doing business but said there has to be money from paying customers.
It’s becoming clear, he said, that ticket sales alone won’t fuel the Roundup. Sponsorships are a key part of the picture that Foust said has to be there for a music event to work.
REVAMPED SHOW
Bad weather hampered the Roundup in its formative years, and the festival moved to July this year to escape the late-spring storm season. Organizers also successfully lobbied the city to approve the sale of beer.
Beer sales did help some and should help even more should the show go on next year, Foust said. But the move to sell beer and add a drink sponsor came along so late this year that a lot of the major distributors were booked for other shows.
And while this years performers were aimed more at the younger set and the slate carried current stars – like Dierks Bentley and Billy Currington – who have hits on the charts right now, not enough fans showed up.
"Our pre-sales actually seemed to be right about where we needed them to be," Foust said. "But we did almost nothing at the gate, no one really walked up and bought tickets."
Foust acknowledged the Roundup is recruiting some new investors – and already has identified some specific people – who are expected not only to help on the financial side but also do more of the hands-on work of putting on the festival. He didn’t identify anyone by name.
Winfield city commissioner Phil Jarvis said the city is well aware of the Roundup’s struggle and said he thought that bad luck with the weather was responsible for most of that.
Jarvis groaned a bit when told of the low ticket totals for this year’s festival. He said it was evident to city officials that this was a make-or-break year for the Roundup.
It was a struggle even in the lead up to this year’s festival because Roundup organizers hadn’t paid "thousands of dollars" owed the city for the 2009 festival, Jarvis said. Contracts for this year’s show included stipulations that the money be paid before the 2010 show could happen.
"I was disappointed it took so long for that money to be paid," Jarvis said.
Disappointed, but not surprised that the country music festival was strapped for funds. The money was paid before the 2010 show happened.
"They’ll tell you themselves that times are tight," Jarvis said. "If I was a betting man, I’d bet against them coming back. I’d be surprised."
