Speakers to the Sky: An Essential Guide to Planning an Outdoor Music Festival

Outdoors is the ideal place for music festivals, as there is plenty of room for everyone to crowd around and listen.

The open space means there’s less harsh treble being bounced around by solid walls, and the food trucks have a near endless expanse of room to set themselves up in. The main downside to outdoor music festivals is the time it takes to set them up, but unlike indoor music festivals, you don’t need licensing and permits to host an outdoor music festival, just permission from the land owner.

If you wanted to host your own outdoor music festival, there’s very little stopping you aside from the complexity of the setup. To help you in achieving that goal, we have put together an essential guide to planning an outdoor music festival.

Food

The first thing to take into account is food. Everyone needs food every day, and the more movement and energy you’re using, the more food you’ll need to keep your body moving. Outdoor music festivals are an example of a place that is almost exclusively hot, dry, and sweaty, with lots of dancing and jumping around. This means that you’ll need food for almost everyone in attendance, including artists.

Contact food truck companies to see if you can find some that have enough trucks to cater to your ticket holders, and look for companies that offer vegetarian and vegan options too. Making sure you have food options for any and all of your guests will ensure nobody goes hungry at your festival, and nobody faints or passes out from a lack of nutrition, or due to a medical condition, such as diabetes.

Water

Water is just as important as food, and given the amount of sweat that pours out of someone in the heat of a mosh pit, making sure you have a lot of drinking water on hand is a must for any outdoor music festival. There are plenty of companies that offer water trucks for hire for events, and finding one that has a large enough truck for a whole festival shouldn’t be too difficult.

If you find yourself at a loss for which company to go with, try finding out what companies larger outdoor music festivals use, and contact those companies for quotes.

Shelter

Making sure your guests have somewhere to sit in the shade and recuperate is key in organising heatstroke-free festival. Finding marquee party hire in Melbourne is easy enough to do, and most rental places won’t be concerned with where you’re setting it up anyway, so hiring at least one marquee for the area near each stage is a good idea for this. Plus, hiring more for a merch area will help you ensure that the artists’ merchandise stays dry in the event of rain.

Providing shelter for your ticket holders and workers is a legal requirement for events such as this, because without reliable shade from the sun and shelter from the elements, people can suffer from extreme health concerns. Another reason is that, being that many music festivals take place in the outback, the ambulance ride to the nearest hospital could be long and arduous. To avoid all of this hassle and threat to the health and safety of your patrons, provide some shelter.

With these tips, your outdoor music festival should go off without a hitch. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the good tunes, the good company, and the good food for a weekend of bliss.

.This is a contributed article