In some of the earliest discussions among the founders of Seaprog, an idea that came up often was the fact that the workings of concerts, and music festivals, are often a mystery to people outside the small circle of event organizers. We decided that transparency was a worthy aspiration. Once things got going, transparency fell somewhat by the wayside, not from any desire to keep secrets, just from neglect in the face of everything else we were doing.
When you start talking about money, you start touching on issues of privacy, so there are limits to what kind of openness is appropriate.
The bottom line is that putting on a music festival, even a modest-sized one, is expensive. One of our largest expenses is for the venue. It costs us more than $3000 to have the venue for a single day. Our total for all of the artists comes in around $10,000. Taking that total and dividing by the capacity of the Rainier Arts Center, which is about 250, we see that $53 per ticket would break even. If we sell every single ticket.
But there are other expenses to consider as well. We have to spend money on promotion and advertising — we have certainly learned that our real-world and social media connections are insufficient to get the word out, so we have to spend time and money to get the word out, printing posters and buying ads. And we have to pay graphic artists to create those materials, since it wouldn’t be fair or ethical to ask them to donate their services. If we want to have t-shirts available, we have to pay to have them printed. Admittedly, we’ll make that back if we sell them, but we don’t have that money at the time we get them made, and they might not all sell (we’ve still got some shirts from previous years left over). We have to provide refreshments for the artists on the day of the show, and some of them are from out of town and need hotel rooms.
That does not cover all of our expenses, but it’s the majority, and enough to get an idea of how this works. We’ve set our discount price at $65 and full price at $80 because — allowing for reasonably good ticket sales — that should get us to the break-even point with a little cushion for contingencies. If there’s a bit left, we’ve got a seed for next year’s activities, where we start over and do it all again.
As a non-profit venture, we are not doing this to make money, and in fact all of us on the Central Committee have at one time or another contributed in one way or another to help things along. In our early days, before we solidified our non-profit status with Shunpike, things were especially shaky. And speaking of Shunpike, they do take a cut of all the funds that come in to cover things like taxes, non-profit registration, legal compliance, accounting, and banking, but those are things we couldn’t realistically do ourselves.
Experiencing music in a setting like the Rainier Arts Center is a very different experience from catching a show in a bar. You get cushioned seats, good acoustics, and no distractions from people buying drinks or making small talk. Given the prices for concert tickets lately (how about $150 to see the Beat tour from the upper balcony?), we think Cascadence is a bargain. We also hope you can understand why we ask for donations as well. They’re tax-deductible for the giver and help us take care of business.