It’s been about 20 years of revelry and year after year of memorable festivals for the team at Future Music Entertainment and their incredible Future Music Festival with every year has grown leaps and bounds and the 2013 instalment is definitely set to raise the bar even higher.
The festival tours across Australia in March hitting Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and this year with a line up featuring Avicii as the big headliner and other stellar artists such as; The Prodigy, The Stone Roses, Special Guest PSY (Gangnam Style), Dizzee Rascal, Bloc Party, Azealia Banks, Rita Ora, Boys Noize (Live Debut), Ellie Goulding, Steve Aoki, A-Trak (Live), DJ Fresh, Borgore, Sven Vaeth, Richie Hawtin, Ricardo Villalobos, Steth Troxler, Magda and many more, this year’s instalment is definitely going to be one wonderful experience.
Now, have you ever wondered what the dynamics of putting a festival of this magnitude together are? We at The Bangin Beats decided to take a peak into the mind of the man at the helm of the organizing team of the Future Music Festival and understand the different logistics involved in putting such an incredible festival together. Read ahead as we give you a extraordinarily informative Q&A with the Director of Future Music Entertainment, Mr. Brett Robinson!
Mr. Brett Robinson (Director – Future Music Entertainment)
We are “The Bangin Beats” and we’re currently talking to the Director of Future Music Entertainment, Mr Brett Robinson!
Q) How are you sir?
Brett: I’m great. Thank You!
Q) First of all we have to ask you, when we read the lineup of this years Future Music Festival it’s massive, you have the who’s who of the dance music industry. So what are the logistics involved in putting a festival of this magnitude together?
Brett: Well, it takes a lot of planning of course. We’ve been doing this for 20 years now and we soon have the 20th year anniversary celebration of Future Music Entertainment. We’ve had a long 20 years of dealing with some of the worlds biggest artists and the agents and managers who look after them and I suppose over the years we’ve built some great relationships with them and as we’ve continued all of our shows have been growing, from 1000 to 5000 to 10000 to 50000 and 60000 and we’ve needed more & more talent. I suppose it’s just growing from year to year and we really do spend all year to prepare for these shows in March.
Q) Great! Now, you just announced Avicii as the headlining act?
Brett: Yeah that’s right, Avicii is our EDM headliner, he was announced last week and tickets have gone crazy since we’ve announced that.
Q) So you’ve received a great response after that?
Brett: We have. I mean our ticket sales have tripled in the last 2 weeks and yeah we’re expecting to sell out in Sydney on the 10th of February or thereabouts at the moment.
Q) Amazing, so could we classify Future Music Festival as a dance music festival essentially right?
Brett: Well yeah, the festival most definitely started as an electronic music festival and as the numbers have grown so has the styles of music that we provide at the festival. We have bands like “The Stone Roses”, “Bloc Party”, “The Prodigy”; We’ve got pop artists like “Azealia Banks”, “Rita Ora” & “Ellie Goulding” and then we’ve got the best in dance music artists in the world, from “Avicii” to “Hardwell” to “Steve Aoki”, “Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike” to “Nero, “Ritchie Hawtin”, “Seth Troxler” to a huge trance lineup with, “Cosmic Gate”, “W&W” and a whole bunch of others. So yeah we’ve grown to incorporate Pop & Rock music as well but yes predominantly it’s all centered around dance music.
Q) Would it be safe to say that you raised a few eyebrows when you announced Korean artist “PSY” as part of the lineup? Do you see it as just a bit of humour or are people taking it too seriously?
Brett: Well I think it’s always been for us to not take ourselves too seriously. 90% of the lineup we have are very very serious artists who have been successful for many years and I suppose when “PSY” popped on to the market, K-Pop was already getting bigger in Australia anyway before he came along and I think when he put “Gangnam Style” out and it took the world by storm it really highlighted K-Pop and the nature of K-Pop obviously which is very flamboyant and extravagant I suppose and yeah, it turned a lot of heads and hardcore dance music fans were scratching their head and wondering why is he on the lineup but there was also a huge amount of commercial media from every TV & radio station and newspapers & publications were publicising the fact that “PSY” was on the lineup, he sold a hell of a lot of tickets and he also opened up the festival to become a lot broader again. We’re very excited to have him on the bill and it’s a cross genre festival so you know for other people they could go spend time in other areas but I can assure you that it’s going to be one of the most successful moments of our festival this year.
Q) Taking things a little further, Could you tell us a little about “Future Music Asia” and your expansion plans?
Brett: Sure! There are a lot of Asian students who come to Australia and study here and go to the “Future Music Festival” here and all of them end up going back and telling their friends about how good the festival is. So over time there’s been quite a demand for building a name for Future Music in Asia and we fly all those artists from around to be in Australia so its very easy for us to get those artists to Asia before they go back to their home countries and aside from that people in Malaysia have been very keen on securing the festival and securing an international lineup of that calibre. I know they’ve always found it a bit difficult to get live festivals or a lineup of that sort of calibre to Malaysia before so they helped fund the event in Asia and we are developing a draw card for the whole of the Asian region. We also are getting a lot of tourism coming to Malaysia from Singapore, India, Jakarta, Hong Kong and more and this year we got about 20000 people at our first event which was very successful and have now grown to a 3 day event, one has Armin van Buuren – A State of Trance on Friday night and other headliners include, “The Prodigy”, “PSY”, “Bloc Party”, “Rita Ora” and a whole bunch of dance music artists and we’re expecting about 30000 people per day for 2 days so its been an amazing ride seeing the amount of support Malaysia have been for us.
Q) So do you reckon you’re going to stick to South-East Asia or do you reckon we’re going to see more expansions as well like maybe India?
Brett: We know that India is a very big market for dance music these days. We’ve been watching Sunburn Festival and the Swedish House Mafia tour just recently so there is a lot of interest in what we do there and we would love to be moving to India at some stage in the future.
Q) Mid-November, Future Music Entertainment is on the verge of completing 20 years?
Brett: Yeah that’s correct we started in 1993 in Melbourne and we were promoters of many successful nightclubs and we started with touring with the likes of Sasha, John Digweed and Carl Cox and Roger Sanchez and more such dance acts and from there we’ve grown to probably being the biggest festival promoter in the region so we’re very proud of what we have achieved in the 20 years we’ve been around and we’ve been through up’s and down’s and all sorts of things that have challenged us along the way but at the end of the day we’re doing something that we love and we’re very thankful that we can go to work everyday and work on these amazing festivals with some of the biggest and best acts in the world and yeah, we’re very keen on doing this for another 20 years.
Q) Our best wishes! Lastly, any statement you’d like to make to the festival goers with regard to Future Music Festival this year?
Brett: I’d say hurry up and buy tickets because they aren’t going to last too long. This year is going to be our biggest and best, Future Music Festival yet so whether your living outside Australia or you’re based in Australia I wouldn’t miss out on this because I think this is going to be something really special.
Thank you for speaking to us. We hope we see you in India soon!