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and seeing everything all the time. “They want them excited about an event that’s coming around the corner.” Does profitability matter? In the world of music festivals, there’s no such thing as an easy buck. One of the highest profit margins for a festival is Coachella at 38%, which lasts for a week and has the most recognizable musical talent you’re going to find anywhere. For most smaller festivals, the profit margin is 5 to 10%, according to a published report, Music Festival Economics by Robert M. Brecht, a managing partner at TSE Entertainment in Austin. “It normally takes years for a festival to grow to where it can be successful,” Konold said. “SLE promotes Ostrich Fest and they’ve been doing that for 30 years. They told us that it’s only been profitable for the last seven to 10 years. It took years for people to recognize it.” Which begs the question: Is profitability the way to measure success? Mayor Smith at an April city council meeting said the job of the city government is to provide services, profit be damned. “We have community events, tourism events and signature events,” Smith said. “We have a budget for each one of those and we have a budget for public safety. We have a budget for dog parks and we have a budget for our recreation fields. We have a budget for everything. So, should we call out one thing and the loss of money and not the rest of it?” City Manager Ben Bitter agreed. “I think as we look at our budget, everything that we do is provide a service, whether that service is through the
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WITH SALSA FEST Perhaps the biggest complaint about last year’s Wild West Music Fest was that it happened at the same time Salsa Fest, an annual tradition in Maricopa since 2004 celebrating the titular Latin American spicy tomato sauce, is normally held. “It would be about the same time as Salsa Fest and we literally just didn’t have time to do both the Salsa Fest and Wild West,” said Quinn Konold, Maricopa’s director of community enrichment. In a recent interview, Konold broke
the bad news — unlike the city, Salsa Fest will never celebrate its 20th birthday. At first, Konold explained, the plan was to hold Salsa Fest at a later date, but as he started to look further into it, he heard the interest was waning. “It wasn’t the same as it used to be,” Konold said. The community
started scrutinizing the festival. “At the last Salsa Fest, the health department told us we can’t keep doing this with amateur chefs preparing food,” Konold said. “They have specific stipulations for handwashing that would require every single station to have a physical sink.” Such a requirement would have easily doubled the cost of putting on the festival. Konold explained that to cover the extra expenses, The city was going to have to either make a sizable investment to keep this one event afloat or pass the costs along to the participants. In the end, it chose neither.
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event that once attracted Food
Network stars had lost its picante edge. The city instead piloted a new event, Copa Cultural, to roll all the cultural celebrations into one festival. The final nail in the coffin, however, came when the Pinal County Health Department
For so many reasons, last year’s event had to be held during that period in October. It was a birthday party, and you hold those events as close as you can to the actual
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