FINDING A NOVEL WAY TO GET THINGS DONE
When pulling together the logistics for a brand new music festival, Novel Tours and Events knew they could rely on the performance of Stage and Screen.
Who are Novel?
Novel is a leading Melbourne based boutique music agency with a dynamic focus on touring, promotions and event management. They service the most cutting edge and established electronic music artists in the world and deliver successful shows and tours throughout Australia, New Zealand & Asia. Novel run music events including Pitch Music & Arts, Let Them Eat Cake and Days Like This Festival.
Festival fundamentals
Pitch Music & Arts festival, created and launched by Novel in 2017, has now evolved to host over 50 local and international performers each year with over 12,000 music fans attending over fours days in March. Apart from the inherent challenges of starting a festival from scratch, the travel logistics are complicated by the fact that the festival site is three hours from Melbourne in a field at the base of the Grampians.
To add to the complexity, a large number of the artists performing are also appearing at a sister festival Days Like This in Sydney and at sideshows around the country before and after the event. So a missed flight or delayed plane can also mean a missed set for the artists.
Pitching in
With artists accommodated in Melbourne for the duration of the festival, but also flying in and out to sideshows, precision travel management and attention to detail is essential. The nature of the music industry, and managing so many different artists, means travel changes are both inevitable and frequent.
To streamline the process and solve any potential communication issues between Novel and Stage and Screen, the client’s dedicated travel manager Bronwyn White is linked into Novel’s back-end systems so she has access to the very latest information.
Once an artist is confirmed for the festival, the travel manager can instantly work from an updated, shared spreadsheet to start booking airfares, accommodation and car hire. By also being alerted to any changes Novel make to festival logistics, the travel manager is able to proactively rework travel schedules and bookings at Stage and Screen’s end.
Headline acts
Working closely with Novel as one of their team, simplifies the travel booking process - which is invaluable for complex festival bookings when there are so many moving parts. It also cuts out a number of time consuming steps and eliminates the need for hundreds of phone calls, or emails, between Stage and Screen and Novel across the many months of planning.
Having the same travel manager dedicated to the account since the inception of the festival, also streamlines ground transport logistics. Bands typically travel with 13 to 15 road cases of gear, but Stage and Screen’s travel manager knows their dimensions, what cars to book and when a trailer is needed.
Taking a holistic approach to all aspects of the festival, also allowed Stage and Screen to conduct a comparison of hotel offerings in Melbourne for the large number of festival room bookings. This benchmarking enabled Stage and Screen to secure better hotel value for Novel, with a new hotel arrangement which also included a number of negotiated complimentary extras like Wi-Fi, late checkouts and a designated front entry parking bay for Novel vehicles.
All part of the same line up
For Novel the close long-term partnership means they consider Stage and Screen to be an extension of their own organisation. In the words of Ben Harrison, Head of Touring and Logistics at Novel – “we might have five different band members arriving for a gig from five different international locations – and I can just copy our travel manager in on an email to a promoter and they will come back to us quickly with different routing options! It makes us look very professional as an organisation (which is important when we’re dealing with some of the biggest music promoters in the industry), when we can show that we have great partners like Stage and Screen”.