The Art Of Booking A Summer Concert Series In Northern Michigan

Summer is live music season in northern Michigan, and as April dawns and summer gets one step closer, that season is almost here. In recent weeks, Interlochen Center for the Arts has been rolling out its summer 2023 lineup, one announcement at a time. So far, that lineup includes classic throwbacks like Styx and The Beach Boys, early 2000s radio fixtures like Train and Five for Fighting, and more, with another trio of acts set to be announced Monday.

So between campus schedules, national tours, asking prices and more, how do all these pieces actually come together? To find out, The Ticker sat down with Brent Wrobel, executive director of Interlochen Presents, to hear about the art of building a balanced lineup.

According to Wrobel, Interlochen typically looks to schedule about 15-18 concerts in any given summer. As of last week, 11 acts were booked for 2023, including the seven shows announced so far and the three coming Monday. “So I've got a little bit of work to do over the next few weeks, to get the rest of the season in there,” Wrobel laughs.

While the process for building a summer lineup starts months in advance, Wrobel says things inevitably come down to the wire every spring, right around this time. “We have a few bands that we’re already talking to about next summer,” he tells The Ticker. “But the process really starts in earnest around September, when the summer is over. And then our goal is to have everything confirmed and announced by May 1. We know that Traverse City is a touristy town, so by Memorial Day, we want to be hitting our full-season marketing hard, as the summer crowd starts to come in.”

In other words, booking a summer live music series is a marathon, not a sprint. To help clear the way to the finish line, Interlochen has a key partner: an Ohio-based booking agency called Music Event & Management Inc. (MEMI).

“They know all of the agencies and they know who's touring when,” Wrobel says of MEMI. “So they work with us to identify artists who might be a good fit for Kresge Auditorium or Corson Auditorium. And when they identify somebody, they pass it along. Then we say, ‘Yep, we want to make an offer to this band,’ or ‘No, we want to pass on that artist.’”

An “offer” includes all the core business aspects of the equation – the artist’s fees, bonuses that can kick in after a certain number of tickets are sold, proposed ticket prices for the event, and more. “We put all that together with MEMI, and then they send the offer to the band or their management,” Wrobel explains. “And then we wait – sometimes for a very long time – to see if they accept the offer, or if they want to negotiate any changes to the offer.”

“Even a lot of the offers we put in early on, like in September or October, we won’t really start getting any confirmations until around January,” Wrobel continues. “We actually have artists that we put out offers to in October, and we’re still waiting to hear. But this is also really the time of year where everyone is figuring it out. Bands can’t wait much longer, because they need to get their tour schedules solidified for summer. So, I expect that, within the next few weeks, we’ll hear back on a lot of these pending offers.”

One of the challenges for northern Michigan venues is routing a concert tour up through the giant peninsula that is Michigan; it's a cost-prohibitive and time-prohibitive venture. Simply put, the Great Lakes get in the way, making it too difficult – or too expensive – for many artists to bring their tours all the way north. As a result, Wrobel says there’s a fair amount of trial and error to putting together a solid summer concert lineup. 

“We probably put out between 30 and 40 offers for a 15-18-slot season,” he notes.

Who ends up getting those offers is its own calculus – one that takes into account Interlochen’s core audience demographic (primarily made up of boomers and retirees) but that also increasingly throws a few bones to the younger crowd.

“We have a lot of data on what has done well in the past, and on what maybe hasn't done well,” Wrobel explains. “We know country does really well up here. We know classic rock does really well up here. And so we know we definitely want to play to that demographic base. But we also want to make sure that we are diverse in our offerings. Because, at some point, especially with the classic rock crowd, they're going to age out. So we have to develop a younger audience, too.”

“There’s a lot of trial and error with that, too,” Wrobel admits of figuring out the best way to appeal to a younger crowd. “We don't want to have a season that is just a bunch of artists that would play to a twenty-something demographic, because we don't have that large a twenty-something demographic in northern Michigan. But if we try to have maybe 1-2 a season that plays to that group, and maybe 1-2 that plays to the 30s and 40s, and then if those shows are successful, we know we’re building our audience year after year.”

The other piece of the puzzle – and sometimes the biggest of all – is the educational component. For most of its run, the Interlochen Arts Festival coincides with Interlochen’s summer arts camp programming, which brings kids and teens to campus for up to six weeks. Wherever possible, Wrobel looks for opportunities to connect the artists with students, who can get educational benefit – whether that’s master classes with the artists or chances to perform alongside big-name acts on the Kresge stage.

“We're a school and a camp first; the rest of it is second,” Wrobel says. “And so I'm always looking for those types of opportunities. We just announced Greensky Bluegrass is coming, and Joshua Davis, who is one of our faculty members, used to perform with them. So we're already talking with Josh about that, and hopefully he'll connect us with his buddies to see if they'll spend some time with his students this summer while they're here, performing their show.”