What I've Learned

I have a deep passion for music and live music. Once I was heavily involved, I stumbled upon Festival Snob. This blog has been the number one source of festival news for me over the past two years. This blogger has always been kind of a secret guy when revealing his identity and what he does as a profession, but I was excited when he got back in contact with me and voluntarily shared this info. His name is Nick L. and he is from Nashville, Tennessee. He is 30 years old and his profession is computer forensics. His interest in music festivals started from his first time attending Bonnaroo in 2011. Nick experienced the magic of a music festival and couldn’t wait to share his experience with everyone. He then started spending a lot of his time discussing music festivals on online forums and message boards, and still occasionally does in his spare time.  After a while, he started sharing his information he had learned on social media sites. Nick then decided to stop bugging his friends who weren’t as interested as him and start a WordPress blog. A year after that, he resorted to creating social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter and it took off quickly from there. His page updates followers on any festival news, rumors, and information. Because of his increase in popularity, Nick and his partners are able to get Media passes to festivals which means they get the front row, uncrowded view of the stage and even backstage sometimes.

 Once accumulating a decent following, he made an Instagram account to post photos of the festivals he attended and then made a snapchat account so you could follow him wherever festival he attends. At first, this blog did not receive any money; but after January of this year, he started to make a little income by adding Google Sense Ads and was able to add more partners to expand the festivals attended. Now the amount of money made doesn’t earn enough income for the festival expenses of Nick or any of the other partners, but he expects that to change.  

What makes this blog more unique than the rest is how many different social media sites he’s on. Not only is there the site and twitter, but you can follow along with him at whatever festival, which is different than the rest. Now that he has expanded, he’s added more professional photographers and uploads great shots of the bands played at the festivals, as well as the festival goers. Nick is quick to respond to tweets and emails and does a great job on updates.  And now that he has added partners, Festival Snobs is able to show live coverage of more festivals.

Some strengths of this blog is what I keep saying, the live coverage. Being able to follow the blogger on SnapChat makes a huge difference. The only problem is sometimes two of the Festival Snobs partners will be at two different festivals in the same weekend, so unless you pay attention to the environment around the stages, you can’t tell which festival is which. Nick is good at putting a caption on who he is saying, but I’ve noticed other partners fail to put the artist that they’re seeing which is frustrating. The site, Festivalsnobs.com, is very well organized. It has everything you can possible find about music festivals on one page. One downfall is that there is so much info and so many music fests that all the thumbnails can be a little overwhelming. But, with the increase in the number of North American music fests, it’s understandable how many thumbnails there are to choose from.

            The advice I got from Nick was “Don't force it. I see a lot of other festival/music blogs trying to be something they aren't yet. Example: Throwing "#1 Source For Etc" on your blog, when you're only updating a handful of times a month. Let your followers come natural. Identify who your target audience is and start interacting with them on social media. From there you can identify what exact type of information your followers crave and put your focus there.”

What I learned from this interview was to be noticed, but don’t force it. I found his advice kind of ironic when he said don’t force it, only because the way I discovered him was from Nick mass following people tweeting about music festivals so we would follow him back and just to have him unfollow us. Still, I found his information useful, interesting, and exciting because of how secretive he makes himself out to be.