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Lollapalooza Day One Recap

Lollapalooza continues its successful residency as a multi-day Chicago-based festival this weekend. Spanning 8 stages scattered around Grant Park, the current incarnation of Lolla allows for 50+ performances per day. As such it’s nearly impossible to see everything, but at the same time it’s really easy to see a lot.

The northern end of the festival kicked off with sets by Animal Kingdom and First Aid Kit. While both bands are quite gifted, and both perform as trios, the layout and general atmosphere benefitted Animal Kingdom to a greater degree than First Aid Kit, with the latter’s gentle folk being swallowed up by the sheer enormity of the festival. Sharon Van Etten, The Head And The Heart, and Dawes all seemed to suffer in a similar manner, with all 4 performers having delivered better sounding and more engaging sets at last weekend’s significantly smaller Newport Folk Festival.

On the other hand, the more noise your band makes, the better Lollapalooza serves you, best demonstrated by competing sets by The War on Drugs and The Black Angels, with the louder and brasher Angels drawing a significant portion of the crowd away from the similar-but-psychier WoD. EDM had a heavy presence at the festival, especially in the Perry’s area curated by festival founder Perry Farrell, but the attendance in this area, as well as the response to acts such as Die Antwoord and DJ Zebo on larger stages, suggests that the newly-titled genre’s 15 minutes are almost up. On the other hand, great singers seem to be on the upswing, with Yellow Ostrich, Passion Pit, Metric, and the aforementioned Black Angels drawing much larger crowds than the bands themselves seemed to have anticipated. In contrast to the Bonnaroo end of the festival scale, collaboration and community seem to take a back seat to tight, polished performances at Lolla, which is not only perfectly appropriate but also ultimately beneficial to the bands featured on this festival’s lineup.

Despite the frequent scheduling of similar-sounding bands at the same time, the constant ebb and flow of the audience from one stage to another doubtless earned some new fans for many of the day’s performers. A big showdown was scheduled for the close of Friday’s festivities, with now-arena rock darlings The Black Keys scheduled at the same time as the mostly-reunited Black Sabbath, with Wale and Bassnectar caught in the smaller-stage crossfire. Sabbath appeared to win the audience battle at first, however as their blistering set wore on (and frontman Ozzy Osborne’s pitch-control slowly disintegrated), many were seen maneuvering their way to the other end of the park for the Key’s fireworks-bolstered performance. Both Wale and Bassnectar also appeared to benefit somewhat by the big rock battle going on between the big stages, as they played to larger-than-expected crowds of dedicated hip-hop and electronica fans respectively. Overall, most of the days performers brought their A-games, with Yellow Ostrich, The Black Angels, and Black Sabbath (the instrumentalists more than made up for Ozzy’s questionable intonation) as particular stand-outs in a day full of great performances.

Comments

There are 2 comments associated with this post

Giannoula August 21, 2012, 13:45:24

I find it incredibly cuouirs that Hong-Kong Schools Speech and Music Association, China got second place; I live in Canada and that’s nowhere on my top 100 results for both music+festival and music festival . Even Coachella only shows up once. That you used a different search engine for the Hong Kong respondent is my best guess why that particular festival got such a high ranking it may be a statistical outlier (Even still, I have no idea how you got that sum. 100+99 +85 != 1465).Three things worth thinking about:a. At its most basic level, a site’s Google Pagerank is dictated by how many relevant sites link to them where a site is in the results is far more important than how many times it shows up. Arguably, if a site shows up multiple times far away from each other (I.e., if a site has multiple domain names and nobody’s sure which is the correct one to link to), it might ultimately be splitting its traffic again, it’s much more preferable to have a higher pagerank than multiple entries in the search results. To this end, finding some way to attribute more points to higher rankings might be an avenue to improve the accuracy of your methodology in the future. Also: each festival should only get points for the first entry in the results list.b. Your results may be very seasonally-driven — because a festival itself is a very temporal event, people will post more links the closer it is to the event itself. Or if there’s a lot of negative press around the event due to, say, environmental or crime-related issues, or even/especially tragic events (I.e., Berlin last year), the pageranking will increase. c. The search phrase music festival will dictate your results quite dramatically. The other thing that dictates pagerank is keywords ( music and/or festival ; again, I don’t know whether the terms were grouped). If a music festival calls themselves that (I.e., Shambhala Music Festival , Future Music Festival , T-Mobile Inmusic Festival ) and people link to them like that their pageranking for that search will likely be much higher than something like SXSW, which doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a music festival. Also in non-English majority countries, did you translate the string to whatever it would be in that country’s main language? Google has a tenancy to weight results depending on local relevance. Cool work regardless; I don’t know why more people don’t do research on music festivals, quite a cool topic. -c6.

Willem August 28, 2012, 10:49:09

HKSMSA really srspriued me too. It appeared 22 times at different ranks in Europe, often in the top10. Google was the search engine used every time it appeared, as Google exists in HK (but not in the rest of China). Btw, the results from Baidu came up nowhere. My guess is that they are too specific: they only appear in that SERP so they don’t have enough points to be in the final list.a. I see your point, even though I don’t know exactly how we could have done. Maybe we could have attributed significantly more points to the first ten results, since most of the time we don’t look any further (I know I don’t). And each festival did got points only for the first entry, because you’re right, it wouldn’t mean much to get, for example, 98+97+96 points if you occupy 3rd, 4th and 5th rank with: festival.com, festival.com/program, festival.com/enb. We thought of the issue of seasons (maybe that helped Coachella??), but we focused on the URLs and deleted all the news. True, that still means a lot of articles can point to this particular URL at this moment, but giving the time we had we couldn’t do better.c. We didn’t use the , that’s why we were so srspriued by the huge difference between searching music festival or just festival. But indeed, the fact that so many festivals on the list have music in their name or their slogan (like Coachella: music and arts festival) cant’ be a coincidence. We added music because otherwise we would have had too many other kinds of events (danse, theater, food, etc.). Finally, as far as the national language is concerned, no one made any comment about the relevance of the litteral translation. Nevertheless, some pointed out that this would not be the two words they would type if they were looking for a festival. But, well, we had to start somewhere!