OUR SUMMER BLUNTLY OVERSIMPLIFIED

 We’ve been awfully quiet the last few weeks, haven’t we? You probably assumed we were enjoying the summer, relaxing, and celebrating the festival selling out.

And for a good five minutes, we were. But things never go as planned, and we’d barely finished our celebratory cocktails when we received an urgent message to come to Waterfront.

Officially, we won’t get the key to Waterfront until the beginning of October. However, over the past few weeks we’ve been there on various occasions for production stuff, and every time the venue was more or less in the same state: dirty, dark, but full of potential.

Until last week. 

We were summoned to the venue and, when we walked in, the place was filled with 4 centimetres of the worst-smelling water. Much to our surprise, because the weather hadn’t been that bad. Yes, it had rained, but it’s not as if it had been pouring constantly, so where on earth had the water come from?

Nobody knew. 

We suggested that maybe it wasn’t the rain causing problems. By no means are we experts on the subject, but we’ve lived below sea level our whole lives, and we know that water sometimes has a tendency to find its way up when somewhere a drainage system isn’t working properly.

Shoulders were shrugged, heads were shaken, and for a few days it was unsure if we could use Waterfront in October. We were slightly panicking and mentally preparing for the embarrassing moment when we’d have to let you know that, despite our best intentions, Waterfront was not going to be part of Left of the Dial.

But then, completely by chance, we ran into someone who had actually worked at Waterfront years ago. They told us this had always been a recurring problem and that, in fact, it had something to do with the drainage system. In oversimplified words: it’s fixable!

We’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say we’re back on track, we’ll get everything cleaned, and you won’t be needing your wellies. If nothing else goes wrong, that is. The venue gods have played tricks on us before, so we’ve learned not to guarantee anything, but we’re now much more confident again we’ll be welcoming you to Waterfront in October.

In the meantime, we’ve been busy completing the lineup. Next Friday, 22 August, we’ll be adding a lot of new artists to the festival. Like, really a lot. And we’re already trying to fit them all into an overwhelmingly huge timetable, which we’ll hopefully be able to release a few days after the lineup announcement.

We’ve also just tested a Wheelchair Pub Crawl, we’re working on the boat and bus shows, and we’re trying to keep track of all the souvenirs we’ve ordered. With another thousand things going on, it’s fair to say our summer break will probably start sometime in November. But who cares? We’re loving every minute of it.

OK, except maybe not the minute we were ankle-deep in smelly water, but other than that it’s been nothing but a great pleasure organising this festival for you all.

Big love,
The sewer rats of Left of the Dial

WE ALWAYS HAVE TO MAKE THINGS COMPLICATED (THE OFFICIAL UNOFFICIAL)

Monday, we’re going to slowly start up the promotion for the free daytime shows during Left of the Dial. 

And sure, it would have been so much easier to call it just that: ‘Left of the Dial free daytime shows’ and we’re really not trying to complicate things for the fun of it, but it just wouldn’t be a correct description. 

The Official Unofficial is. 

When we started Left of the Dial, it was just 2 nights, mainly for people in Rotterdam. But it all grew a bit faster than we expected and soon it turned into a 3 day festival with lots of people coming in from abroad. 

We felt we should find a way to entertain those people during the day, but we simply didn’t have the time nor the staff capacity to set up loads of daytime events. So, we asked friends if they wanted to help us out. We didn’t want to limit them in any way, so we decided to call their events The Official Unofficial:

Officially, they’re not part of Left of the Dial and we don’t have any say in the curation. Hosts can book whatever artist they want, it’s their event, not ours. 

Unofficially, we fully support those events though and we do whatever we can to get everybody to the free shows. Even people without a Left of the Dial ticket, we don’t care, if you love music, you should go to The Official Unofficial. 

Now, it can be a bit puzzling. Some artists who play at The Official Unofficial, also play official Left of the Dial shows. And we also have some official Left of the Dial daytime events for which you do need a ticket, like Bands on a Boat. 

We know, we could have made it all a lot less complicated. Just give us a couple of years more of explaining and we’re sure everyone will get it. 

Anyway, to cut a long story short, soon you’ll be reading about a daytime festival with over 50 free shows that happens to take place in exactly the same weekend as Left of the Dial. 

And it really is as simple as that. The Official Unofficial is a really cool festival in Rotterdam on October 24 & 25. Hosted by some really cool people (not us) with a lot of really cool artists. No wristband needed, so please drop by. 

Big love, 

The complicators of Left of the Dial

Oh, and on a side note… we know it’s probably not really smart to promote other free shows when we still have our own tickets to sell, but that’s the kind of confidence level we’re at today. (Might be different tomorrow of course…)  

THE WAITING ROOM

(in case you wonder why)

Once the last Left of the Dial tickets are sold, you can sign up for our waiting list.

The one thing we’ve learned from organising shows and festivals, is that the very minute you sell the final ticket, someone will call you in total disbelieve that they can’t buy a ticket anymore. Despite all warnings and numerous low-ticket alerts, they are completely taken by surprise that events actually sell out and that there’s no secret stash of tickets especially for people like them. 

So, to be clear, when Left of the Dial is sold out, that’s it. Hate to say I told you so, no more tickets.  

You might wonder: then why on earth sign up for a waiting list?

We fully understand that it doesn’t make much sense to have a waiting list for a very much and definitely sold-out festival, so please allow us to explain.

All bands get a couple of guest list spots for friends or family. Sometimes they want to bring more people who are important to them, so we always reserve a number of tickets they can buy. If a band doesn’t need these, the tickets go back on sale.

We do this every year, you just wouldn’t normally notice. But this is the first time it looks like Left of the Dial will sell out before the lineup is complete, so we can’t yet say how many artists will use their reserved tickets.

It’s possible we’ve set aside too many. And if that’s the case, we’ll let everyone on the waiting list know.

We’re not clairvoyant though, so we can’t promise anything.  

Big love,
The fugazis of Left of the Dial 

SIZE SHOULDN'T MATTER

(attendees versus attendances) 

More true than ever: you can easily skip this post and not miss any essential festival information. It’s just another one of those weekend long-reads about something probably only we care about.

We’ve always felt that ‘but everybody does it’ is a bad excuse for anything, but apparently sometimes it’s an unavoidable one.

Although tickets aren’t selling extremely fast at the moment, it looks like we’ll have a sold-out festival in October. This means we will have sold 4,000 three-day passes. Sure, that’s nothing compared to the size of the crowd a huge summer festival draws, but to us it’s kind of mind-blowing that so many individuals have already spent their hard-earned money to see mainly pretty much completely unknown bands in October.

However, we already know that by the end of the festival, we’ll send out a press release with a much higher number of attendees. Or rather: attendances.

We don’t know about other countries, but here in the Netherlands it’s become pretty standard not to count festival attendees, but attendances.

For example, Left of the Dial has sold 4,000 tickets to people who’ll attend the festival over three nights. That’s 12,000 attendances already. Each band brings some guests, we have volunteers who work one night and attend as punters the next, and a bunch of journalists come to Rotterdam to report on the festival... That easily brings the total to 15,000. Then we have Bands on a Boat, the music conference, the free daytime events... we could very well end up with over 20,000 attendances over the weekend.

Why on earth do we go to the trouble of counting in this odd way, you might wonder?

In the Netherlands, many festivals receive some form of funding. So do we. Less than Jeff Bezos earns in a minute, but still, Left of the Dial wouldn’t be possible without this financial assistance. Other festivals may also have sponsor deals, and both kinds of support are easier to secure if you manage to draw a sizable crowd. Usually bigger is better and generates more money.

So, as much as we feel that crowd size doesn’t matter, we’re sort of forced to join the whole attendees-versus-attendances hoopla. If only to be compared fairly to other festivals.

In other words: everybody does it, so we do too.
But we felt the least we could do was be honest about it. 

Big love,
The mathematical magicians of Left of the Dial 

PROVE THEM WRONG

 (because that’s the kind of people we are)

We really don’t worry too much about ticket sales. We’ve still got nearly four months to go, which should be plenty of time to sell the remaining 200 tickets. More importantly, though, there are other urgent things to focus on. We still have to finalise the lineup, we have a hotel schedule for hundreds of band members to sort out and we have about a dozen of production meetings next week to ensure all venues get the right equipment.

To us, a well-organised festival is far more important than a sold-out one.

But a couple of days ago, someone with a lot of marketing experience told us that no one buys tickets in summer and that we should just forget about it until September. ‘Start running some ads by the end of August, that’s the only way you’ll get rid of those last tickets,’ they said. When we told them we’d vowed not to spend any money on Meta ads this year, they laughed and said, with great disdain, that it would be impossible. 

We know we should just let it go, but now we really want to prove them wrong.

To be fair, though, proving them wrong won’t be easy. We basically already fired all our guns. Yes, there’s still one more lineup announcement to come, but we’ve already told you about Bands on a Boat/Bus, the Extra Extras, Waterfront, Les Savy Fav, Dine Like a Star, and everything else that makes Left of the Dial the best weekend of the year.

The only thing we can think of right now, is bring back the midweeks. Some of you were really disappointed when we stopped our weekly update on the Left of the Dial ticket sales and perhaps they were right and we should have continued to post them. No idea whether it will make any difference, but it’s worth a try. 

So there you go. Starting Wednesday, we’ll be posting the weekly midweeks again. Of course, we’ll be updating you on other things too, so no need to unfollow us if you’re not interested in the tedious process of selling tickets. 

We’re still the fun people, just avoid our posts on Wednesday.

Big love,
The easily provoked vendors of Left of the Dial