SHARING REALLY IS CARING

(or how to help your fellow music fan)

It’s an embarrassing fact for such a prosperous country as the Netherlands, but 3.1% of the Dutch population is living in poverty. In Rotterdam alone, over 40,000 people are eligible for assistance from our local food bank.

Now, in Rotterdam there’s an amazing new project named Ticketbank. It’s an online platform which offers free tickets for concerts and events to people using the services of the food bank.

It’s a wonderful way to prevent those people from getting socially isolated, and Left of the Dial wholeheartedly supports this project.

We fully understand that some of you are also struggling to make ends meet and that a Left of the Dial ticket is already quite an expense. If so, this post is clearly not for you.

But, if you have a little more to spend, there’s a way you can help us support Ticketbank:

Go to our website and buy one or more donation tickets for €5 each.

For every 10 support tickets sold, we’ll put in the extra €25 and donate a Left of the Dial ticket to Ticketbank.

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Or if you’ve already got a Left of the Dial ticket, but you can’t stay all 3 days, do it the good old-fashioned way:

For years, we’ve been offering Sharing is Caring, a service to pass on your wristband to someone else of you can’t stay for all 3 festival days.

Initially, this service was meant for friends unable to attend on the same day; we just wanted to avoid the whole wriggling-off-wristbands-thingy and make it easy to share a ticket. 

But some people don’t have a friend to share their wristband with, so we’ll donate those wristbands to Ticketbank.

We know we can’t save the world, but we can try to make our festival a little more accessible.

In case this post isn’t quite clear, check our website for:

• All info on Sharing is Caring -> click here
• The donation tickets ->leftofthedial.nl/tickets
• The apparently still much needed explanation on why we only sell 3-day passes 

Thank you for reading this post, thank you for sharing and caring, and most of all, thank you for being the awesome people you are!

Big love,

The sharers Left of the Dial

PS: for more information on Ticketbank (in Dutch): click here 

OUR STRUGGLES WITH THE MODERN WORLD – PART 2

Some festivals sell all their tickets the minute they go on sale.

We don’t.

We usually sell a huge chunk of the tickets right after the previous festival edition and then it slows down. After the first few lineup announcements, things pick back up again and we start selling an average of about 250 tickets a month. 

By the time we’re down to the last 400 or 500 tickets we always start to get anxious. We worry that we’ve reached every possible person who could be interested in our festival with our regular posts and newsletters. And we do need to sell those last tickets to meet the budget.

What we normally do around that time, is run some last-minute ads on social media. Mostly on Instagram and Facebook. 

But that just doesn’t feel right anymore. We hate being so dependent on ads, and more importantly, we hate the idea of giving money to a huge multinational whose values do not align with ours.

Pretty hypocritical, we know, because we’re using their platforms on a daily basis, but still… it feels like there’s a line that needs to be drawn,  

So, we’ve decided to not spend any money on Meta campaigns this year.

Which probably doesn’t sound like much of a challenge, but any festival marketeer with tickets to sell will agree, detoxing from an ad-dependency is a tough battle. 

Foremostly, it means we have to find other ways to sell the last Left of the Dial tickets. And we’d like to warn you: some of those ways could very well be annoying.

If you’re easily irritated by more frequent newsletters and endless posts promoting Left of the Dial, we kindly suggest you unfollow us right now. Just check back in closer to the festival and information-wise you’ll be fine. 

However, for those of you who want to support our ad-dependency detox, please share this with all your friends. Or better, make them buy tickets right now. 

Big love,

The codependers of Left of the Dial

LAST NIGHT THE DJ SAVED MY LIFE

The after parties have always been a bit complicated at Left of the Dial. There were years we had too many, and last year we clearly didn’t have enough after parties. Especially on Saturday night, the dance floors were uncomfortably packed.

That’s easy to fix of course, and this year there will be more after parties on different locations.

Now, every year we also get a few complaints about the music. Not many, but some people felt the music was ‘too poppy’, others criticized our DJs for playing only obscure songs. Having often DJ-ed ourselves, we know it’s impossible to please everybody, so there’s no simple solution.

Unless…

We give everybody the chance to DJ.

It’s still a work in progress, so bear with us, but this is the general idea:

In one of the late night venues we’ll have a DIY DJ Party where Left of the Dial ticketholders can play their favourite danceable tunes. Everybody who signs up gets a specific time slot to spin the wheels of steel, or whatever the expression is.

We have no idea how many people actually would want to DJ, so we can’t tell you yet how long those slots are going to be, nor do we know on which night or nights it’s going to be. That all really depends on you.

You don’t need much experience, there’ll be a skilled DJ present to help you out if needed. The only two requirements are:

You need to have a Left of the Dial ticket – we don’t want any wannabe professional DJs who are just looking for an extra gig, but who have absolutely no love for our community;

It’s supposed to be a party, so you need to play danceable music. This is not the time, nor the place to demonstrate your undying love for minimalistic ambient records…   

Right now, we’re pretty busy working on the next lineup announcement, so we’ll get back to this later, probably with a colourful post, explaining everything (hopefully) in more detail.

If you can’t wait that long, you can also email us right now using ‘DIY DJ’ as a subject. Please include your Left of the Dial 2025 ticket number, so we know that you’re part of the family, and let us know what kind of music you’d want to play, which night you’d prefer, and how long you think your set should be.

Maybe, it will turn out that you collectively think this is the lamest idea ever, and you all rather just dance to other people’s music. That’s perfectly fine too, then we’ll never mention this again and just stick to the regular after parties!

Big love,

The floor fillers of Left of the Dial

OUR STRUGGLES WITH THE MODERN WORLD

Short version:

If you go to Bandcamp.com and look for ‘leftofthedialfestival’ you’ll find an overview of all Bandcamp accounts of artist that have played or will play Left of the Dial.

Very (very) long version:

Lately, we’ve started to feel more and more uncomfortable using Spotify as a tool to promote the Left of the Dial lineup. Lots of people use Spotify and it’s an easy way to reach a lot of people, but we can’t help but feel that we’re pointing our ticketholders to a platform that’s basically ripping off artists by paying them roughly €0.004 per stream, while the founder of Spotify has an estimated net worth of $4.8 billion.

We fully understand that companies need money to set up a service. It’s pretty much the same with Left of the Dial, we can’t give ALL the money from ticket sales directly to the artists, we also have to pay for a lot of other stuff (and people!) to make the festival happen.

We do try however to spend the money you spend on tickets wisely, and we really make an effort to NOT buy products or services from questionable multinationals.

Which, in all honesty, is close to impossible. Just look at which platform you’re reading this on. We may not have spent any money on this post, but we all know very well that everybody’s paying with their data when using social media.

But back to the music.

We felt that Bandcamp has a much fairer business model for artists, so we wanted to set up an account that would link directly to the artists. Divided in neat different categories, in chronological order of the Left of the Dial editions. Not to make any money of course, purely for promotional reasons.

It turned out to be impossible. So, what we created a fan-account, and we followed every artist who ever played Left of the Dial. Or at least, every artist we could find. We started at 2018, and worked our way back to the current lineup.  We may have missed someone, and when we’ll add them now, they will appear on top of the list, which will make it very confusing, but hey, we’re doing the best we can.

To cut a long story short, we hope you go to Bandcamp and support the Left of the Dial artists. Bandcamp’s share is only 15% on digital items, so if you spend a couple of euros on some tracks today, you’re basically buying your favourite artist a beer tonight.

Big love,

The strugglers of Left of the Dial

PS: Don’t worry Spotify lovers, despite us being a bit on the fence about the whole platform, we’ll still keep on adding new tracks to all our Spotify playlists!

SOMETIMES WE MESS THINGS UP

(and then we try to make them right)

Overall, things went pretty smoothly last year. Except for one thing. We had to cancel the second show of a band through absolutely no fault of their own, but in retrospect,  we feel we didn’t make that quite clear.

During the second show’s soundcheck, we got a noise complaint from a neighbouring office. The office was supposed to be empty, but apparently someone was working late, who got absolutely livid and threatened to call the police if we made any sound before 18.00h.

Now, we’re not afraid of the police, and we only use that specific stage for one weekend, but the venue is there all year round. We didn’t want to jeopardize their much-needed good relationship with their neighbours. So, we had no other choice than to skip the first two bands.

For one band, we could easily find another slot, but the other had to leave straight after their scheduled show due to other obligations which made it impossible to move them to another slot.

Of course, it’s a festival and these things happen, but we could have communicated it waaaayyyyy better.

In the heat of the moment, with hundreds of other things going on, we gave you some vague ‘due to unforeseen circumstances’ reason which maybe made it sound like the band had some part in the cancelation while they absolutely didn’t.

They really wanted to play their second show and judging from the queue at their first show and all your disappointed reactions you would have REALLY loved to see them again.

So, we did the only logical thing – we invited them back for Left of the Dial 2025. And they accepted!

They will be part of the Feb 40 which we’ll proudly announce tomorrow.

Big love,

The stage divers of Left of the Dial

PS: Most of you will know exactly which band we’re talking about, but we promised to keep it a secret until the first official lineup announcement, so if all you smartasses can restrain yourself from posting their name in the comments for about 24 hours, that would be greatly appreciated. Tomorrow it’ll be official and we can all publicly celebrate their return!