Back in 2016, the paper I was writing for in South Carolina assembled a list of โ€œ15 Regional Music Festivals That Have the Goods,โ€ selecting a list of mostly indie rock celebrations we felt were truly succeeding.

Looking back from 2024, five of those festivalsโ€”Winston-Salem’s Phuzz Phest, Charlestonโ€™s Southern Ground, Charlotteโ€™s Carolina Rebellion, Atlantaโ€™s Shaky Beats, and Durhamโ€™s Art of Cool Festivalโ€”have permanently canceled all or large parts of their programming.

Maintaining a music festival and evolving its perspective over time is hard. Your initial audience keeps aging, meaning you need to pull in younger people to replenish your crowd as former regulars tire of hoofing it to catch a multitude of acts playing in conditions that are often hectic and at the whim of the elements. 

In the case of a festival like Raleighโ€™s Hopscotchโ€”which built its success on an adventurous curation of far-flung smaller acts anchored by headliners that often skew toward indie rock legacy actsโ€”organizers are tasked with maintaining a balance of emerging acts (to drive a sense that audiences are experiencing something fresh and exciting) and compelling luminaries (to give attendees the nostalgia hit that keeps them coming back for more).ย 

A crowd at Public Enemy’s 2010 performance. Photo by Brian Vetter.

Both of those marks keep changing as time marches on. Hopscotch crowned its first festival in 2010 with hip-hop powerhouse Public Enemy, at that moment about a decade and a half removed from their revolutionary early-โ€™90s prime. Booking them today would likely still generate excitement, but would they be received with the same triumphant glee that greeted them 14 years ago?

Topped by some seriously big indie rock headliners in the here and now (Waxahatchee and St. Vincent), zeroing in once again on a hugely exciting legacy act (The Jesus Lizard, who are set to release their first album in 24 years the week after Hopscotch), and including exciting forays into other territory (rapper JPEGMAFIA and Zamrock legends WITCH), the marquee slots on this yearโ€™s lineup keep Hopscotch headed in the direction youโ€™d expect, with a litany of smaller acts that further back that up.

Evolving the festival over time while maintaining its identity is a daunting task. But itโ€™s one that Hopscotch director Nathan Price says he isnโ€™t sweating as the event approaches its 2024 outing September 5-7, bringing nearly 130 acts to two outdoor main stages and eight club spaces in downtown Raleigh.

โ€œI guess we’re kind of lucky in that I haven’t really thought about that even a little bit,โ€ says Price, whoโ€™s headed up booking for the festival since 2014. โ€œIt’s mostly just we’re booking the bands that are exciting to us, new or old. That’s pretty much how I’ve always done it.โ€

But that doesnโ€™t mean Price and his team donโ€™t think hard about whom theyโ€™re booking and how they work together. One of Hopscotchโ€™s strengths through the years has been the way it books older acts and newer acts in conversation, showcasing the way musical trends evolve. And that was certainly on organizersโ€™ minds again this year.

โ€œItโ€™s just wanting to make it as well-rounded as possible,โ€ Price says. โ€œTwo of the most exciting spots that we have for that are Ducks Ltd. going into The dBโ€™s, which is kind of like new power pop into classic power pop. Once we realized that we could do that, it seemed like it’d be fun. And then that Pylon [Reenactment Society] bill on Saturday night with Exercise and some of the locals is kind of fun. We were looking at it, we were like, โ€˜Man, there’s like a million young bands that could fit perfectly on this.โ€™โ€

But finding the headlining acts to anchor your festival lineup can be challenging.

Aaron Greenwald worked previously as the managing director for Knoxvilleโ€™s Big Ears Festival, which collides more traditional festival sounds like indie rock and hip-hop with far-reaching experimental acts and modern classical. He says that with monolithic industry titan Live Nation gobbling up many of the biggest acts, the selection of workable options can be slim.

At the same time, the mechanics of a festival allow for more creative avenues to solve this problem.

A Hopscotch performer in 2022. Photo by Brett Villena.

โ€œYou’ve historically seen more creativity in the festival business,โ€ Greenwald says. โ€œThe festival model is not based on โ€˜How much money can I potentially make on this artist on a given night?โ€™ Your revenue sources are aggregated from ticket sales plus sponsorship plus food and drink plus merch. I think the popular festival model brings several additional sources of revenue to the table so that a booker can pay more than they would If they were presenting a single artist.โ€

At the same time, as Greenwald points out, the need to end up in the black to make a festival feasible in an ongoing capacity can stymie creativity. Itโ€™s a challenge that Price acknowledges.

Hopscotch started out losing money, emerging as an experiment put on by this very paper to see if a huge, stylistically far-reaching music festival was possible in downtown Raleigh. Hopscotch canโ€™t run that way anymore.

โ€œI don’t know that the goal in the early years was ever to not make money,โ€ Price says. โ€œIt was attached to another business that was kind of creatively trying to push something for the city. And now it’s on its own. It’s not attached to anything. And we do, unfortunately, have to look at some things that aren’t just artistic. We have to hopefully sell some tickets.โ€ 

โ€œIt’s tough because we don’t get city funding…We’ve just never been able to sustain that in the same way. In some ways, it feels like it’s all on us to make it happen.โ€

โ€œIt’s tough,โ€ Price continues, โ€œbecause we don’t get city funding. A lot of the other festivals in the area get a lot of support in different ways, whether it be people from the city helping or something like that. We’ve just never been able to sustain that in the same way. In some ways, it feels like it’s all on us to make it happen.โ€

Considerations of dollars and cents can make it hard to balance newer and older acts.

Trey Lofton books the Jam Room Music Festival in Columbia, South Carolina, which, like Hopscotch, is a largely indie rock event seeking to balance emerging acts with impressive legacy pullsโ€”albeit on a smaller scale and without charging for admission.

Several top-line legacy acts from Hopscotchโ€™s past have played Jam Roomโ€”Tortoise, Superchunk, and Guided by Voices among them. Lofton says a big reason why the festival frequently leans on such acts is they often come cheaper than newer acts that are cusping toward larger popularity.

โ€œ[There are] bands I’ve made inquiries toโ€”either immediately prior to my inquiry or immediately after, they’ve all kind of reached a level that it’s just not in our budget. It would eat our entire artist budget to do it, or 80 percent,โ€ Lofton says.

Price feels lucky that Hopscotch established a balance between newer and older acts early on so that he can turn his energy toward evolving that approach over time. But some things have changed as heโ€™s brought Hopscotch alongโ€”such as booking headliners the event has booked before, as it did this year with St. Vincent, Waxahatachee, Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, and Guided by Voices.

Tracking the evolution of artists that organizers and audiences enjoy has become part of Hopscotchโ€™s spirit, balanced by a continued sense of adventure across the rest of the lineup.

โ€œWe don’t do quite the same thing as we always used to,โ€ Price says.

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Bio: After seven years in the Triangle, Jordan Lawrence followed his fiancée and their fluffy cat to Greensboro. He has written about music for the INDY since 2010.Twitter: http://twitter.com/JordanLawrence