really was a world first!
I am delighted to say the rapport formed thirteen years ago is still as strong as ever. The UK V Festival takes place every summer during the third weekend in August on two beautiful sites, Hylands Park in Chelmsford and Weston Park in Staffordshire. It is one of the largest and most popular in the UK — attracting over 175,000 music fans in 2007 — and plays host to more than a hundred bands. It’s an industry favourite, with the live-music business voting V European Festival of the Year for the past seven years at the annual Live Magazine Awards. Good thing I trusted their instincts!
Fast forward to spring 2006 in the US. It’s year two in our fight to launch our newest airline, Virgin America, and there is no clear end date in sight.
While the US Department of Transportation took its time making a decision, the design team kept its head down and continued to create a revolutionary new travelling experience for US consumers. But our patience was frayed. We thought we’d have launched a new company by now.
One day that spring, Virgin USA’s Dan Porter, who came to Virgin with extensive expertise in technology and music, rang me up and said: ‘Richard, Virgin businesses are all inherently social, whether it’s health clubs, mobile phones or airlines. So is music. You’ve been building incredible communities every summer with V Festivals in the UK, so while America waits for the airline to launch, what do you say to throwing the largest music and art festival on the East Coast? Give Americans a taste of the Virgin brand?’
‘How quickly can you get it going?’ I asked. A big splash could be just the thing, I thought, and it wouldn’t have to take as long as starting an airline. I do like live music and believe in the rejuvenating powers of parties. And I certainly enjoyed camping.
‘Give us seven months,’ Dan said with a gulp.
Now, we’d never put a festival together in the largest music market in the world, and what did the Virgin USA team know about festival logistics, finding the right campsite, locking down the best date and convincing 50,000 people to give it a go? It took the right kind of magic and chemistry to create something like the UK’s V Festival. Could it be replicated in America?
The US team decided to launch two festivals, one on the East Coast in the US and one in Canada. Both would be called Virgin Festival — we were lucky enough to have a brand name that didn’t sound like a corporation or a cleaning product. We then had to find concert partners who shared our vision; while the festival was a business, it wasn’t just something to make money but an extension of the brand and the Virgin lifestyle, so every detail had to be perfect.
Two independent promoters with a strong aesthetic sense and vision joined up: Seth Hurwitz, the last great independent rock promoter in a cut-throat market of giant corporations that were swallowing concert venues and record labels whole; and Andrew Dreskin, promoter and trusted partner who had started Ticketweb with Dan. They felt as strongly as we did about putting on an incredible experience so they didn’t hesitate to spend an extra bit of money for the best line-up, the best production, the best food, the best drinks. It was important to stay true to the original values behind setting up V Festival back in 1996 — a truly punter-focused festival. They identified Baltimore as a site in the north-east that was under-penetrated and in close proximity to hundreds of colleges and several key mid-sized to large US cities. Virgin Mobile US joined up as a sponsor and offered their expertise in marketing to a youthful target audience.
Meanwhile, in Toronto, the Virgin Mobile Canada team — including marketing gurus Nathan Rosenberg (recruited from Virgin Mobile Australia to start Virgin Mobile Canada) and Andrew Bridge — began to transform the lush Toronto Island Park into Virgin Festival grounds.
Without a fantastic headliner, there is no festival. In a stroke of luck and genius, the Who decided to tour that summer and Seth signed them up to open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Baltimore. It was to be their only mid- Atlantic stop. Once the Who joined us, we knew the festival was going to make a strong first impression.
Dan even convinced my son Sam to get in on the excitement. In June, less than three months before the festival date, Sam kicked off ticket sales at the Union Square Megastore in New York City. He was flanked by a row of lads wearing nothing but socks in a tribute to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Afterwards, Sam rang Jackie up in the UK and convinced her that he did the media event in nothing more than a sock — thankfully, my son has more modesty than his father and was only winding her up!
I had a busy September that year. On 9 September I helped kick off Toronto’s Virgin Festival and then went down to New York to announce during the Clinton Global Initiative that 100 per cent of profits from Virgin Group’s transportation interests would be invested in clean energy. Days later, my wife Joan and Sam and I travelled to Baltimore for the US festival. As I walked across the grounds and shook hands with thousands of festival-goers, I was struck by the number of people who thanked me for bringing Virgin and the festival to the US. Many jokily thanked me for saving the Earth but I reminded them that it is just as much their responsibility as it is mine!
While the North America market is very different from the UK market, one thing was clear: we all love a brilliant party. So we responded to each individual market but also gave them signature Virgin touches, most of which were inspired by the UK’s V Festival. We wanted to be remembered for unsurpassed production quality, Virgin Angels who helped people in charming and unexpected ways, chill-out areas, delicious food and beverages. We partnered with sub-sponsors who agreed to contribute to the overall consumer experience, not just their logos, and our stages weren’t named after athletic shoes or radio stations. Because we took it seriously as a business, people got to enjoy it as a party. In 2007 we launched V Festival Australia (Sydney, Gold Coast, Melbourne and Perth) and the Aussies definitely know how to party!
In an era of digital downloads and headphones that tune out the rest of the world, the live-music experience offers something different, authentic and communal. It provides a rare chance to gather with people to catch favourite acts and also make unexpected discoveries. Little did we know that thirteen years ago when Jackie and James came to me with the idea of starting V Festival in the UK, we would be in the vanguard of new music festivals in North America.
Just as competition is a great thing for airline passengers, competition will be a great thing for music fans. Many new festivals have sprouted up since that summer, and eventually the best will last.
So, the milliner says to his son: ‘Don’t worry, lad. People will always need hats.’
What he means is: ‘
Is his attitude a healthy one?
Of course it is. No business lasts for ever, and being true to your life’s work carries with it the risk that you may lose your future. This is the deal we make with the world: that we exercise our free will and accept the consequences. (I love ballooning, and it’s almost killed me on several occasions.) Every risk is worth taking as long as it’s in a good cause, and contributes to a good life.
Of course, if your business involves the investment of other people’s money, you are under certain legal and moral obligations. You may have to adapt your business to meet those obligations.
But I have every sympathy — especially in the light of changes in the music business — with those companies who delivered a thing well, with care and pride, long after the thing being delivered had lost its currency. It’s a classic case of doing the right thing at the wrong time. Sometimes it’s a mistake. Sometimes — and there’s not a business book on the shelves will admit this sorry fact — it’s not a mistake at all. It’s just something dying.
Virgin is not especially aggressive in the marketplace. (We fight hard and long when we have to, but we don’t do dirty tricks and we don’t go looking for punch-ups.) And heaven knows, Virgin’s success is not down to its crystal-clear vision of the future. If it were, you’d be Virgining our company valuations on the Internet rather than Googling them — and our Megastores would have been sold off in the eighties.
Virgin’s success is primarily down to the consistent way it’s delivered on its brand proposition. Closing the book on Virgin Music
What astonishes people is less our ability to move into new sectors — after all, venture capitalists do this all the time — than the speed with which we deliver. Willingness to change jobs is one thing, but how do we sometimes manage to hit the ground running so fast?
