September was a happening month if you care about North Carolina music. Three festivals landed on consecutive weekends: Hopscotch in Raleigh, the NC Folk Festival in Greensboro, and the Carrboro Music Festival on the last Sunday of the month.
I didn’t catch all of each one, but I don’t need to. Put them side by side, and they make the same argument in three different ways. Every town should have a music festival, and the price of admission should not be the thing standing between people and live music.
Of course, each one gets there differently. Looking at how they do it is the closest thing I can offer to a blueprint for any city that doesn’t have one yet.
Hopscotch, the “conventional” festival
Hopscotch might be the closest thing in the state to a “conventional” festival: 3-day general admission passes, a VIP tier, a national-ish lineup, and a price tag that sets itself apart from NC Folk Festival or Carrboro Music Festival. It’s also privately owned and for-profit, which is part of why it gets picked apart every year. While the branding suggests Coachella-adjacent, the most recent headliners have not been.
But if you ignore the ticketed festival and look at the free one, Hopscotch is an absurd bargain. Starting at noon and running three days straight, local venues like Kings, Neptunes, Slims, and The Pour House host day parties with no wristband required. You can walk into a room, watch great local bands, then head into another and do it again.
I had a press pass for the first time this year, and yet almost everything I actually engaged with was free anyway. I saw bands like Applefield, Kill the Buddha, Glowr, Banff, T. Gold, Amelia Riggs, Knockout Artist, and so many more just by bouncing (or, more aptly, hopping) around a couple of blocks.
If you’re a Raleigh local, you don’t need me to tell you that the day parties are Hopscotch’s backbone. They’re booked by venues and bands working together, not by the festival itself. The clubs open before noon and close after midnight, which is a staggering amount of music to curate. But that gives it a South by Southwest feel of people bouncing between rooms and catching sets they didn’t plan on.
No matter where you stand on Hopscotch lately, it’s foolish to think that Raleigh is better off without it. Free, accessible day parties are a big part of that.
Image credit: emma_essersnaps5
NC Folk Festival, the dream scenario
Flip the model from a traditional music festival, and you get the North Carolina Folk Festival, which was almost entirely free. The Saturday headliner was The Roots, and you could walk up to Greensboro and watch them for nothing. Attendance broke records, and the free recognizable headliner probably helped.
The money side matters here. The festival raised well over a million dollars without leaning on sponsors people roll their eyes at (looking at you, Duke Energy). Instead, most support came from local banks, locally owned businesses, and larger regional companies. VIP tickets were there for people who want to spend, but the core of the festival is available without forking over cash.
Of course, that approach requires a nonprofit whose job is to fundraise, book the acts, handle logistics, and run communications. It’s enormous work, and it isn’t always flawless. But the payoff is a city that gets to put itself on display. Out-of-town visitors arrive for a day or a weekend with no steep up-front cost, eat at local restaurants, wander, and stay. A mix of local, regional, and national acts, almost all without a price tag. That’s every city’s dream festival.
Carrboro Music Festival, the one you can pull off
Those looking for a festival to model itself after only need to glance at what Carrboro has done for nearly three decades. It’s completely free, scattered across the town center, with most stages set up outside local businesses.
This year’s “20 stages and 100-plus artists” sounds like hyperbole that’s too big to fit into one day, until you see it. It was a perfect Sunday, and the whole thing works because people walk around. You follow the sound, find a band you’ve never heard, grab something to eat, and move on to the next one. It all works because of the musicians who play, people who book the stages, and businesses willing to host a band next to their front door. There’s no budget line for a headliner because the headliner is the town.
You can see the same DNA in your typical Porchfest. Pick a nice day, close some streets if you can, and let people walk. That last part is especially important in the South, where so many cities sprawl and rely on cars to get anywhere efficiently. Shutting down a stretch of downtown for a day gets people to park, get out, and make an afternoon of it.
Creating a blueprint for others to follow
My key takeaway from a month packed with music festivals is that you can’t expect people to stumble onto local music on their own. You have to put it in front of them. While all three models are different, there are aspects that can be pulled from each one into a blueprint that other towns and smaller cities can replicate.
- Make free the default. Things are expensive, people are tired, and a night out that also costs money is a hard sell. A festival that says “just show up” removes the biggest barrier.
- Use what’s already there. Hopscotch’s best moments happen in existing venues. NC Folk Festival and Carrboro’s stages are in front of existing businesses. You don’t need to build a festival site from scratch.
- Let the community run the core. Those day parties and next-to-business stages work because the people who care about local music are the ones booking it.
- If you want a buzzworthy headliner, find a nonprofit and go local for the money. NC Folk Festival showed it’s possible to book a big name act and keep it free, so long as you have people doing the fundraising and sponsors who want to be there.
If your town is missing a connection with local music, it’s easier to start with the Carrboro version. That model is the cheapest and the easiest to replicate, and it’s built entirely out of things your town probably already has: bands, bars, sidewalks, and a little bit of nice weather.
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