Kevin Lyman has managed to turn the Vans Warped Tour into one of the premier concert circuits in the nation. Now he’s trying to replicate the success he’s had with the punk rock and skateboard shows in a completely different genre: country music.
Lyman’s company, 4 Fini Inc. in South Pasadena, has spent the past 16 years growing the Warped Tour into a national, 44-city showcase for some top bands. The 2010 lineup will include All-American Rejects and Flatfoot 56, and the sponsors number more than 30, topped by Vans, the shoe manufacturer based in Santa Fe Springs.
This summer, 4 Fini – named for Lyman’s daughter, Fini – will try to duplicate the Warped formula with the 23-stop Country Throwdown Tour, which started May 14 in Tampa, Fla., and will end June 20 in Mountain View.
For Warped, the company produces an all-day event with a main stage featuring six to eight nationally known bands, a secondary stage for local or upcoming bands, and acres of tents selling or giving away sponsors’ merchandise and food as well as CDs and T-shirts for all participating bands. 4 Fini usually forms partnerships with radio stations and retailers to promote the tour, and ticket prices are in the $30-$40 range.
Lyman said he thinks most of those elements will translate well from the crunch and scream of punk to the torch and twang of country.
“Our shows are a lot of stimulation for a low price,” he said. “I feel that country music needs some stimulation, and the musicians need to team up to promote themselves.”
Lyman got the idea for Throwdown a few years ago when he attended Stagecoach, an annual country music festival in Indio. He looked at the audience and realized they weren’t that different from the Warped Tour crowd.
“There weren’t many cowboy hats in the crowd,” he said. “Today everyone lives in this iPod generation set on shuffle. They listen to Taylor Swift one minute, 50 Cent the next, and they may try Iron Maiden for the right song.”
Country Throwdown does things slightly different from Warped. While regular seats still sell in the $30-$40 range, lawn seating is available as low as $21. Also, the marketing campaign depends less on the Internet and more on radio, a medium that still commands tremendous loyalty among country music fans.
One challenge that Lyman has discovered – and still hasn’t resolved – is that country fans love tailgating, maybe more than concerts. At times there are nearly as many people standing in the parking lot as sitting in the amphitheater. Before the tour ends, he hopes to find incentives to move more people from the parking lot into their seats.
Hal Abramson, a music festival consultant in Rockville, Md., said Throwdown will need to get sponsors in order to book the big acts that mean success. The first tour features Montgomery Gentry and Jack Ingram – recognizable names for serious country connoisseurs, but they don’t have the draw of Taylor Swift or George Strait.
However, Abramson thinks 4 Fini is making a smart play in trying to get the festival up and running this first year. Thanks to the success of Warped, the company has a reputation that will help it to secure big-dollar sponsors that will allow booking of top talent in the future.
“Most bands require a 50 percent upfront deposit, and Taylor Swift will cost $1.5 million for a 90-minute set,” he said. “In these times, only going concerns like the Warped promoters can secure these needed sponsorships to offset the growing cost of the acts.”
Lyman doesn’t have a top-line sponsor equivalent to Vans for his country music experiment, but hopes to land one next year. For now, the tour is presented by Rockstar Energy Drink, and it has sponsorships from Wrangler, U.S. Marines, Stetson and a smattering of record labels. It’s a start, but it’s nowhere near the 30 to 40 sponsors that Warped signs each year.
School of rock
4 Fini started in 1995, when Lyman was getting burned out producing about 300 music shows a year in nightclubs. Vans approached him with the idea of putting on an amateur skateboard competition. He had planned on dropping out of the music business to become a school teacher, and decided that the Vans show would be a great thing to do first, but only if Vans agreed to add musical acts to the skating.
The first tour was a phenomenal success, and Lyman decided to stick with it instead of heading to the classroom.
4 Fini now has eight employees, four in Los Angeles for the Warped Tour and four in Nashville, Tenn., for Throwdown. However, some weekends this summer, with two concert tours in full swing, it will employ about 900 vendors and temporary workers, from musicians to ticket sellers to security guards.
Financially, Lyman’s goal is to break even from ticket sales and make his profits from sponsorships. However, he acknowledged Warped has only accomplished that feat three times in its history.
In most years, some of the money from sponsorships and T-shirt sales help offset the festival’s production costs.
The larger sponsorships for his tours cost $500,000 or more, but the majority are less than $100,000, all the way down to a few thousand dollars for local retailers. He wants to get as many companies as possible to participate.
The Warped Tour has 30 to 40 sponsors, each with a tent at the event, plus an additional 20 or so tents that sell merchandise for the bands in the show.
Jocelynn Jacobs, a spokeswoman for American Legacy Foundation, said her anti-tobacco group has been a Warped sponsor for 10 years.
“With the Warped Tour, we can bank on large crowds, a fun environment and reaching those teens with grassroots, peer-to-peer marketing that’s highly effective for us,” she said. “It’s one of the few music tours that still commands an audience.”
While Lyman hopes Throwdown will someday rival Warped in popularity and profitability, he doesn’t plan his business more than six months ahead. He won’t exit the music business for school teaching anytime soon – even though he gets consistent offers from those wanting to buy his company.
“I tell them I’ll start negotiations at $3 billion,” he joked, “and the numbers will go up from there.”
