How Yours & Owls Festival Pulled Off The First Large Scale Music Festival In NSW Post-Lockdown

Yours and Owls Festival 2021 @ Wollongong’s Dalton Park. Photo credit: Ruby Boland

It hasn’t been an easy ride for the music industry over the past year, and music festivals, in particular, have been hit the hardest. With no insurance against COVID snap lockdowns and stringent restrictions still in play, festival organisers are playing a high-stakes game to help pave the way back to live.

Last month, Yours and Owls successfully delivered the first large scale music festival in NSW, with 30,000 fans in attendance over two days at Wollongong’s Dalton Park.

The festival was also home to the first rotating stage in Australia, allowing fans, who were divided into four seated zones to watch live performances from the likes of Tones and I, PNAU, Dope Lemon and DMA’s.

We spoke with the organisers of Yours and Owls Festival to find out how they were able to deliver the festival in today’s COVID normal world.

Australia’s first rotating stage at Yours & Owls Festival 2021. Photo credit: Mikki Gomez

1.  What’s the best thing about being able to finally deliver Yours & Owls Festival?

 Finally seeing the plans come full circle, so many different ideas and conversations that sat in limbo for so long... That paired with knowing we were part of a super small crew of people that had the opportunity to navigate our way through that limbo was a pretty surreal realisation to have.

2. Most difficult thing you overcame in order to make the festival happen…

 Trusting the process, when we didn't know what the process was... as someone whose personality and role orbits around routine & structure/plans, it was a big difference trying to plan something with almost no direction for a little while there... It's easy to pull from past experiences and follow the guidance of others when you're not sure, but there was literally no knowledge to work off for this.

3. Is there anything about the festival that you would change if you had to deliver it again under similar circumstances?

 From a marketing perspective, I'd step up our comms process... There were lots of answers we were happy to 'finally have' that I think we overlooked a few of the questions that they would spark, so spending a little more time within our internal team around 'what questions will people have after hearing this info' and making sure we try to address/solve those in the initial launch of new information.

4.  What are three things that you relied on Moshtix as a partner to deliver in the lead up to and on the day?

• Up to date comms with all ticket holders; It's hard for us to ensure everyone that has bought a ticket to our event is across all of our social media & internal comms platforms, so having Moshtix available to send any and all info from their platform directly to all ticket holders for that event specifically made a huge difference in ensuring all patrons received the comms they needed to.
  

• Cross-promotion; In the uncertain times amid the covid climate, it was great to have Moshtix as another solid and trusted party on board continually backing us to the public to reinforce our message and help spread it as far as possible to another community of event lovers specifically.
  

• Ticketing issue problem solving; This was a massive thing for us, it saved us massive amounts of time in the way of working through ticketing cases with individuals, and gave us one clean route to take for all ticketing enquiries. This simplified things internally for us, and also cleared up a lot of misinformation in the external conversations happening on socials etc.... people got the idea in the end that if you have a ticketing q, go to Moshtix directly.

5. If you had one piece of advice to pass on to fellow festival organizers what would it be?

Communicate with your audience. People trusted us because we continually talked them through what was happening and what we were doing in response to changes.

6. Favorite festival moment?

Hearing the entire crowd sing along to Lime Cordiale 'I Touch Myself' and realising we just pulled everything off and people were there, and everything felt like a normal festival.

30,000 attendees across two days at Yours & Owls Festival 2021. Photo credit: Ian Laidlaw