Ep. 44 Ritesh Patel on Building Ticket Fairy to Support Festival Creators

We chat with Ritesh Patel, CEO and co-founder of Ticket Fairy and founder of LOCUS Festival (A Drum 'N' Bass Experience in Paradise), to talk about how a love for throwing parties turned into building real systems that help promoters bring their vision to life.

Ritesh shares what producing over 400 shows taught him about the biggest challenges promoters face, not a lack of creativity, but a lack of time, tools, and capital. Those lessons shaped how Ticket Fairy works, from affiliate ticketing to fair resale and smoother on-site entry.

We also get into lineup flow, crowd energy, and why thoughtful curation matters just as much as booking big names. From creating Locus in Tulum and Bali to navigating agents, weather chaos, and even a volcano, Ritesh breaks down what it really takes to build festivals people feel connected to.

This conversation is all about supporting independent festivals, leading with community, and helping organizers actually see their ideas through.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Ritesh And The Origin Story
• 3:55 Bristol Raves And First Big Booking
• 10:20 Balancing Tech Career With Promoting
• 17:05 The Spark For Ticket Fairy
• 23:40 How The Earn-Back Model Works
• 29:20 Scaling From Clubs To 40k Events
• 35:10 Box Office Fixes And Wristband Mapping
• 42:30 Building Trust With Organizers

Transcript

Meet Ritesh And The Origin Story

Vanessa 0:00

Hey, Sunny.

Sunny 0:01

Yeah, Vanessa?

Vanessa 0:02

What do you call two best friends that love music festivals?

Sunny 0:05

Hmm. I guess you'd call them Festies.

Clark 0:25

Music. festivals. Friendship. Festies

Sunny 0:34

Hello, Festies Fam. Oh, welcome back to Festies. Today on the show, we are joined by Ritesh Patel, CEO and co-founder of the Ticket Fairy and the founder of LOCUS Drum 'n' Bass Festival. In this episode, we talk about how Ritesh went from throwing raves in college to turning that passion into his full-time career with the Ticket Fairy We talk about how Ticket Fairy works. Dive into the story LOCUS Drum 'n' Bass, which has taken place in destinations like Tulum and Bali. And he even shares his golden rule for creating a festival flyer. We also get into the differences between festivals in the US and the UK and a bunch of other behind-the-scenes insights. So let's jump into the conversation. Before we get into the ticket fairy LOCUS, we would love to rewind a little and hear about where your festival journey started. Start from the beginning.

Ritesh 1:35

Start from the beginning. Okay. So I was a very, can you use the term, a very early nerd? I started coding when I nine years old. And basically chose to do computer science at college. And by the time I got there, I'd kind of like built tech and built products. And I was 18, and I was kind of like, oh, well, I've kind of done this, and now they're making me do all these boring classes. And simultaneously, I discovered the rave scene. And, where I went to college was a city in the UK called Bristol. And Bristol has one of the best music scenes in the world. It's like Massive Attack, Port's Head, Runny Size. the dub step scene kind of came from there as well, in at least across the across London and Bristol. And so kind of got to a point where like the rave scene kind of took over my life. And in the first year of college, I got put in a house that was kind of had quite a lot of sound isolation. So like it was surrounded by a forest, and it was a big house with 35 people. And you kind of walked into the entrance, and there was a big square opening where that, I look I kind of walked into the house and I was like, that is a dance floor. And, one of the guys in the house had turntables and a professional sound system he'd brought to college with him. And we were like, okay, so no equipment costs, we've got this no noise pollution issues, we've got a massive dance floor. Let's throw a party. And, we ended up getting about 400 people to a house party. Yeah, that's crazy.

Vanessa 3:12

All things lined up, huh?

Bristol Raves And First Big Booking

Ritesh 3:14

The house became quite well known for throwing these parties, and we did three over the course of a year, and I got the taste for promoting because I was kind of like, wait a second, like you can actually bring the right people to you, and this is really fun. And the guy that had the sound system at the house, I kind of said to him, Hey, look, I like this whole marketing promotion angle of throwing parties. Should we approach a couple of clubs and just see if they'll they'll let us actually do it, do a gig? And one of the venues was like, Hey, yeah, we'll give you a Wednesday night, no problem. And then probably one of the like most prestigious venues in the city agreed to give us a Saturday night. two 19-year-old kids, and they were like, Yeah, you can have a Saturday night. And so I think when you get to know me, you realize that I'm a zero or a hundred person and don't believe in middle ground. So called up the highest booking agency I could, and I was like, Can I book your four biggest DJs, please? Yeah, like not one or two, like I want four of them. All of them. and then we announced the show like three weeks beforehand, and there was no social media back then for promoting gigs, and so it was all like physical flyers trying to not get caught by police putting out big posters, gluing them to the walls and things like renegade.

Vanessa 4:32

Yeah.

Ritesh 4:32

And and then we announced the gig and everyone was like, Are you crazy? Like you're gonna lose so much money. That's the biggest lineup that's been in Bristol forever. And, you guys are just stupid, but it got attention, right? that's the whole point of like when you announce when you announce a party, the whole point of launching something is that it gets attention more than it should, because you're not an established brand. So it's like, well, how do you get attention? You do something ridiculous and book this massive lineup.

Vanessa 5:00

What great confidence that must have given right off the bat.

Ritesh 5:03

I'm surprised the booking agent even let us do it. And the thing is, like back then, the artist didn't really have a choice. if you offered the agent money, there was no management. The agent basically had the calendar of the DJs, and she just went, Yep, this one's available, this one's available, this one's available. I'm just gonna put the booking in their diary right now. I'm gonna send over the contracts and send the deposit, and it's done. There wasn't this like red tape of this billing has to be this way, this font size needs to be this, this artist hearing needs to be this way. Basically, this is in 2000, right? So, the agents did not stipulate what the artwork looked like. So the promoter could actually curate correctly, position the music correctly, and do their job, which is actually get the people, people to come to the gig. And so she just booked it in. And second biggest act almost didn't come because she double booked him.

Sunny 5:56

Oh no.

Ritesh 5:57

He missed the flight to his primary booking and saw a text from another DJ saying, see you in Bristol. And he was like, Oh, I have a booking in Bristol as well. And so that would have been a no-show, but it wasn't. And so he actually showed up. That was Andy C. And I don't know if you know Andy C on the John Bay side, but he he headlines the baseball stage at ADC frequently. And so, like, we had this huge gig and it was packed in the first like 45 minutes, and then I got a little bit ambitious and decided to do a DIY live stream over dial up, and that actually worked.

Vanessa 6:31

That's crazy, and that's how I got into playing waves.

Ritesh 6:34

Wow, it wasn't like say Instagram live where there's an existing audience, right? So, like uh, and there was no cloud, and there was no like 3G, 4G, 5G, whatever, like none of that existed. Yeah, and then no one had laptops. So I had to take a I had to take a really big heavy PC tower, put it in my car. The monitor was 30 pounds.

Vanessa 6:59

Oh my gosh.

Ritesh 6:59

Just a screen.

Vanessa 7:00

Yeah, right.

Ritesh 7:01

And then I had to take that to the back room of the venue, and then basically couple together audio cables that were long enough to go from the back room to the stage into the mixer, and then put that audio feed into a sound card, and then connect my home dial-up internet line. And then I convinced someone who I would have had never met in person, was only talking to in a music chat room who worked in tech to let me borrow this physical server he had in his data center because there was no cloud, you couldn't just spin up a server. Right. You had to own a physical one and then install custom streaming software on that.

Sunny 7:34

And you're doing all of this while your event is about to start. How could you focus? I have no idea.

Vanessa 7:41

that's a 19-year-old's brain right there.

Ritesh 7:43

And then, there was no audience, so I had to like promote the stream in chat forums and things like that, and people listened, but it was real time and it worked. The whole event was live streamed from start to finish.

Sunny 7:54

That is so cool. Do you still have that audio?

Ritesh 7:56

you know what? I found the high quality recordings in a box about three or four months ago from 25 years back.

Sunny 8:06

Oh my gosh. That must have been fun to listen to. Yeah. So you started throwing parties with raves when you were 19. And then how did it go from a kid throwing raves to I mean, you're very successful and have your career in this field now? How tell us about that?

Ritesh 8:25

So when you get into music as deeply as most of us do, if you kind of like, it kind of takes over your life, right? if you are in the rave scene, it's very common that it takes over your life. And so I almost failed my degree. My waking hours flipped upside down. I'd be waking up at 5 p.m. every day and like going out to promote my gig and then going to events. and then barely graduated college and then went into tech as a day job and was still throwing five parties a month with a full-time job. Wow. And so I had this like 40 hours a week doing a tech day job for the VPC and 40 hours a week throwing gigs, and that's 16 hours a day. And then and then on top of that, I was going to nine parties every night. And like it was like four clubs between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. and then five house parties between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m. and then two hours to sleep and then to work. And it it was nuts.

Sunny 9:23

It really did take over your life.

Ritesh 9:25

Yeah, it really did. And so I managed to do two full-time careers at once. And 10 years into that, I produced over 400 to 450 shows. So that was talent booking, venue, marketing, physical promo, everything. And when once you've thrown four or five hundred gigs, you're like, man, this sucks. This is really hard. It's like, yeah, I'm lucky if a gig breaks even.

Vanessa 9:51

Right.

Balancing Tech Career With Promoting

Ritesh 9:51

If I made profit on a show, then the next two shows are gonna wipe that out. I'm subsidizing these gigs with a day job, but I love it, so yeah, cool. Of course, that is something you will do in the name of passion and art and whatever else, right? And it's every festival producer will say the same thing, you know. Hey, I lost 500 grand on my festival. Wait a second, there's this house I own that I can sell. Oh gosh, and, and you know, like these were club shows as well. Like, no, they weren't, but I lost 15 or 20 grand in one night on a show that I I'd spent a year planning, and it was so depressing.

Sunny 10:29

Yeah, I couldn't imagine.

Ritesh 10:31

and then I think again, that one was like uh get attention. I booked like 10 headliners, including four BBC Radio One DJs. And again, it was like wow, kind of dumb, but all right.

Sunny 10:42

That's how you learn.

Ritesh 10:44

But once you've done that, right, you realize that the industry needs a lot of help.

Vanessa 10:48

Yeah.

Ritesh 10:49

It's kind of a wait a second, this gig could be making way more money, but the promoter has so few resources and they are so stretched and they can't afford to pay people full-time salaries, and they're barely scraping by doing the minimum to even make the gig happen. How are they gonna access the cream of the event that takes them from loss into profit or loss into break-even? Because they just don't have enough hours in the day or enough bandwidth, right? And so, about 10 years in, the idea for Ticket Fairy suddenly became a thing where it's like, wait a second, I'd been running a couple of like digital marketing businesses with my brother, and we kind of understood how ad tech worked, and we understood how Google worked, and how people were selling products online and running affiliates and things like that. And it was like, wait a second, people are selling TVs and physical and whatever consumer brands using affiliate links online. Why can't you apply that to events? And so the initial concept of Fairy was let's build it what looks like a ticketing platform and it does everything that a ticketing platform does. And obviously, you have to get the vet, you have to get the venue or the event as a client for the to do this.

Sunny 12:03

Yeah. Yeah.

Ritesh 12:04

Once they start sending their fans to you to be the official ticketing platform, if someone then goes and buys a ticket to a show, why not make them into an affiliate? Why not say to them, hey, you just spent 50 bucks on a ticket? But if you can then get other people you know to go to the show, then you can actually earn back that money using a trackable link. And instead of going 50 bucks, the first two people you get to buy to go to the gig, your price is gonna drop from 50 to 45. If you can get five people to go, it's gonna drop from 50 down to 35 bucks or 30. And then if if you get eight or 10 people to go into the gig, then you get all your money back and you go for free. And the promoter is gonna be super grateful that you managed to ground up your crew and you deserve that $50 refund and you've you deserve to be on the S list.

Vanessa 12:53

I've never heard of something like that before.

Ritesh 12:56

That's why it's called Ticket Fairy, because it gives you money, like the Tooth Fairy gave you money when you ticket.

Vanessa 13:00

It's a great name. You're the fairy godparent of all these music goers, too. So it depends on how many you sell, it's you get either partial money back or all your money back.

Ritesh 13:10

Yeah, and and the psychology is really nice, right? Because if you spend 50 bucks on a ticket to go and see an artist you really love, you don't mind spending that 50 bucks. you're gonna be spending it because you want to go to the gig.

Vanessa 13:20

Yeah.

Ritesh 13:20

but the person who's putting on the show who's risking all the money is desperately trying to find as many people as possible who would go to that gig. And often it's not that you have a bad show, it's that you didn't get it in front of enough of the right people to get the venue filled, right? You have you could have the most amazing artist bookings and and and lineups, but if no one knows about your gig, they can't go to it. Or if they find out too late and it's after the show, then they can't go to it. And it's really the if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it really actually fall, right? Yeah, and so what this did is like it basically created a way for event organizers and promoters to get their show in front of the right people. And because I'm saying like I'm buying a ticket and I'm going, okay, I'm I've just committed full price to go and see my favorite artist. I probably would have said to my friends anyway, like, we should go and see this person.

Vanessa 14:13

We're already doing friends with you.

Ritesh 14:15

You're getting your friends off the fence, or you're getting a show in front of them that they either wanted to know about, or they trust you because you've already bought your ticket and you've committed. So like they kind of have some sort of social proof that like that artist is worth seeing, right? Yeah, that's way more effective than an ad that's just in the in a news feed that's saying, Hey, please come buy a ticket to my gig anonymously, right?

Vanessa 14:38

Right, word of mouth.

Ritesh 14:39

And word of mouth has always been the right way to promote gigs, but before we did this thing, you could never track it and you could never incentivize people who who committing early to a gig. And so basically it gave the event organizer distribution and eyeballs.

Sunny 14:56

It's amazing because you're solving so many problems like accessibility. maybe people who couldn't afford to go to these shows now can. the promoters, they have more time to do other things because they're not worrying about the ad revenue. there's so many free marketing for that.

Ritesh 15:12

It's pay on success marketing, which is the holy grail, right?

Sunny 15:15

yeah, yeah, super interesting. Thank you for service.

Vanessa 15:19

Yeah. Yeah, because that's totally something we would take advantage of too. We already do that, you know? We always love to have big groups of people come with us to our show, and it's more fun when you have big groups of the city.

Ritesh 15:29

That doesn't mean you don't have to run ads, it just means say you your ads convert a sale, right? I see a show in my newsfeed and I buy the ticket. That's cool. You got one sale out of the ad. But now you could get 10 sales out of that same ad click, which is which is really nice.

Sunny 15:45

Yeah. What size events does Ticket Fairy work with?

The Spark For Ticket Fairy

Ritesh 15:49

We do anything from 100 people to 35,000, 40,000 people. We can do every scale. And every scale of event has its own issues, right? If you're Coachella and you're selling out in 10 minutes, your next problem is secondary resale. So we built closed loop in platform secondary resale that's face value only in 2014, so that you would be able to safely transfer a ticket and you could safely buy a resale ticket and you would never get ripped off. And the smaller shows, maybe your venue holds 500 people and you can only sell 400 tickets because you've run out of marketing budget and you've exhausted your reach. But if you get another 50 people, suddenly you're breaking even instead of losing money. Every size, like there are different problems you can solve. And so we've kind of spent over 10 years thinking about every possible scenario where there's a problem. And sometimes you don't know in advance, right? Sometimes you're sitting in the box office and you figure out that there's a problem, a new problem that needs to be solved. sometimes it's like you're an interviewing a new client and finding out like what all their business bottlenecks are and where they'd where they have challenges so that you can build the next feature. it can be really hands-on. sometimes you have a vision for what needs to exist in the industry, like that whole like earn your money back thing, no one had ever done it. And we were the first in the world to do that. So, sometimes you see that gap, and then sometimes you just have to talk to your clients to be like, hey, where are your issues and what can we what can we solve? Because you are a one person or two-person team, like, where can we take the heavy lifting away from you?

Sunny 17:23

Is there a festival that comes to mind when you think about that?

Ritesh 17:26

One year, in the in the fairly early days, because we had a tiny team, and we managed to like get not that many, but like a few clients all over the world. And we managed, we got one client, and I was living in England at that point. And there was one client in New Zealand, and like it was a New Year's festival. And so, you know, I'd do Christmas in London with family, and then you know, Boxing Day, get on a plane and fly 25 hours to go to New Zealand, and then go get on the road to go to the festival to sit in the box office doing customer service for 18 hours a day. and this festival had really complex tickets. It was three days over New Year's. They had three-day passes, they had two-day passes, they had one day passes, they had camping add-ons, they had VIP lounge add-ons. And then, based on the combination of the order, you'd have completely different wristbands or multiple wristbands. And so, like, I'm sitting in the box office and there's 10,000 people at this festival, right? And I'm like, why is the line going so slowly? And it was like, because like it's so confusing for the gate staff who've only really just like, you know, they're freelancers, they're gig workers, right? So like they've probably been trained an hour before the gates open, and there's all these different combinations of wristbands, and it was like, okay, it's taking like two minutes to get each person into the gig. And this is a problem. And it was kind of like, well, how do we solve that? And so what we did is, and obviously, like you have artwork that you use to manufacture your wristbands, right? that already exists. So basically built this thing where in advance of the gig into the dashboard, and in fact, no, I did it manually back then, you could actually take the same wristband artwork that you use for the manufacturing and you could map it to the ticket type or the combination of a ticket type and a camping add-on. And so you could say, okay, well, it's a green wristband for a three-day pass, but it's a blue wristband if it's a three-day pass with a camping add-on. And if you add a VIP lounge, it's a red wristband. And so all of that got mapped in advance. And so when the ticket got scanned on the day, the scanning app would show visually within half a second, well, this person's got all of these things on their order. Give them the blue wristband and give them the red wristband and get them in as quickly as possible. And it basically took two minutes per person down to 30 seconds per person. And if you multiply that by 10,000 people, and those 10,000 people are in the festival two hours or three hours early because they didn't need to line up, and you only sell one more drink per person by say 15 bucks, they just made a lot more bar over. And everyone was happier because they didn't have to wait.

Sunny 20:04

That's a huge difference. Yeah. So when you were first launching Ticket Fairy, how did you explain the value to festival organizers?

Ritesh 20:13

, I mean, I think with the first thing we launched, which was the you know, earn back your ticket money. If you can say to a nightclub owner or independent promoter or a festival owner, do nothing except change your ticketing platform and you'll get 10 to 20% more in ticket sales, that's a pretty good hook.

Vanessa 20:29

Yeah.

Ritesh 20:29

And that's actually what it does. It actually adds 10 to 20% more in ticket sales. Just that one thing. And also makes the sales go faster because now you're getting people off the fence and they commit earlier, and then the whole group commits earlier. So it's not just about more sales, it's about faster sales. Maybe we sell you out six weeks early and you don't have to spend panic marketing ad dollars in the last few weeks and you don't have to add another headliner or whatever. there's a there's a really big impact if you're sold out well in advance, right?

Sunny 20:56

Yeah, since you've been in the industry for a long time, how has your ex relationship with festivals changed over the years?

Ritesh 21:03

Over the years, like if you can show people that you actually care about what they're doing, it really does make the relationship really nice. And people are way more willing to give you access to like internal documents. They would never show like a ticketing platform vendor, because now what you're actually doing is looking at their remaining challenges and gaps and trying to solve them. And so it becomes a really nice relationship. And at the end of the day, you know, no one, well, you can't really do a degree in festival production, right? Like you have to learn not yet. I mean, look, even if you did it in theory, the theory is very different to the practice, right? And so yeah, I think that like if you can be the solutions provider, that's a whole different relationship.

Sunny 21:56

You're the perfect person for this because you are still throwing gigs, so you're still involved with the actual process, and I'm sure experience some of these issues that other promoters are experiencing.

Ritesh 22:09

Definitely. And that kind of like that was an accident because when when I went full time on Ticker Fairy, there was no spare money to risk on doing gigs. And then 2018-2019 played around a little bit with producing events again and decided to throw an after hours at South by Southwest. and like did an industry only, invite-only after hours between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. five nights in a row. and like you know, tried to gather gather the community.

Sunny 22:39

Like you said, all or nothing. Yeah.

Ritesh 22:41

Let's not do everyone's like, let's do a south by point one night. And I was like, no, let's do six.

Sunny 22:46

Yeah. sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

Ritesh 22:50

No, no, no, like if you hadn't pointed it out, I wouldn't have even thought about it, but you're right.

Sunny 22:55

I'm noticing a pattern here.

Ritesh 22:59

And then like COVID happened, and then that was obviously challenging. But weirdly, we grew during COVID because we were operating in markets that closed their borders, and so they reopened events like relatively quickly. So we were lucky, a lot of ticketing companies didn't survive. And part of that process ended up with me moving to Tulum because like the entire North American music industry was in Mexico, essentially.

Sunny 23:24

Oh, interesting.

How The Earn-Back Model Works

Ritesh 23:25

Signed up a bunch of the venues to us over 2021. It was like beach clubs in Tulum had very manual processes, right? Like they were high-end gigs, big DJs, but table bookings were over WhatsApp, tracking was in spreadsheets, you know, like there was no real no real-time reporting. and then kind of, you know, living there, you make relationships with the venues at the hotels and things like that. And then if you pitch to a Mexican venue that like this ticket platform is gonna add 10 or 20 percent in ticket sales to the to their numbers, and they don't have to pay for the software, and it's just gonna be paid for through service fees, it's pretty easy to sign up a venue. yeah, and then you're like, oh, well, what are you what you're doing manually? And then so we kind of built all the systems for their concierge tracking and things like that. And then one day, I again like this is the all or nothing thing. Like, I'm a drama bass person, and drama bass is so niche and like not that big in North America, right? But one of our really early clients is a eight-day destination drama bass festival in Sardinia, in Italy.

Vanessa 24:28

We highlighted it here on Festivals.

Ritesh 24:30

We did talk about that festival, and they were one of our earliest clients, like 2014, they took a chance and decided to switch to us, and we built our resale face value resale platform, like in partnership with them. They helped to suspect it. And so, like, living in Tulum in 2021, it was like, wait a second, there's no drum 'n' bass festival in the Americas. I I basically begged one of our venues to let us produce a DB festival, and Tulum is all house music. So it's like I had to put headphones on the venue manager and say, Hey, here is this genre you've never heard of. You only know a house. Let me play you liquid drum 'n' bass, and you won't understand it, but there is a really passionate community. And will you consider letting me throw a gig and not just one day? Will you let me do four days? Yeah.

Vanessa 25:21

I'll answer that again. Not even three, straight to four.

Ritesh 25:24

When the venue agreed, and it took me a year, because of the kind of 10, 12 years of throwing shows before Ticket Fairy, I started DMing a bunch of artists that like I'd kind of worked with in the early days when you know they weren't even that big, right? Like, you know, maybe they were big in 2021, but they weren't that big in 2000 or 2001. And like having that personal relationship, I was like, hey, would you consider doing a 10-hour flight from London to Mexico for one gig? And I can only pay you club show fees, not festival fees. But I'll give you a hotel room on the beach for five nights.

Vanessa 26:01

That's pretty nice. So, were all your shows before those were all drum 'n' bass?

Ritesh 26:04

Yeah, they were drum 'n' bass shows. I did a couple of like multi-genre things, but they were drum 'n' bass

Vanessa 26:08

Yeah.

Ritesh 26:08

And again, drum 'n' bass is so underground that it's really hard to make money from. So, like, even more reason to build Ticket Fairy was like because the most underground genres is like, you know, it's impossible to break even most of the time.

Vanessa 26:19

Yeah, it's very niche.

Ritesh 26:20

And so, yeah, like then convinced, I think it was like 50 artists to fly to Tulum for five days. And unfortunately, what happened was that like in 2021, management and agents had done what management and agents do now and start fighting over their billing and positioning on the flyer.

Sunny 26:42

Alphabetical order. Yeah.

Ritesh 26:43

Yeah, but but we all know that alphabetical order doesn't work because the artist that could drive the most sales would be halfway down, and you'd never even get to that point.

Sunny 26:51

We complain about it all the time. Yeah, we don't like alphabetical order.

Ritesh 26:54

And the thing is that like there was two agents fighting, and one of the agents was like, just do like A to Z billing. I was like, Are you stupid? Basically, I'm the one taking the risk, it's like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah, I know how to position the right artists so that there's a blend of old talent, new talent, harder acts, more liquid. You need something for everyone in the first two lines of the lineup so that in the first few seconds, multiple different types of fan can see something that's for them. And then they'll explore the rest of the lineup, right? That's just the golden rule of how you put a flyer together. And you guys are fighting, and it delayed our lineup announcement by a month.

Sunny 27:32

Oh, wow.

Ritesh 27:32

And we were already late, and when the lineup came out, no one thought it was real.

Sunny 27:39

This has got to be a fake. This is a mock. Oh man.

Ritesh 27:43

People thought it was one of those like Spotify wrapped end of year, like virtual festival lineups that you get from like your streaming history.

Vanessa 27:50

Yeah, wow.

Ritesh 27:52

And so like we only had 150 people a day.

Vanessa 27:56

Oh wow. But what year was this? 2021. 21? Wow.

Ritesh 28:00

And like it was the biggest strong-based lineup in the Americas, in the history of the Americas, like bigger than any insomniacs, and people thought it was fake.

Vanessa 28:08

Oh my gosh. I mean, that speaks a lot to you too about how you were able to get all the 50 artists, your relationships and your passion that you were able to get all those people. I mean, that sucks that people thought it was fake, but that's awesome that you really get all those artists.

Sunny 28:25

So looking back on that experience, what did you learn? No, how did like how did you what what did you change? What did I learn?

Ritesh 28:33

All or nothing is often painful.

Vanessa 28:36

Yeah.

Ritesh 28:38

But again, again, again, similar principle to the very first Bristol I 25 years ago is get attention.

Vanessa 28:44

Yeah. I'm sure people were bummed that they thought it was fake.

Ritesh 28:48

Yeah.

Vanessa 28:49

So I mean, for the next years, people took it more seriously.

Ritesh 28:52

Yeah, it got it got bigger, it got it got more more traction. And then I got taken to Bali for a ticket Fairy meeting, and the Bali venue was like, Oh, you well, I told them about the Mexico festival, and they were like, Oh, we should host a DB festival at our venue. And it made sense because Perth in Australia is a two-hour flight from Bali and it's the second or third largest drawn-based scene in the world.

Sunny 29:15

Oh, okay.

Scaling From Clubs To 40k Events

Ritesh 29:16

Again, even when we did that, and that was like 2024, three. And there'd already been three festivals in Tulum at that point. People in Perth thought it was fake. They were like, that's too good to be true.

Vanessa 29:29

What do you gotta do?

Ritesh 29:31

I know, I know, and and a lot more lives?

Vanessa 29:34

Did you live stream it?

Ritesh 29:35

Uh no, but but like going back to what you Sonny was saying about like still running events and understanding what still needs to get done, yeah. The process of running the festival over the last four and a half-ish years, and having done five of them now, you realize that no matter how like we built like 10 years plus of tech and ticket Fairy that would handled all sorts of stuff in terms of marketing and CRM and operations and guest lists and promoters and tables and all of this stuff, right? And then as soon as we start doing the festival, it was like, oh wait, there's still so much more to build. This there's like a hundred email threads, and every email thread is sending manual attachments, and every agent is chasing bit for this thing, and every document is in a different format, and all the writers are manual, and you have to manually look at every document to find out what equipment each DJ needs. And yeah, like there's a thousand hours of inefficiency just in this process.

Sunny 30:35

Wow. So you must still love it because you're still doing it. Did we say did we say the name of the festival?

Ritesh 30:42

LOCUS is the name of the festival?

Sunny 30:45

So are you throwing one this year as well, 2026?

Ritesh 30:48

We're not doing Mexico this year, but we are doing Bali last year in Bali, we flew a full live drum 'n' bass orchestra from London and did to Bali.

Vanessa 30:59

Oh my gosh, that's so I imagine the logistics of putting on a festival in in somewhere like Bali is just insane.

Ritesh 31:06

The local team is really great, but still flying an orchestra to Bali and actually trying to meet the production specs was was crazy.

Vanessa 31:14

Yeah.

Ritesh 31:15

And then we had to supplement the orchestra with seven players from Indonesia locally, and it was expensive. And guess what happened two days before the festival started? Oh no, it rained.

Vanessa 31:29

It rained.

Ritesh 31:30

So bear in mind that ticket buyers fly into the festival, right? Because it's a destination gig.

Vanessa 31:36

Yeah.

Ritesh 31:37

Two days before the festival, a volcano erupted in an island just near Bali.

Vanessa 31:44

Oh my gosh.

Ritesh 31:45

And every airline cancelled every flight.

Vanessa 31:52

Ouch. Ouch. Was that the first year?

Ritesh 31:55

No, it was the second year. Oh no, this past year?

Vanessa 31:57

Second year. Oh my gosh.

Ritesh 31:59

It was like a 4 a.m. text that every flight going from Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Asia had been cancelled.

Sunny 32:07

Oh my goodness.

Ritesh 32:09

People were scrambling to rebook themselves for thousands of dollars, and almost everyone was dedicated enough to actually get themselves there.

Vanessa 32:20

Wow.

Ritesh 32:21

But I guarantee we lost about almost a thousand people that just didn't bother doing it.

Vanessa 32:26

Right. Right. Oh my gosh. I'm curious for a festival that's so niche, like how do you go about curating or finding your artists for how many artists do you have on on it's about 70, 75. 70?

Ritesh 32:43

Yeah, it's wow. It's over four days. I'm really fussy about the curation. So we have done things over the last few years at the festival that people thought was impossible. Like I spent two years per artist reuniting artists that had not hadn't played in 20 years, wow, who'd left the scene, who people loved. And there's two specific duos, like Kamal and Rob Data and Stack and Skynet. And both of them had stopped performing in like 2001, 2002. And for Stack and Skynet, they'd lost contact. And I spent two years tracking them down individually and like fielding the idea of them doing a reunion gig and like thinking about whether they would still do it, and then eventually putting them together. And that was like so, so fulfilling.

Vanessa 33:30

I just got chills. Yeah, that's amazing.

Ritesh 33:35

With other artists, it's like you have the established, and then you have the underground, and then you have the people that are just like underrepresented that make amazing music that deserve to be seen.

Vanessa 33:46

Yeah.

Ritesh 33:46

And so it's a blend of all of that.

Vanessa 33:48

So you're obviously just such a huge fan and passionate about Olive that you keep up with everything.

Ritesh 33:54

I mean, there's pockets of time where like you don't get to really keep up with who is new and who's like coming through. And so every so often you have to like do that research and like be like, okay, cool. Well, you know, who's the person that is really like making amazing music right now? I don't believe in the booker mainstream commercial artists just for the sake of it if their music sucks, which makes it really difficult because you have a much narrower pool of people to choose from to book.

Vanessa 34:22

Yeah.

Ritesh 34:22

And I'm really proud of it. You end up with this like very purist line. Right.

Vanessa 34:28

Yeah.

Ritesh 34:29

and then you have to think, okay, well, often it's just one stage running at once. Last year was the only the first year we had multiple stages running. Four previous festivals only had one stage running at a time. And so you have to think about like progression of music, it has to get like progressively harder over time. If you have one style for too many hours at once, you will lose half the crowd. And so, like the curation overall is really important, but the curation per day is also super important, and it's really hard.

Vanessa 34:56

Yeah, that sounds hard. That sounds really hard, but I love that you take the time to do all that because you just care about it.

Box Office Fixes And Wristband Mapping

Ritesh 35:03

I piss people off because I don't announce until like a week before because I'm like, or even a few days before. I'm like, sorry, the set times aren't perfect. I need to get it right.

Vanessa 35:12

Back to the drawing board. No, I love the passion.

Sunny 35:16

So, what kind of experience do you want people who attend LOCUS to have?

Ritesh 35:22

So, what's been really nice about the festival is that the feedback has been. So, we've done five now. Each one, the feedback has been, I have met friends for life. Everyone in the crowd was so passionate about the music. I saw a video that one of our artists posted off last year's festival. And you know, it's like a 30-second clip, and she captioned it. What do you see? What do you notice in this clip? And then she screen recorded all the responses, and there were like 50 responses of there's no phones.

Sunny 35:49

I was gonna say, yeah.

Ritesh 35:50

Everyone, everyone is just dancing, they're really into it.

Vanessa 35:54

Oh, I love that.

Ritesh 35:56

I love it because it's kind of a it's almost like a a community project, right? You're basically bringing people together that you know would really enjoy each other's company, be friends for life, travel together, and just be smiling the whole the whole weekend because not only are they with their people, they are also hearing like really carefully curated music.

Vanessa 36:23

Yeah. Wow, that's what festivals are all about.

Ritesh 36:26

Yeah, that's what they're supposed to be about. They're not about that at the moment, but they're supposed to be about that.

Sunny 36:32

Do you find they're not like that in America?

Ritesh 36:35

Or I will say that the variety of music at US festivals, and I and bear in mind, like I've been going to gigs around the world for 25 years, so this is a very informed point of view. I lived in Australia for six years as well. the variety is nowhere near as good as UK festivals. UK festivals tend to book a lot more underground, a lot broader in terms of style, a lot more musical orientation of bookings. It's not just uh top 10 tunes being played by the same 10 artists.

Sunny 37:12

Right. Why do you think that is?

Ritesh 37:14

I I honestly couldn't tell you. I honestly couldn't tell you. I think a lot of the time the Thailand bookers are the same for a lot of festivals. The other thing is that because everywhere everywhere's so far apart in the US, maybe an artist has to go, has to be doing a four or five day tour across multiple festivals. And to make it commercially viable, like a lot of festivals have to have the same lineup. Whereas let's say it's UK, someone drives an hour, two hours to perform at a festival. They might do two in a weekend or three in a weekend or whatever it is, but they might not. You don't have to pay for the flights in the hotel of those artists as the festival producer. So your loaded cost to book someone in the UK is very small compared to a US booking or a Canadian booking or something like that. Interesting. My loaded cost for an artist at the Mexico festival was about $5,000 on average, right? Across like flights, hotels, fee. If I wanted to book that lineup in the UK, it would be half that. And so you have a lot more artistic license to do things that are creatively pure rather than thinking just about like whether this is possible to make commercially viable or not.

Vanessa 38:25

Yeah.

Ritesh 38:25

I also think US agents are a lot more aggressive with fees.

Sunny 38:31

Yeah, totally. That's right. That's right, yeah. I hear it's like the artists they have to fit it into their tour. Yeah. So I can always kind of like guess who's gonna be where based off their tour. and then Vanessa and I experienced this because I love outside lands in San Francisco and she loves Bonnoroo, and that overlaps almost every time.

Vanessa 38:53

Yeah, the headliners are usually always the same.

Ritesh 38:55

Yeah. I mean, this is also why people thought my festivals were fake. Because to Mexico they were flying 10 hours, to Bali, they were flying 23 hours.

Vanessa 39:05

Oh gosh.

Ritesh 39:06

To do one show and they were flying home again. I used to do draw and bass shows in in Sydney as well with a local promoter that became a really good friend. And to make it viable for a UK draw and bass artist to play in Sydney, there had to be seven dates on the tour. Four in Australia and three in New Zealand or something like that. Seven, seven, yeah, five was the bare minimum to make it viable. And then here's my festival with that caliber of artists, and there's like 60 of them, and everyone was just like, no, that's that's impossible. That can't happen.

Sunny 39:38

You made the impossible happen.

Vanessa 39:40

I love it.

Sunny 39:42

So, what's next for Ticket Fairy?

Ritesh 39:44

We've been very fortunate about a month ago to announce that like Ticket Fairy generally has always been like, hey, what tech can we build to help financial success and mitigate losses and streamline things and help generate more ticket sales? You know, get people into the venue faster and do more bar sales and all that kind of stuff has been like layers and layers of tech, right?

Vanessa 40:05

Yeah.

Ritesh 40:05

But it's been layers and layers and layers of tech. As of about a month ago, what we announced is we've got the ability to provide working capital funding to festivals for artist deposits and things like that.

Sunny 40:18

Oh, wow. can you walk us through that a little bit?

Ritesh 40:21

So we would look at, let's say you're an independent festival and last year you did half a million dollars in ticket sales.

Sunny 40:28

Okay.

Ritesh 40:28

And, you know, maybe every year you do a friends and family early bird on sale to bring in, you know, 10, 20, 30k, but there's no lineup yet. And then you have to like incrementally book artists and then incrementally pay deposits and do a small phase one lineup announcement because the agent won't let you announce someone until you pay their 50% deposit, especially the larger agents. And so you have to drip feed your announcements or book smaller artists because, like, you know, you don't necessarily have like huge investment or things like that. And so what we can do is say, hey, look, if you did half a million last year, we can front you 100 grand. If you did five million last year, we can front you a million. If you did 15 million last year, we can front you 3 million.

Sunny 41:13

Oh, wow.

Ritesh 41:14

And you can use that to lock in all your talent and do the strongest announcement possible. And then when your ticket sales start coming in, we'll agree with you that say we'll take like 30% of that. So, you know, in for every hundred gala ticket sales, 30k of it goes back to repay that advance. You get to be announcing earlier, doing stronger, stronger lineups, and um, you know, you don't need to be the huge live nations or commercially funded festivals to be able to actually announce your lineup. And that combined with the tech that we have, I think it will be a really impactful thing for the industry.

Vanessa 41:56

Yeah, that's amazing. I think so too.

Building Trust With Organizers

Ritesh 41:58

The thing is, right, is that every festival owner, every gig promoter is essentially they're a creative person, right? Like they have like my let's say my festival, it's a niche destination drama-based festival for the drama-based community. There's thousands of creatives like that who have a vision of their experience, of the community they're trying to serve, of the music that they're trying to promote. Like, festival owners are creatives, right? And so if we can help in terms of financing and ops and the grunt work and you know, all the best practices that all the big guys have learned that we can put into the platform to help you to do the same thing, then you can concentrate on the stuff that makes you unique. And I think that's really important.

Sunny 42:44

Yeah, I mean, you are really helping festival organizers avoid burnout and actually enjoy seeing their vision through. So thank you for that. Yeah, that's amazing.

Vanessa 42:54

Thank you so much. I I mean, this conversation has been very inspiring. Thank you for everything you're you're doing. Thank you for coming onto our little podcast and sharing it all this with us. Before we go, there's one quick thing we like to do with all of our guests. We are creating like a Dream Festies festival lineup. And it's not about what's realistic or who's touring or whatever, it's just for fun. So we have two lineups. One is for people that are living and one is for people that have passed on. So, do you have two artists that you would love to see on our Festies lineup?

Ritesh 43:29

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Um I mean, there's a lot of very talented people who passed in drama base, which is you know very sad, like every genre, right? Um have passed, I would say there was a guy out of New Zealand called Bulletproof. Guy called Jay, really passionate guy. He created a podcast on the history of drama bass. We sponsored it for a while. Um amazing producer, and he died of a brain aneurysm a few years back.

Vanessa 44:00

Oh no.

Ritesh 44:01

Oh man. And so I would say Jay Bulletproof should be the Okay, great. And like someone who I feel would be someone I'd like to represent.

Vanessa 44:13

Okay.

Ritesh 44:14

people have past side of things. And then people are still here. I mean, I don't if don't even know if I can play favorites, but um I know it's a hard it's a hard one.

Vanessa 44:25

It's cruel, really.

Ritesh 44:26

It's really difficult. Um I'm gonna say Degs.

Vanessa 44:29

Okay.

Sunny 44:31

How do you spell it?

Ritesh 44:32

D-E-G-S.

Sunny 44:33

Degs. Okay, okay.

Ritesh 44:34

Thanks. He is a beautiful human being who is really passionate about the music, wonderful vocalist, but also the sickest DJ and has really good selection, and he never runs out of energy. So look, but at the Bali festival last year, he convinced me to give him four or five sets over the course of the festival. So this year he's insisting that he gets one every day, and it's it's become a running joke, but like he just loves it so much, and so I think he deserves that.

Vanessa 45:03

Oh, that's awesome! Well, thank you so much. We'll add those on.

Ritesh 45:06

Thank you as well. I appreciate you both listening to my random stories. They are very random.

Sunny 45:11

Oh, we love them. We we loved it, yeah. Do you have the dates for LOCUS?

Ritesh 45:16

Yeah, 18th to the 21st of June in Bali this year.

Sunny 45:19

And where can people find their tickets? Are they on sale yet?

Ritesh 45:23

Ticket Fairy, LOCUS Bali, Google.

Sunny 45:26

I could have guessed that.

Ritesh 45:27

Yeah.

Vanessa 45:29

Thank you so much, Ritesh. We really appreciate you coming on and we really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks, Ritesh.

Ritesh 45:36

Thanks a lot, guys.

Vanessa 45:36

Bye. Have a good one.

Ritesh 45:38

Awesome. See you later. Bye.

Vanessa 45:43

Okay, Festies. Thank you so much for listening to that. I hope you liked it as much as we did. And if this episode gave you a new perspective on how festivals actually work behind the scenes, please share it with someone you go to shows and festivals with. And if you're enjoying the podcast, make sure you're following or subscribed wherever you listen. Leaving a rating or review really helps the show and helps more people find us. You can also find us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at Festies Podcast. And thank you so much for listening. Catch you on the next one. Bye.