Music / Business / Ethics at Christian Festivals
Music Festival Studies: Current Perspectives, Future Directions
Online, July 30, 2020.
Material from this paper was published in Music Business, Ethics, and Christian Festivals: Progressive Christianity at Wild Goose Festival.
Abstract
At the biggest popular music festivals in the United States, such as Bonnaroo, Coachella, and Lollapalooza, the central objective of promoters and organizers is to appeal to the largest possible audience of attendees; their core value is profitability. Smaller popular music festivals, by contrast, often articulate the aesthetic, social, and ideological values of the niche genres with which they are affiliated. Niche festivals are not only about good music, but rather they are often about good music and environmental sustainability, or social justice, or inter-generational communication, or the preservation of tradition. Niche festivals, in other words, are places where the values of niche musics are substantiated—performed, sounded, voiced, and embodied—for performers, organizers, stakeholders, and attendees alike.
Christian music festivals illustrate these points. The largest annual Christian festivals in the United States, such as Creation Festival, are designed to appeal to the largest possible audience of U.S. evangelical Christians (both non-denominational and mainline Protestant) and focus on the “mainstream” of contemporary Christian music (or CCM). Smaller festivals, however, operate on the peripheries of the Christian market: events like Cornerstone Festival, AudioFeed Festival, and Wild Goose Festival appeal to niche evangelical Christian audiences. The aesthetic, social, and ideological values heard and observed at these festivals reflect not some generalized notion of mass appeal but rather articulate interdependence and resistance (at Cornerstone), community and belongingness (at AudioFeed), or the intersections of theology and social justice (at Wild Goose). While larger events would avoid these values for fear of alienating some attendees, smaller events find in these ethical stances their core meaning and reason for being.
In this paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork at Christian music festivals and formal interviews with festival organizers, I address festivals as sites of musical ethics made manifest. By focusing on specific niche Christian music festivals, I am able to emphasize the relationships between the values of their organizers, artists, and attendees and the lived experiences of the events themselves. But my conclusions have implications for the viability of the broader festival industry, particularly small events that cannot afford to compete with the Bonnaroos, Coachellas, and Lollapaloozas.