The Headliner Slot: How the Festival Pecking Order Is Set

Sun, 14 May 2023 14:31:00 +0000

Look at a festival poster and the hierarchy reads itself: three or four names in enormous type across the top, a denser slab of medium-sized names underneath, and right at the bottom a wall of tiny lettering nobody photographs. That typographic pyramid looks like taste. It is closer to a balance sheet. Every name’s position on that poster was fought over by booking agents months in advance, and the closing slot on the main stage on the final night — the actual headline slot — is one of the most contested pieces of real estate in live music, decided by a mix of hard commercial data and old-fashioned ego management that rarely makes it into the marketing copy.

In-Ear Monitors and the Death of the Wedge

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 13:24:00 +0000

Watch a big touring band from side-stage and you will notice the floor is emptier than it used to be. No wall of speaker boxes angled up at the singer’s face, no monitor engineer sweating over a separate desk trying to keep six wedges from howling into feedback at once. Most of what the band hears now arrives through a small wireless pack on the belt and a pair of custom-moulded earpieces, sealed tight enough to double as hearing protection. The wedge — the loud floor monitor that defined how a stage sounded to the people standing on it for the better part of fifty years — is still around, but it has quietly gone from the default to the exception. That change happened for good reasons, and it cost something too.

Stage-Craft - vo.rs

The Headliner Slot: How the Festival Pecking Order Is Set

In-Ear Monitors and the Death of the Wedge