By Kevin Crowder
Last week, I attended the 3-day Power Trip music festival in India, California, after also spending a few days on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, exploring some of the most important live music venues in American music history, including the Whiskey A-Go-Go, the Rainbow and Lemmy’s Lounge, the Viper Room, and the Troubadour.
It’s nice when music and analytics commentaries converge, and the festival got me thinking that it was an opportunity to use one of our most important, innovative, and unique analytics tools we have: Placer.ai foot traffic analysis.
You see, in all of the online forums, and even in the crowds at the festival, everyone had an opinion about what the attendance was going to be. These uninformed estimates ranged from 25-35,000, to 125,000, to less than 5,000 by the malcontents that just have to always complain (” there’s still thousands of tickets unsold, man!”) and blah blah blah.
So, what a great opportunity to kill two birds – market analysis and music cities. You see, after running our Placer analysis, we discovered that the Empire Polo Club where the festival took place, was one of California’s largest cities for three days, with 99,900 visitors. It may have been even more, considering the number of international visitors we met, who may not have been tracked as part of the system. We met people from Australia, England, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Denmark, Korea, and many other countries, in addition to those from domestic markets (below map).
So what else did the Placer data teach us about the festival?
- 99,900 visitors made 229,400 visits to the festival grounds, an average of 2.3 visits, which is pretty good for a 3-day event;
- They spent an average of 191 minutes each time they visited the festival;
- The hotels throughout the region were full of festival goers, and the patronized many Palm Springs, Cathedral City, and Indio businesses;
- The racial and ethnicity makeup of the crowd was 51% White, 32% Hispanic, 9% Asian and 7.2% Black.
- 80% of attendees live more than 50 miles from the venue, and 43% more than 250 miles away.
7,700 Powertrippers also visited AC/DC’s pop-up bar that they opened in Indio, CA for the festival period:
Attendees had an average income of $110,000 and median income of $74,000 (I bet that is not what you expected for a bunch of metalheads!):
Festivalgoers patronized over fifty area restaurants during the three-day event:
With over 99,000 attendees, the Power Trip Festival was The Music City in California for three days, larger than 412 of California’s 482 cities.
