Posted on 10 November 2012

Last night was the the warm-up to Coldsnap show. Coldsnap is a winter music festival here in Prince George that I’m involved in organizing.
The kick-off accomplishes a few things: it gets all the volunteers (it’s an entirely volunteer-run festival) warmed up for over a week’s worth of shows in January, it lets us test new things and, with any luck, it builds up excitement for the shows in January so people start buying their tickets.
I’ve never done anything like this in other cities, but other people tell me that Prince George is a notoriously last-minute town when it comes to things like concerts. Sales will be at like 10% the day before the show and then the night of it sells out. It drives people who organize things like concerts and plays absolutely nuts. They’ve put all this time and effort into promoting something and up until the last minute they’re wondering what they could have done differently. Then it turns out they did everything just fine, people were just waiting to pick up their tickets at the door.
That’s why whenever there’s an early sell-out there’s a huge amount of relief. We found out we had hit sell-out level the night before the concert. So the day of the concert you can just focus on getting ready for the concert and NOT trying to drum up last-minute publicity when people already have their plans. And there’s always hope that the people who didn’t get tickets will take that as a prompt to buy tickets to other things they want to see a little earlier next time. Lots of people got turned away last night. So here’s hoping.

Filed under: music, Prince George