Build your festival lineup from a catalog you keep

Every booker has a version of the same spreadsheet: act names in one column, a fee someone typed from memory in another, three different spellings of the same band across three years. The lineup is the most-asked-about thing at any festival, and it's usually kept in the least reliable place.

FestivalSpark separates the lineup into three parts that are easy to keep straight: the catalog of artists and acts your organization knows, the lineup of acts on this festival's bill, and the performances that put those acts on a stage at a time.

Artists and acts are different things

An artist is a performer: a singer, a drummer, a DJ, a poet. An act is what takes the stage: a band, a duo, a solo set, a collective. An act is made of one or more artists.

That distinction sounds fussy until the first time you need it. A singer-songwriter plays Friday night with her five-piece band and does a solo acoustic set Sunday morning. That is one artist appearing in two acts. A drummer sits in with two different bands on the same bill. Keeping artists and acts separate means the drummer's bio and photo are entered once and appear wherever they play.

In the console, go to Festival > Artists to add each performer with a bio, genre, links and a photo. Then use Festival > Acts to create the act and choose its artists.

Keep the catalog clean as you book

The catalog belongs to your organization, not to one festival, so next year's lineup starts from what you already know. A few habits keep it useful:

• Enter the act as it will be billed. If the band's name has a "The" or an ampersand, match what's on their own materials. The spelling in the catalog is the one your team will copy everywhere else.
• Add the photo and links when you book, not the week before. Press kits get harder to chase once the act is on the road.
• Write bios in your own voice. Pasting a three-paragraph agency bio makes every act sound the same. Two sentences on what the act sounds like and why it's on your bill do more work.
• Don't delete acts that didn't get booked. A catalog entry for a band you talked to this year is a head start on next year's conversation.

Put acts on the bill and set their billing

Open the festival's event and choose the Lineup tab. Add acts from your catalog and mark each one as a headliner, featured or supporting act.

Billing is a promise as much as a label. It usually decides poster position, font size and running order, and it's often written into the agreement with the act's agent. Settle it when the offer is accepted, record it in the lineup, and treat changes as a conversation with the act rather than a quiet edit.

A lineup that is kept current answers the questions that otherwise land in someone's inbox: Is the Sunday closer confirmed? How many supporting acts do we have on the second stage? Who's still unannounced?

Schedule performances onto stages

A lineup says who is playing. A performance says where and when. For each act on the bill, schedule a performance: choose the act, a venue that is on the event's map, and a start and end time within the festival's dates. An act that plays twice gets two performances.

FestivalSpark won't let two performances overlap on the same stage, so a double-booked slot is caught the moment it's entered. It doesn't decide your changeovers for you, and it shouldn't: fifteen minutes is plenty between two solo sets on the acoustic stage, while a full band change on the main stage often needs forty-five minutes or more. Leave that time empty in the schedule.

Some scheduling rules of thumb that save a festival day:

• Build the running order from the headliner backwards. Fix the closing set against the curfew, then work earlier.
• Stagger stages. Offset set times between stages so the crowd isn't all walking at once.
• Protect the quiet stage. Don't schedule the loudest set on the main stage against the most delicate set on the acoustic stage if the two sound fields overlap.
• Don't open a stage to an empty field. The first set of the day on a secondary stage often plays to the people who arrived early for food. Book accordingly.

If you haven't placed your stages yet, start with the site map guide. Only venues on an event's map can host performances.

Use the schedule, don't retype it

Once performances are in, the schedule is the one the team works from. Ask the FestivalSpark Assistant who is on the second stage on Saturday afternoon or when a particular act goes on, and it answers from the same lineup and performances you entered. When a set moves, move it in the event and every later answer reflects it.

The same lineup and schedule also appear on your festival website. Its Lineup page bills your acts as headliners, featured and supporting. Its Schedule page shows set times by day and stage, and every act gets its own page with its artists and set times. An act you haven't put on a lineup yet stays private, so you can build the bill before you announce it. Pair the reveal with a news post and an email campaign.

Next year starts now

After the festival, the catalog is the most valuable thing you're left with: every act you booked, with their artists, photos and links, ready for the next offer. Write down what the next booker should know about each act while it's fresh: how the changeover went, how the crowd responded, what the agent asked for.

For the full order of work from stages to vendors, read how to plan a multi-stage festival.