Jersey Live 2009

Whilst sports tourism is now an established trend, many would say that the next travel niche to explode will be music tourism. There are several kinds of music tourism, and it’s something I’ll post about later as it’s close to my heart – I’d be far more likely to travel for a gig than a game – but here I want to talk about our involvement in the triumphant success that was Jersey Live 2009.

This year we worked with specialist music PR agency Excess Press to bring over a group of key media and handle further media requests whilst out there. In attendance were great music titles Gigwise, Clash, The Fly and French title Les Inrocks.

We also achieved extensive advance coverage, essential in creating bookings, ensuring the festival was regularly featured in the festival round ups and working with tourism partners and media on competitions offering VIP tickets and travel with accommodation.

The line up was quite probably the best in the festival’s five year run, with Basement Jaxx, Dizzee Rascal, the Kooks, Passion Pit and Temper Trap all included in a really diverse line up of dance, rock and pop. Jersey Live have great foresight in booking bands early, regularly seeing them get big in the intervening period before the festival – offering the lucky festival goers a chance to see real buzz acts that are playing much larger festivals elsewhere.

The festival is 10,000 capacity (’boutique’ by general UK festival standards) and was a total sell out this year, the sale of the last few tickets oweing largely to the great line up and absolutely amazing weather – sunshine all weekend. I didn’t think it could have gone more perfectly, until I took the media group to the festival ground by speed boat (our hotel, the Radisson SAS Waterfront is right on St Helier’s marina, and the festival site is close to the island’s north coast) when we were caught up by a school of dolphins who wanted to play. You don’t see dolphins on the way to Reading Festival now, do you?

BBC World Service’s travel programme Fast Track were also there to cover the festival, as part of a feature on music festivals’ effect on tourism. Which brings me to what Jersey Live does for Jersey. The numbers are elusive, unfortunately it is hard to track just how many visitors come to the island specifically for the festival. But in terms of branding what could be better for positioning Jersey as younger, trendier and more exciting than Dizzee Rascal? I caught up with Luke Pritchard, lead singer of the Kooks, in the airport on the way home, he hadn’t been to Jersey before but (as all of the bands that visit for the festival do) he found it a realsp eye opener. He loved it, and would definitely come again.

So you can see for yourself, I caught a lot of the footage from the festival (and the dolphins) on a handy Flip video camera and edited it together for our YouTube channel. The band performing at the beginning and soundtracking the whole video are the Temper Trap, another brilliant new act who came all the way from Melbourne. Have a watch -