Brand Features - webwatch

Winnipeg Folk Festival amped
by Renee Alexander
February 16, 2009 issue

When thinking of branding, most people conjure images of iconic brands such as Apple, Rolex or McDonald’s. Branding, however, is essential to business ventures of all sizes, backgrounds and philosophies—even the Winnipeg Folk Festival, a bastion for hippies, acoustic guitars and feelin’ grooooooovy.

The annual four-day extravaganza, one of North America’s premier outdoor music events for the last 35 years, recently brought its website into the 21st century thanks to a US$ 100,000 gift of technology from an ex-patriate Winnipegger.

PassAlong Networks, a Nashville-based media distribution developer run by Dave Jaworski – a former deejay at the University of Manitoba radio station in the 1970s and long-time fan of the Folk Fest, as it’s commonly known provides the Internet infrastructure, e-commerce interface, catalogue of songs and the album art for the site.

The idea is to promote and sell CDs by the many artists who perform each July at the Folk Fest while providing an income stream for the not-for-profit charitable organization. The prices range from 33 cents to US$ 1.29 per song, with the vast majority set at 99 cents each. The Folk Fest receives one dime for every song sold through the site.

PassAlong’s total music catalogue has more than three million songs from artists such as Madonna, Coldplay, The Guess Who and The Tragically Hip.

The Folk Fest prides itself on the eclectic list of performers who grace its main stage, secondary stages and participate in other events, such as songwriters’ circles, each year. Artists from all over the world travel to Birds Hill Provincial Park, just a few miles north of Winnipeg, Manitoba, on the second weekend of July.

While event organizers prefer to focus on the many folk legends, such as Pete Seeger, or performers who come as unknowns, such as the Undertakin’ Daddies, it’s impossible to ignore some of the big-name artists that have performed there. They include Ray Davies, lead singer of British Invasion group The Kinks, the Barenaked Ladies, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Burton Cummings, former lead singer of The Guess Who, as well as Canadian radio favorites Blue Rodeo, Crash Test Dummies, Spirit of the West and Cowboy Junkies.

The site also does its best to promote folk, roots and indie artists who don’t have access to the kind of publicity machines common to mainstream bands and singers. Clicking on the featured artist takes surfers to a page with a brief biography of the artist, including their history, recent recordings and upcoming concerts. One more click and you can listen to a selection of their music or buy it online. There are also links to their Facebook and MySpace websites.

Winnipeg Folk Festival - amped PassAlong has also made two other technological elements available to the Folk Fest’s site. The first is an OnTour widget that can be downloaded to your computer. It scans the music files already on your hard drive and lets you know when those artists will be performing in the area.

The second is called ROSTR, a feature that will enable the Folk Fest to compile set playlists of artists who have performed at the festival since 1974.

Of course, the site contains the expected information about next year’s festival a daily countdown is prominently featured and will include bios on the performers once the lineup starts to come together in the spring.

A symbolic sign that the Folk Festival’s site has entered the electric age is its eight volume-dial icons, the kind you’d see on an amplifier, which provide information on concerts and events, its retail store, visual arts and crafts, and volunteering.

But the Folk Fest has become much more than a one-event pony. Under its concerts and events icon, it lists upcoming performances during the other 361 days of the year by bands and artists who have performed at previous Folk Fests. The news icon displays announcements and stories about those same artists.

Furthermore, the site drives traffic to the Folk Fest’s bricks and mortar music store in downtown Winnipeg, where discerning music lovers can get their fix of world, folk, celtic, blues, bluegrass, country, alternative and everything in-between. The store also sells tickets to the Folk Fest itself and to The Folk Exchange, the Festival’s intimate concert venue in the heart of the city’s historic Exchange District.

Anyone who has attended the Folk Fest knows it’s as anti-mainstream an event as you can get. Hundreds and hundreds of people camp out for the weekend, resulting in countless campsite minstrels leading impromptu sing-alongs. But it still requires corporate and volunteer support to be a success. The site solicits the 2,200 volunteers that donate their time and showcases the dozens of companies that write checks to the Folk Fest each year.

The number of companies, both big and small, listed as sponsors demonstrates how widespread and popular an event the Folk Fest has become. The list includes multinationals such as Canwest Global Communications, dominant players in the provincial economy such as Manitoba Hydro and mom-and-pop shops such as Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company.

The Winnipeg Folk Fest is indeed a brand of its own – one that embraces both the artistic spirit of musicians and music lovers alongside the business realities of running a major event and promoting bands and their music. And the website, both artful and efficient, fully represents the brand online.

Rene Alexander is a freelance business and lifestyle writer based in Winnipeg, Canada.