{"id":30060,"date":"2025-11-04T05:30:02","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T10:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=30060"},"modified":"2025-09-05T11:54:27","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T15:54:27","slug":"renos-offbeat-music-festival-small-scale-and-curated-by-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/04\/renos-offbeat-music-festival-small-scale-and-curated-by-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Reno\u2019s OffBeat Music Festival: Small-scale and Curated by Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reno\u2019s OffBeat Music Festival celebrated its 10th<\/sup> year this October. With a wide array of artists gracing multiple stages in a concentrated, walkable area, the festival presents local, regional and national artists ranging from brand-new to up-and-coming to right-on-the-edge-of-breaking-big. Staged in the lively Brewery District, OffBeat presents something for most every musical taste. The festival\u2019s impressive lineup is spread across three days, October 2-4. Co-founder and organizer Flip Wright took a quick break from planning this year\u2019s festival to speak with me about the festival’s beginnings, its development, and exciting plans for the future. — BK<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The OffBeat Festival has been a yearly event since 2015. How did it get started?<\/b>
\nIt was a confluence of people meeting each other. We were at a Flaming Lips concert; one of us had a suite at a hotel nearby. After the show a bunch of people ended up at the suite, and just started to talk. I met a guy who was a local promoter at the time. He had some experience in music promotion, and I\u2019m an ad guy. I own an agency and have a marketing background and a general love of music and music discovery.<\/p>\n

We both said, \u201cWhat Reno needs is a festival a la<\/i> South by Southwest, one that\u2019s venue-based, where people can roam around to different bars.\u201d Reno is not really set up for the traditional \u201cfestival in a big field\u201d kind of a thing, and none of us were particularly interested in talking about that anyway.<\/p>\n

Our third partner at the time was a local musician, and he brought the musician side [to the concept]. He also ran a nonprofit here in town, so he [knew something about] raising money. So the three of us came together as the initial team. Today I am the sole remaining of the original three. By [virtue] of risk tolerance, I\u2019m the one who has stuck with it, and here we are.<\/p>\n

Speaking of risk, what\u2019s the biggest peril in mounting a festival like this?<\/b>
\nI always like to joke: \u201cAsk anyone who\u2019s in sales to try to create a festival where you book bands that no one\u2019s heard of, and try to sell tickets for that.\u201d That is very difficult.<\/p>\n

\"\"But you\u2019re making it work\u2026<\/b>
\nYes. And I think it\u2019s a combination of things. When we started the festival, we made sure that we had some local bands on the roster, bands that we knew that people would want to come out and see. We had to find artists that we knew would be a hit. And we tried to build each successive year, taking the best of what we have locally.<\/p>\n

Every now and then you get lucky. There will be a band that you\u2019ve heard of and that you love, but that isn\u2019t necessarily mainstream. But they\u2019re big enough that they can draw some folks. You get to throw those in the mix, and you keep adding those. And now after 10 years, people trust our brand enough that they\u2019ll say, \u201cThe thing I like the most about OffBeat is that even though I don\u2019t know a lot of the bands, I know that it\u2019s really curated. I know that I could walk into any [venue] and hear something that I find amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yeah, we pride ourselves on that.<\/p>\n

Against that backdrop, how has the character of the festival changed over the years?<\/b>
\nIt really hasn\u2019t changed very much. No one\u2019s become a millionaire from this thing; it really is a passion project, through and through. Every year, break-even is a win for us. [The challenge] is finding bands that are willing to play. We\u2019re more and more involved with agents, and that\u2019s a harder game to play.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re the ones that are setting the price, and they\u2019re the ones who are helping good things happen for these artists. To the best of our ability, we have to be able to play that game. Sometimes we can, and sometimes we can\u2019t. Sometimes, unfortunately, we\u2019re offering way less than what they want. But ultimately everything ends up working out, where everyone is happy to be here.<\/p>\n

But I think for the most part, our approach has been the same. Maybe the scale of OffBeat has got a little bit bigger; we try different things every year. We\u2019re including a big, free block party component this year, to give more recognition to the venues where the festival is being held.<\/p>\n

You mentioned that among the three original movers and shakers, you\u2019re the only one remaining. Are you doing everything?<\/b>
\nI\u2019m the tip of the spear for all areas from production to marketing to artist relations to curation, but I have folks who help me in some of those areas. We have an incredible team of volunteers. None of us is getting paid to do this. We have a core group of about 10 people who help me every year.<\/p>\n

Speaking of curation, are there any guiding principles that you follow when picking artists to play the festival?<\/b>
\nWe have to like them! We don\u2019t do favors: \u201cI happen to have this guy routing [near Reno]. Would you put him on your festival?\u201d No. If we don\u2019t like him, we\u2019re not going to put him on the festival.
\nMore than anything, our guiding principle is that we want to make sure that [any artist] who\u2019s involved in OffBeat feels that we not only curate the music, but create an experience that\u2019s really low-friction.<\/p>\n

So, for example, every one of our out-of-market artists gets a hotel room. And we give them wristbands so they can go to the whole festival. We have festival hospitality that creates a total VIP experience. A lot of festivals will say, \u201cYou get exposure, but we don\u2019t have any money to pay you a guarantee.\u201d Every OffBeat artist gets paid.<\/p>\n

We try to make sure that we incorporate a lot of genres so everyone can find something that they like. And we try to be respectful of our venues; we\u2019re not hitting them up for a huge share of the money they\u2019re making during the event. They get to keep what they make, and we do what we do, which is sell a wristband [that gets you into all the venues].<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not expensive, which is probably why people who hear that say, \u201cNo wonder you only break even every year!\u201d I\u2019m definitely a softy; I\u2019m not like that hardened personality that you might think of when you think of concert promoters. I probably have failed that class.<\/p>\n

How many acts are on the bill this year? <\/b>
\nBy the time you total our paid and free shows, we usually have around 70 performances, and nine stages. So about 65 to 70 bands. And about 20% of those are local or regional.<\/p>\n

How many people do you expect will attend?<\/b>
\nOverall capacity for the whole event is 2,500 people; we\u2019re small. The beauty of it is that we don\u2019t have any really big rooms. So over the years, you might have seen Blitzen Trapper or Built to Spill play in a 200-person capacity room. You get to have experiences where you\u2019re seeing bands that really should be playing in front of a thousand people, and you\u2019re getting to see them in a room with 150 people. It\u2019s a cool experience. And the music is perfect for the venues.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What\u2019s your vision for the future of the OffBeat Festival?<\/b>
\nWhat fills my cup, so to speak, is the relationships. Not just with the artists, but with the community. People see a benefit in this and understand what it means to have a music discovery festival of this kind in Reno. Over the past ten years, we\u2019ve brought almost 500 discovery acts to Reno. We have really changed the landscape of [tour] routing; agents are now reaching out to us.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m in the process of converting OffBeat from an LLC to a nonprofit. We\u2019re going to call it the Offbeat Music Society. And part of our mission is not only to put on this festival, but also to help turn the area where we\u2019re doing the festival into a real true music discovery entertainment district. We have eight or nine venues that are always activated, [featuring] music that you maybe never have heard of before.<\/p>\n

But people are willing to head down there because they know it\u2019s a good place to be. We\u2019re never going to have the gravitational pull of 6th street in Austin or Lower Broadway in Nashville. But a part of our mission is to see if we can help plant the roots for helping position Reno as that place where music discovery can happen. And then we\u2019ll see what good things come from that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reno\u2019s OffBeat Music Festival celebrated its 10th year this October. With a wide array of artists gracing multiple stages in a concentrated, walkable area, the festival presents local, regional and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30061,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,41,44],"tags":[5778],"class_list":["post-30060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-indie","category-interview","category-live-shows","tag-offbeat-festival","cat-39-id","cat-41-id","cat-44-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30064,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30060\/revisions\/30064"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}