This isn't going to be one of those blogs where you "Buy my Book" and I'll make you a millionaire. It is, however, a blog that points you towards a community that could probably author such a book: The community of Villaricos in Almeria, Spain. This small town was recently home to an amazing all-night dance music festival. The festival is reported to have brought 800 jobs to the area as well as return an injection of €7m back to the local economy. Dreambeach is only in its second year yet already managed to gain the support of the best DJ in the world, Armin Van Buuren. As young as the festival may be, and with reflection relative to my experience of a number of far more established music festivals, I found it to be organised exceptionally well. More than 80,000 people turned up to Dreambeach and the following article shows how incredibly successful it was:
The great success of such a young festival got me thinking...
How can something only in its second year be so profitable for such a small town?
Where did the money come from?
Why are similar successes rarely heard of within the UK?
I'm thinking that a serious rethink is required by local councils in the UK to how they fund entertainment and the arts. It doesn't seem viable to take the easy option of giving the funding to private companies who care only about their own profit margins. I would really like to see local councils investing the money with individual creatives who would like to work together to help make their communities more productive. There are thousands of 'out of work' / 'sleeping' creatives who would be satisfied by only a fair wage (not a monstrous one as taken by many private organisations). Both Knightvisions Productions and myself publicly support such a cause.
I believe I previously mentioned that I didn't have all the answers and I wasn't going to make you millions of Euros. That isn't to say that myself and surely many others, maybe even yourself; would turn down the opportunity to hear from those who work in organising such events to find out who is truly accountable for the 'risk assessment' when it comes to turning down such truly economically remarkable opportunities.
So €100pd expenditure per day brings in €7m...
Please share if you agree that it is time to more get creative people listened to, overly-zealous private organisations eradicated and the poorly managed economics of arts funding re-organised.
Here is a quick fan video showing some of Armin Van Buuren.
Your comments and support are welcomed below and also via my Twitter.
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