From Lineup Leakers To Lineup Creators: Our Chat With Madison House’s Alicia Karlin [Interview]

Sure! I’m the Lead Talent Buyer at Madison House Presents. I’m also the talent buyer for Electric Forest among other events, tours, and festivals that we do.

For me I’d say it’s a little bit of both. Because of the high amount of competition for the big headliners out there, that part is certainly more difficult. So it’s fun in that respect, trying to figure out the puzzle of it as we move along. It’s really fun rounding it out based on who you get as a headliner, then filling in the rest of the tiers to really make sure that it’s a diverse lineup. For us that’s extremely important.

As soon as the festival ends, or really as it’s even going on, we’re already working on next year…finding areas that we can improve on. The week after the fest we’ll survey our fans, asking what they thought about their experience, what they enjoyed, anything they’d like to see next year etc.. Then really the fall is a super heavy booking time, that’s when we really ramp up the process. The past few years that’s gotten earlier and earlier when people start to book the top names. Many times it’s not even the headliners who get booked first, artists will get confirmed at different times. It’s all about piecing the puzzle together, we send out a lot of offers. It’s a very fluid process. A lot of this happens before the New Year, I’d say 50% of the lineup is set before January 1st.

I would say a little bit of both. I don’t know about “creating” them, I’d say the fans lead the way on that and are really vocal with us on what they want to hear and see. As I’m sure you know our event is really fan/community driven so we listen to them a lot and survey our fans. We have a really active community especially on Reddit and definitely take note of that, while also giving the fans some stuff they may not be expecting.

Yeah I think that’s going to be really cool. Especially with a guy like Carl, that’s going to be a great show and something that our fans haven’t ever experienced at our festival.

I think our fan-base is very special in that they go to many different events. It could be very EDM-centric festivals or it can be very jam-roots type shows. What our fans listen to is extremely varied, it’s not usually one genre. We have a very wide demographic at the festival, it could be 25 year olds or it can be families. So we really try to have that show through in the lineup.

We’re partners and I feel like it’s a really great and special relationship. We work with them everyday on marketing and with social media, publicity, booking. Carlos Correal who’s the talent director at Insomniac, him and I work very closely and constantly exchange ideas and let each other know what’s going on. It’s a very open, strong relationship we have with them.

Bassnectar is a very special artist to us, he’s been a part of the Madison House family for a long time now. He’s really grown with us as a friend and family really. The time seemed right to have him back and everything just lined up, we’ve been talking about it for a really long time and had it in the works since last year.

It wasn’t a plan, but as it started to come together that way we all thought it was really cool that 10 or so artists were back from the inaugural year. They all have new albums, new shows and we feel they each embody what the forest is all about.

I think it’s a shame that people are trying to ruin things for everybody. Not only does it affect us with what we’re trying to do and how we do it, which is obviously very deliberate, but it affects everyone. To us it’s not a game, this is also a business, so I feel however they’re getting their information isn’t in the most kosher way. Honestly I feel other festivals were affected maybe even worse by it, having their entire lineup leaked. I don’t really feel like that’s doing anybody any good. It’s completely different than a more “organic” leak when sometimes an artist might confuse time zones and release information a day early…the intention is good but it was just an honest mistake. Those happen sometimes. What these leakers do is completely different though with someone who is intentionally mining for information, asking followers for lack of a better word to “hack” into private web pages before they get released. Which I found very funny because that specific site which the Festive Owl posted to Facebook wasn’t even where the lineup was.

The forest is obviously a really special piece of it, and that’s one of the headliners of the show as you can imagine. There’s a lot of budget that goes into creating the Forest experience with the art installations. Even outside of the lineup we have artists from all over the world coming in and creating art for the festival and specifically for the forest. The Observatory Stage itself is created by really amazing architects. It’s a more asian themed area, the stage really extends all the way out into the forest and the crowd. The multi-layered tiers and viewing platforms kind of all add to the overall experience and bleed into the community.