How Hopscotch got back on track with Pavement and cheaper tickets

After two years of pandemic uncertainty, Hopscotch Music Festival was in a funk.

• The mood was off, sales were down, festival-goers were antsy, and Ben Wingrove, a co-owner of Hopscotch, felt like the event was no longer hitting its mark.

"When COVID came it really knocked the wind out of our sails," said Wingrove, who is also an executive at Morrisville-based Etix.

• "I was sitting in a bar during [last year's festival] with one of the other owners and I was like, 'We've got to figure this out.'"

Driving the news: A year out from that conversation, it appears Hopscotch has done just that.

• The release of its lineup generated serious buzz — especially with the revelation that indie rock legends Pavement would play their first show in the state since 1999 — and ticket sales are up.

Why it matters: Hopscotch is one of the Triangle's largest cultural events, bringing with it big and upcoming musical acts and packing the streets of downtown Raleigh and its music venues with thousands of people.

State of play: Wingrove credits the potential turnaround to an organizational change within Hopscotch's leadership ranks.

• Instead of shutting down after the festival concluded, the leadership team switched to meeting weekly, year-round. Decision making, they realized, had been taking too long — from picking bands all the way to web design — effectively paralyzing the team at times.
• Rather than putting out fires, the Hopscotch team began looking to the future. They started booking this year's festival last July, months earlier than usual, and are already in conversations with bands for 2024's festival.

Organizers also changed Hopscotch's ticketing model, eliminating single-day tickets in favor of only three-day passes and marketing them much earlier in the year.

• At the same time, they lowered the price of entry-level passes to compensate for the change. Prices were even lower for those who bought before the lineup was released.
• Single-day tickets were "a pretty small amount of tickets in the grand scheme of things," Price said. "But cutting those out made it so that we were able to reduce the three-day prices to a number that I think is the best deal."

What's next: The team is already deep into planning 2024's festival and drumming up ideas to keep it feeling new.

• This year comedy was added for the first time and they're considering expanding eTix's annual conference, held during Hopscotch, into a more public-facing event.
• "Nathan and I had a call this morning about the headliner for 2024, so we're already working on that," Wingrove said.