How many buyers work on Lollapalooza?
It’s Houston Powell and myself. We get input from the whole booking department, seven buyers. We have meetings. We kick it around our office. It’s like a big buying pit — everybody can hear everybody else. Houston Powell runs point on it, and then he and I collaborate with Perry Farrell on who to put on. Did you blow up your shopping budget? In certain areas we did a little bit, but it wasn’t what you would have expected from us. Things sort of fell into place for us. It’s not what you would think, expense-wise. Is it hard to be disciplined sometimes, as a music fan? Oh yeah, it’s very hard to be disciplined. You want to go after it and you get yourself caught in places where you’re kind of impulse shopping. Obviously, though, if you look at our lineup you can see that we put the headliners on that were working, and some that weren’t even working. It’s our fourth year. We really feel like the festival has matured into what it is now. How were your advance sales, before the lineup was
