The Art of the Festival | Billboard Latin Music Week 2023
Written by djfrosty on October 2, 2023
Presented by Viña del Mar
Learn what goes on behind the scenes of crafting and sustaining a successful Latin music festival from the most successful festival producers in the world.
Chris Den Uijl
In the US when we launched Sueños, it was incredible feedback. We did 45,000 people per day, first year, and we had no idea what we were going to do. And we were just blown away. And to go into this year and see that grow. There’s a huge, huge need for consumption. But it’s completely different. We’re learning every single day that we need to challenge ourselves is, is that we don’t need to separate ourselves anymore from saying we have an inclusive Latin festival versus a multi-genre festival.
John Frias
My name is John Frias, the festival is in Los Angeles, and soon to be in Austin. It’s a quintessential festival of Los Angeles. It represents all of the culture that is in LA. It’s very representative of, of the diverse crowd and population and culture in Los Angeles, and just having the time of our lives.
Bruno Del Granado
Excellent. Next to John is my friend Chris, then out from Baja Beach, past suenos Coca Cola flow dynamics la familia on and on. Chris, can you tell us a little bit about your background and some of the festivals your work?
Chris Den Uijl
Hi, everyone, thanks for coming. Um, yeah, so we launched a bunch of different festivals over the last 10 years. But specific to this panel, Baja Beach Fest launched about five years ago. And it’s really just a celebration for Latinos in general, we wanted to create an event that really just like celebrated culture was a platform for the artists to be able to express themselves in like a really united way, but also bring the same type of production that you know, the Anglo festivals that I typically came from brought to the Latin culture so trying to build, you know, one of the strongest kind of footprints for artists to express themselves. And yeah, as time has passed on, we’ve expanded that footprint in two different cities in Mexico, as well as launched a festival called Sueños in Chicago two years ago.
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