How Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival Aims To Balance Art And Commerce

Pavement headlines the 2024 Bumbershoot festival.

Levi Erdman, Courtesy of New Rising Sun

Seattle’s Bumbershoot, which has been around since the early 1970s, may be one of the oldest continuously running music festivals in the United States, but it has been reinventing itself around a new vision and mission since New Rising Sun and Third Stone took over management in 2023. This year, with national acts like Janelle Monae, Weezer, Aurora and Bright Eyes headlining over Labor Day weekend, Bumbershoot has expanded its ambitions to be a hub of art, creativity and community throughout the northwest.

In its heyday, Bumbershoot drew over 120,000 attendees from Friday to Monday of the holiday weekend, showcasing top name bands and charging top dollar ticket prices, but that model was showing signs of strain even before the pandemic. With the old management contract expiring, the City of Seattle, which owns the festival, went looking for a partner with a different approach: a more intimate, more affordable festival with deeper connections to the region and its culture.

“When we took over Bumbershoot, the city made clear they wanted it to be community-centered,” said Joe Paganelli, CEO of New Rising Sun, the production company that currently runs Bumbershoot. He said that unlike the large, for-profit music festivals that have to contend with issues like industry consolidation and the logistics of booking big touring acts, New Rising Sun is aiming for a more manageable event that blends big-name acts with middle tier and local performers and includes a wide range of creative experiences beyond just the music.

Paganelli says ticket sales this year have been strong and organizers expect 35-40,000 attendees over Saturday and Sunday, about the same as 2024. In addition to the musical acts performing on stages around Seattle Center (the park and entertainment complex at the base of the Space Needle), Paganelli says there will be all manner of creative surprises lurking around every corner, from fashion designers showing off their new looks to animated films to immersive VR experiences.

“We have a program called ‘free range,’ which is artists and performers who don’t have a spot on stage but that are popping up around the festival unexpectedly,” he said. “That creates a lot of energy and magic. We’ve drawn a much wider circle around who we celebrate in the art community, and embrace a wider demographic within our community.”

Since taking over Bumbershoot, New Rising Sun has made a commitment to reducing ticket prices by expanding sponsorship and institutional support; engaging with local creators in visual arts, dance and performance art, film, animation, technology, fashion, tattooing, culinary arts and sports; and developing a mentor and apprentice program for local youth to learn audio production, stage management and other marketable skills in the music industry.

This year, the group made another huge investment in the local arts scene by opening a year-round gallery and exhibition space in downtown Seattle. The new Cannonball Arts Center, located in a large previously-vacant commercial space along Seattle’s troubled Third Avenue corridor, aims to “elevate, fortify, exhibit and celebrate artists” from across the Northwest, with a particular emphasis on the indigenous tribal communities.

Constructed in partnership with the City of Seattle, which has committed $11 million over five years to the effort, and with the support of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe and various local foundations, the Cannonball Arts Center features installations, exhibits, events and performance space meant to attract locals and visitors.

“Our greatest natural resource is artists. It’s how we should be measuring the true wealth of our community,” said Greg Lundgren, creative director at New Rising Sun, who supervised the opening of the new space. Lundgren said he hopes the center will put $1.5 million annually into the pockets of local artists. The Bumbershoot festival already employs over 1000 creative professionals. “That’s the financial metric I’m aiming for,” he said.

Putting art first and commerce second is a noble but risky approach. When New Rising Sun first took on managing Bumbershoot, Paganelli articulated a vision for raising an endowment whose proceeds could offset the operational costs of running the show and bring ticket prices within reach of more attendees in the community.

“That is still the Holy Grail that we are pursuing,” he said in an interview earlier this month. “It’s a process of building up trust with stakeholders. We know we have the resources and the capacity here in Seattle, so we have to keep evolving the festival and making sure it inspires people to make that commitment.”

Until then, Paganelli says he is happy to see the increased participation of local philanthropic institutions, the Seattle city government, and tribal governments. Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell and Donnie Stevenson of the Muckleshoot Tribe both participated in the opening event at the Cannonball Arts Center.

“We have a great partnership with them. We’re talking to them about what it means for the city to own the actual brand of the festival and lend the rights out to raise money, produce the festival, and come up with a successful financial result. So I think the roadmap to a sustainable festival is there.”