After 2 Years Lost To Covid, San Diego’s Wonderfront Music Festival Returns November 18-20

Ernie Hahn, the founder of Hahn Entertainment and one of the significant players behind the scenes of the Wonderfront festival is still bringing live events to San Diego. This weekend is Wonderfront the waterfront festival which takes over the Embarcadero near Seaport Village. The headliners are Zac Brown, Gwen Stefani, and Kings Of Leon along with G-Eazy, Cage the Elephant and many more. This year Paul Thornton is running the event, along with a team which brings a seven-stage festival to San Diego’s waterfront for three days of music, food, and entertainment.

It’s always exciting to see new ideas come into town about how to spend your entertainment dollars. That’s why Ernie is so fun to watch. In a little more than three years he’s been part of creating the Wonderfront festival along with his partners, the WonderBus which is San Diego’s answer to the Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile and now interactive entertainment such as an immersive King Tut exhibition.

The lessons that he learned running the San Diego Sports Arena for 30 years are translating into a solid understanding of how you attract people with discretionary dollars to attend something outside their house, away from their screens, live and in person.

San Diego has a lot of venues and a lot of infrastructure which can support additional entertainment opportunities. It has a mobile population with a willingness to spend money to be entertained. So, it is always a joy to see an entrepreneur who understands how to bring good choices home.

San Diego has a long history of providing outdoor entertainment hearkening all the way back to the original street scene, a festival which threaded through the streets of San Diego with acts playing on stages built in open space and parking lots. There is no reason for San Diego not to host these kinds of events. It’s well known for having some of the best weather in the country. People come here to celebrate the benevolent climate and the laid-back culture of good food, good beer, and conviviality.

Ernie Hahn did the near impossible as general manager of the Sports Arena. He managed getting acts booked in both by Live Nation and AEG. In great part because of Ernie’s efforts San Diego had arena shows come to town for everybody from The Who to U2.

During the pandemic Ernie put together a project called Wonderbus which we previously covered in Forbes. In short summary: the Wonderbus is a double decker bus with musicians on the top deck playing their instruments live, through speakers as the bus drove around town.

MORE FROM FORBESErnie Hahn’s Wonderbus Brings Music To The PeopleBy Eric Fuller

Ernie has just created a new project through Hahn Entertainment. In an interview, he described how he will be bringing the king tut exhibition to the Del Mar fairgrounds next year. King Tut is an audio-visual exhibition in the same fashion as the interactive Van Gogh project.

This is a newly emerging style of ticketed entertainment in which there is something in place temporarily for people to attend. Your ticket allows you entry into the nine-room exhibition which walks through the history of King Tut. You go at your own pace. If you are truly immersed in everything Tut you might spend 2 hours soaking up every frame of every image. If you are moderately curious you could walk through the exhibition in under an hour or maybe even 45 minutes. If you just want to get across the street for lunch and a beer, you could blow through it in 20 minutes. It’s entirely self-directed and up to you

Entertainment is really a difficult business. You invest a lot of money up front in an idea and then hope that people will reward your hard work by buying a ticket and showing up. Even a big music festival can’t make it just by selling tickets. The tickets cover the infrastructure and the cost of the musicians. The ability to make any profit is driven by the sales of drinks, food, and merchandise. None of this happens without an entrepreneur at the helm and a solid partnership with a team to bring it all to fruition.