After four years, it was so refreshing and exciting to walk around the hallways of The Zone @ 91-3 during the week of Rifflandia – being greeted by fellow Zone Family Members with a familiar saying: “Merry Riffmas”.
This is a common phrase in our building because Rifflandia is very much our favourite time of year and we’re so happy to have remained promotional partners with the festival since its inception!
Here’s a quick look at the festival from the perspective of our listeners (a.k.a. Zoners):
What makes the partnership between Rifflandia and The Zone @ 91-3 work so well is our joint commitment to providing an incredibly-rounded festival experience for residents and visitors of Greater Victoria.
For years, we’ve set the stage for our listeners/your festival-goers, getting them excited for the artists they’re going to see, helping them plot out their weekend of live music choices and pre-emptively exposing them to festival artists that might not otherwise be on their radar.
The advantage of The Zone as a media partner is the simple fact that we are 100% programmed locally. The music is not centrally-programmed and is personally curated by a music department team within the walls of our own radio station. We have the freedom to make internal decisions about music and live content and that often allows us to go above and beyond in promotional value for the festival.
Not to mention that our support of local artists is second-to-none, with several festival acts being alumni of our station’s Band of the Month Program (including this year’s artists from the 2022 season, Pastel Blank and Liam McKenzie & the Moon Dogs).
If we feel like an elevated rotation of an artist on the festival bill will help build an excitement and appreciation among our listeners, those discussions are had (and decisions made) internally.
We did this quite a bit with Zone Artists in this year’s festival line-up:
(The above is a sample of a small handful of artists we spun in regular rotation in the weeks leading up to the festival. Each dot in the graph indicates a spin. A play in a live, announcer-hosted hour would be accompanied by a live announcer intro/extro and segue into a mention about the festival and when/where that artist will perform.)
We can (and have) also run several interviews with festival artists and Rifflandia team members to encourage wristband sales and provide our listeners with further information about the festival.
And we also created an on-site activation from where we broadcasted our entire weekend – reconfiguring our on-air line-up to allow every announcer to broadcast a two-hour show from Royal Athletic Park – complete with on-site artist interviews and stories from our own festival experiences.
Our team has also been ready and willing to help the festival on-site, hyping the crowd during artist introductions and helping with various on-stage presentations.
View this post on Instagram
And as many artists will attest, when it comes to interview, there’s nothing more fun than chatting it up with a Zone Announcer! Here are a few of the interviews we conducted (either live or recorded) while on-site at Royal Athletic Park.
Art D’Ecco
Allan Rayman
Bran Van 3000
Ruby Waters (pre-recorded…and with explicit language, lol!)
