A chat with Northern Vibe – the enchanting hidden secret of Ontario’s festival scene

Nestled in the heart of a beautiful valley in the middle of the Canadian Boreal Forest, Northern Vibe festival gives an ethereal new meaning to the word escapism. As summer nears its close each year, attendees make their way to this stunning Northern Ontario location to experience Canadian art and music against a breathtaking natural backdrop. They camp under the stars, dance to soul-shaking dance tracks next to a moonlit river (or play handrums if they’re not up for boogying), and make lifelong friends. 

The festival houses two main stages – the aforementioned River Stage, a dance and EDM stage produced by Toronto’s Roost Radio. And the Forest Stage, which sees talent from the Canadian alternative rock scene play to enchanted crowds in a gorgeous woodland setting.

So, what exactly goes into organising a festival like this? A certain level of “organised chaos” admits Jessa Nisbett, Northern Vibe’s Information Technology manager. We know there are lots of people in the Ticket Tailor community that’ll be desperate to learn more – especially those with their own vision of starting a successful, (almost) 10-year strong small festival like this one. (Northern Vibe would be hitting its tenth year if it wasn’t for having to take a year off during Covid). 

Keep reading for our chat with Jessa to learn all about this amazing Ontario happening – and how these guys pull it together successfully, year after year.

✅ Key ticketing takeaways

💰Jessa loves the fact that, with Ticket Tailor, you get paid instantly every time you sell a ticket, which helps cashflow – something that can be very powerful for a small event. When Northern Vibe checked out Eventbrite, they found the platform way too restrictive and didn’t like the way they hold your ticket sales hostage. 

🙌 Ticket Tailor’s Products feature makes it so much easier to sell merchandise and to make sure just the right amount of stock is ordered.

🎟️ Ticket Tailor’s pricing structure – which lets you buy credits at a discount, or to Pay As You Sell – is really helpful when it comes to controlling costs. When Northern Vibe knows roughly how many tickets they’ll sell, they buy credits and save.

💡 When it comes to creating a ticketing strategy, there are well-known tactics that work, like early bird pricing (which creates urgency and benefits keen fans). But sometimes it comes down to trial and error, like the new VIP tickets Northern Vibe tested last year.

• See Ticket Tailor’s pricing >

How would you sum up Northern Vibe to anyone who’s never come across it?

Northern Vibe is where you go to escape. It's where you check the stresses of everyday life at the gate and just enjoy being truly free (if even for just a weekend). It’s where you go to meet up with friends you haven’t seen all year, or to make new ones.

Ultimately, it’s a music and arts festival that takes place in a beautiful green valley in Northern Ontario next to a winding river. It's Ontario, Canada’s hidden secret of music festivals. 

Where did the idea for the festival come from, and how did you set about turning it into a reality?

Prior to Northern Vibe, another festival was held on the same site. Eventually that festival stopped because its reason for its existence was no longer there (it was a protest festival). There was a desire from some of the people involved in that festival to make something new happen… and thus Northern Vibe was born! 

Turning it into a reality meant getting the right people involved – from property owners, sponsors and artists to musicians, DJs, AV people, and a whole lot of volunteers.

Have you encountered any major challenges along the way?

This year would have been our tenth year, but the festival didn't run in 2020 due to Covid. We came back in 2021 (with some restrictions in place). Since then the biggest challenge has been getting people to come back. Covid and now this economy have made running festivals more difficult. 

We’re sure a lot of event creators will relate to that. How do you go about organising your festival?

We do most of the planning online. We are a very decentralised organisation. I like to call it “organised chaos". There's a few of us that each do a separate part of the organising, and at the end it just all comes together. 

For example, we have two main stages and a pop up stage. Each stage has a person responsible for making sure that stage comes together. 

Your River Stage sounds pretty epic – tell us about that:

The river stage is where our DJs and producers play, and is effectively our EDM stage. The stage is produced by Toronto promoters Roost Radio, who are well known in the Toronto dance music scene for putting on some of the hottest club shows for bass music. They bring in an audio/visual setup with custom mapped projected visuals, and a custom built sound system. This all takes place next to a river where people not dancing sit around a bonfire often playing hand drums. Those of us that do dance are in for a treat, and our DJs play all night long (rain or shine).

Sounds incredible! How do you go about sourcing and booking the line-ups for your stages? Any advice for budding festival organisers?

Two of the biggest things to consider when looking for acts for our festival are attendee interest, and cost. We don't want to bring in someone that no one cares about seeing (we don't have a lot of acoustic acts, for example, because it's not our demographic).

In terms of booking acts – we believe in paying our performers fairly, if we can't afford them we’re not going to insult them by offering them less. There's a balance here. Obviously, we’re speaking from the point of view of a small festival that books mostly smaller or up-and-coming acts. But I can say that monetary incentives and being willing to accommodate a rider are the main avenues of success here. We might be a small festival, but I'm sure if we offered The Foo Fighters enough money, plus could accommodate their rider, they'd be down to play!

What I would say is that it’s also important to build a sense of community with your acts. Make sure everyone feels they should be there. This goes for attendees, volunteers, and performers. Then, they often end up reaching out to us because they want to come back. 

How important is sustainability and the environment when it comes to organising and running your festival?

Northern Vibe takes place in a beautiful natural environment, and so we take sustainability and the environment seriously when it comes to running things. We encourage our attendees to only bring reusable containers. We don’t allow glass on site (as the trails are often walked barefoot), and we have garbage collection at the end of the event. 

Now onto ticketing – why did you choose Ticket Tailor as your ticketing partner? 

This is a great question, because for many people their first choice might be Eventbrite. We started by looking at what Eventbrite had to offer and found they were actually really restrictive. So we did our research and after trying a few different platforms we finally settled with Ticket Tailor.

One of the factors that was most appealing was that, with Ticket Tailor, you get paid instantly every time you sell a ticket. Because they work with third-party payment providers (Stripe, Square and PayPal), your ticket-money goes straight into your account. Ticket Tailor never even touches your money, so it means you get your sales money instantly, and cash flow is helped. This is a huge thing for us. Being a small festival, knowing you have the money on hand is a big plus.

Ticket Tailor also offers reasonable rates and allows us to either use its Pay As You Sell structure or to buy discounted credits. This allows us to control costs. If we know we’re only going to sell 100 tickets, we can buy the right amount of credits and save. 

The different payment options available are also great! This year we started accepting Email Money Transfers (which is the easiest way for everyone to pay in Canada), and Ticket Tailor made that painless to implement. 

That’s great to hear 🙏. Have you found any other features particularly useful since using Ticket Tailor? 

We have always sold branded merchandise at the festival… t-shirts, hoodies, bandanas etc. In years past we would always order too much or too little of stock. Last year we started pre-selling our merch through Ticket Tailor’s Products feature, which has made ordering the right amount of stock so much easier, as we can see what the demand is ahead of time. 

We’re sure budding festival organisers will be keen to know… How do you go about devising your ticketing strategy?

It is imperative that we have an idea of what our attendance will be for the festival. Selling Early Bird tickets enables us to do this through giving our most ardent supporters a way to get their tickets early and at a discount over regularly priced tickets. 

Each month the price goes up $10, until we get to the regular price. Doing this creates urgency (“I really need to get my ticket before the price goes up"). We’ve had the best response we’ve ever had in pre-sales this year. It's important to note that we do also sell physical tickets locally, so only a portion of our ticket sales are online. 

We also created VIP/Supporter tickets to give people a way to support the festival while getting something in return. This hasn't panned out the way we intended, which we feel is due to details missing regarding what a VIP/Supporter gets as part of this higher tier. So we’re still working on the messaging here. There can be trial and error when it comes to nailing a ticketing strategy – so it’s important to keep an eye on what’s working and what isn’t.

Finally, What does the future hold for Northern Vibe? 💫

We’re never quite sure. We, like other small and large festivals, are at the mercy of the economy. We want to grow the festival, but it's been a difficult recovery post Covid. In short – we’re dedicated to making the festival happen each year, as long as people keep coming. 

We’re sure your fans will be pleased to hear that! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us, Jessa. 

⛺Find out all about Northern Vibe festival and get your tickets for 2024 >

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