Festival season is coming up. Indie acts want to play festivals because there’s a built-in crowd, most of them pay pretty good, or, if they don’t pay, it’s a chance for some major exposure. Oh, and they’re fun. You’re outside, the weather’s nice (hopefully), the backline is set, the PA top of the line and the sound people are pros. It’s kind of a dream gig, really.

So how do you land a festival slot? The biggies like Coachella, Bumbershoot, Jazz Fest or Bonnaroo don’t cater to indie artists, unless it’s on a side stage geared towards local or unsigned acts. You can give it a shot, it can’t hurt. But you’ll likely have more luck starting with locally oriented festivals in your area. Every city has a general spring or summer festival for arts, music and crafts. These are basically coming-out-of-hibernation-from-the-doldrums-of-winter type festivals. The musical entertainment is usually local acts with regional touring acts topping the bill. Find out all these types of festivals in your town, visit their website and find out the booking process.

Since these aren’t music-centric festivals they may not be listed in the usual music festival online databases, so search local newspaper websites. Larger metro areas have a number of these types of festivals each year from spring through fall. It may just be a small but well-funded neighborhood festival that doesn’t do a lot of advertising.

A lot of festivals only do their booking through Sonicbids (sonicbids.com), so join up, create an EPK with plenty of songs, photos and everything else you would normally include in a press kit, and check out the booking/find gigs section on the site. Usually, there are hundreds of festival listings.

Many online resources for finding festivals exist. These are mostly geared towards music fans, not acts, but they’re a good way to find music festivals that may be looking for acts in your genre. A note about the word “indie” here: we use the term to mean the unsigned, DIY act, but it’s also used to refer to a genre of music that is a trendy offshoot of alternative music. Many acts labeled in the “indie” genre are actually signed to a label. It’s important to consider this when you’re searching through festival listings and spot the word “indie.” It likely means the genre, not the DIY acts like yours.

Here are some sites to begin your festival search:

Festivals.com, Spacelab, and Music Festival Junkies with the latter being perhaps the most user-friendly and up to date.

Don’t just seek out the big, general festivals. Many festivals are for a specific genre, such as folk, electronic and the like. Get your EPK to shine and focus on the festivals in your genre. Happy hunting and good luck landing those sweet festival gigs!