Dixie Fuller

Finding enough funding, unraveling the tangle of bureaucratic red tape and booking the right acts are all major hurdles to getting a music festival to succeed.

But ultimately, it all comes down to Mother Nature, local festival organizers said.

From smaller, one-day affairs with a handful of artists to sprawling events such as Riverbend, success or failure hangs on the weather more than any other factor, they said.

“The weather is probably the biggest situation you can’t do anything about,” said Paul Smith, who works with operations at the Chattanooga branch of Texas-based Palo Duro Records. The label is planning to host the inaugural year of their Chattahippie Americana music festival in September.

Although they started planning for the four-day event 18 months ahead of time, Mr. Smith said it could still end in the same soggy nightmare that snuffs out many festivals in their infancy.

“You hear of a lot of festivals that plan, the weather wipes them out, and they hang it up,” he said. “One of our greatest fears is that we have this whole party planned, and the rain comes in and soaks us out.”

While it doesn’t necessarily take a hurricane to stop a festival in its tracks, it certainly doesn’t make things easier, said Thomas Hellend, the founder of T-Dawg Productions, which used to organize the HarvestFest music festivals in Lafayette, Ga.

In 2005, Mr. Hellend stopped hosting the three-day, multi-stage events after Hurricanes Ivan, Katrina and Rita “destroyed us,” he said.

Now, he hosts smaller-scale Hootenanny events, which feature a reduced lineup and production level with a similarly reduced price in case it all turns south, he said.

“I might do a festival again of that sort, but right now, I’m trying to do what’s financially viable,” Mr. Hellend said. “Single-night events have gone over really well.”

After the weather, keeping within a feasible budget is the next-biggest festival killer, organizers said.

Most of the money might go to booking bands and securing a venue, but planning for secondary costs like portable toilets and liquor sales licenses is also important, they said.

Advertising is also important to let people know an event is coming, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.

Raising awareness for a first-time festival can be a lot like political campaigning. Using grass-roots approaches like e-mail canvassing and social networking Web sites creates cost-free inroads to people’s eyes and ears, Mr. Hellend said.

“Developing a local street team, meeting folks at shows who will help you promote and handing out flyers at concerts are other methods,” he said. “Those require a little bit of effort to make it work, but that’s part of the fun — you go out and meet the people who are going to come to your show.”

Last year, the Chattanooga Downtown Partnership teamed up with the Fletcher Bright Co. to organize the not-for-profit Three Sisters Music Festival, which lucked out and landed a pair of days with bluebird skies. It will be returning this year.

Three Sisters had a successful debut, but filling the seats required a lot of work behind the scenes before the first note was struck, said George Bright, who helped decide which acts to pursue for the two-day event.

“There’s really no magic to it; it’s just about getting the nuts and bolts done,” he said. “I figured out how to get it paid for from our side and had some general ideas, but the details and really making sure it was fine tuned was something the (Chattanooga Downtown Partnership) did.”

CDP’s executive director, Carla Pritchard, said making Three Sisters and other events like Nightfall successful isn’t about just landing the right acts. Festival organizers need to consider how their event is going to affect the community, too.

“When we embark on a new project, we are always careful to take a look at the events calendar to see if it can sustain another event that’s not going to overlap or duplicate anything,” she said. “You want to contribute to the life of the community, not take away from it by closing roads or cause inconveniences to businesses.”

For all the headaches of getting a festival off the ground, however, it can be a rewarding job when all the pieces come together — and it doesn’t rain — organizers said.

“It’s is all about exposing people to new music,” Mr. Smith said of his hope for the Chattahippie festival. “You hear music on the radio that’s just not as good as some of these beautiful records being made right now that no one is hearing.

“You have to find ways to expose people to certain types of music they might not otherwise be exposed to. That’s one of our biggest goals.”