Trolley

The new trolley route is awful. Trying to go from the north (M&M area) to the south (KCA or Bijou area) takes upwards of 30 minutes. It seems that making sure to have the trolley hit KMA and the Church St church makes it so that the route is hitting really tough traffic intersections that are often slow-moving. Once I attempted this trolley route a few times and determined it was consistently longer than walking, I just walked, but was disappointed because I’ve made heavy use of the trolley in years past. Going south to north was fine, but due to the longer than expected route time I felt it was less reliable to expect a trolley to show up in a timely manner, but I didn’t try this enough to come to a determinate conclusion. A thought I had to fix this: maybe next year there are two trolley loops running? One loop that goes north-south along the strip, from The Point to KCA, and one route that goes east-west between KMA and KCA, picking up Church St church.

Phones

I like where the ye festival currently feels. I remember when no phones was a lot more militantly enforced. Now, it feels like the vast majority of the audience for the vast majority of the time is very present and not with a phone out, but a handful here and there taking a quick recording. I think that’s a great middle ground. Between the two poles, I’d prefer militant phone policing over everyone having their phones out the whole time, but I don’t feel that’s what we have, despite that feeling like what most other concerts nowadays have. We’re a good bunch!

App

This year’s app definitely was worse. However, most things got addressed, including the deleting of previous days during the festival. The one thing that never got fixed that was so frustrating was just the loading times throughout the app. Something as simple as opening the filters screen to filter by venue, which isn’t even a new page, would sometimes take 5-10 seconds to load up. I don’t work on apps, so I don’t know if it’s an optimization issue, sync issue, connection issue, etc. but I definitely hope this gets addressed in the future. My biggest gripe at first was my schedule being really difficult to look at a glance, so I’m very happy that despite not being able to completely stick the landing, the app team really did fix a lot in such a short period!

Non-Music, Non-Film events

Big Ears should be more communicative to those hosting these events about the expectations. My partner is a big crafter, so we went to try the Malaysian screen printing, arriving just before the half-way point of their scheduled session, and we were told they had already finished that session and to come back at another session. Not a big deal, the biggest disappointment was the time lost because KMA is so out of the way, but it felt like no one at Big Ears told the event to expect large chunks of people to either only stay for the first half of a scheduling or to only show up for the second half of a scheduling.

Ticketing (including clipping)

Despite there being lots of capacity alerts, I felt like ticketing was good this year. I made it into every show I was interested in, which included a variety of showing up early, showing up on time, and showing up late. Yo La Tango and clipping were the biggest obstacles. Having one issue I think is still a great batting average (the Yo La Tango show). The clipping show seemed like an unfortunate consequence of the last minute changes. With Julien Baker & Torres canceling, that was a big name to fill. Big Ears stepped up and moved Arooj Aftab to fill it, but it left much less “competing” with clipping. I think the clipping show would have actually been okay ticketing-wise if Arooj Aftab was still overlapping them. This seems more like having to be aware of all of the consequences of big changes, moving Arooj Aftab up made sense, but without putting another big name at the end of the night, clipping should have moved to a bigger space.

Water bottles

I’m still bummed that Bijou doesn’t allow reusable water bottles in. This year I bought a 24 pack of single use water bottles and just used those, and Bijou was cool with it, but I saw so many others having to dump their full bottles at the beginning of the day. I don’t think this is in Big Ears’ control, but it’s still a bummer. Big Ears involves very long days, so keeping hydrated is essential.

Merch & Box Office

Both of their new spots seems great. I don’t remember having complaints of their locations in years past, but no complaints on this year’s either.

Vibe

So so wonderful. Everyone involved is amazing. Every single volunteer and worker was always so kind. Every single moving through a line to get into a venue was super smooth and painless. Every bathroom was clean. It all felt very well run, very put together, and like all involved were genuinely happy to be part of such a great event.

Music

As is par for the course with Big Ears, not only is it all fantastic, but such an eclectic mix of different kinds of music from all over. Game respecting game around every corner. It feels very down to earth, even punk, when there are so many artists also excited to be catching other people’s sets and you are right there next to them. We’re all together big music lovers. And as Carla Kihlstedt mentioned in her set, in effect practicing great curiosity and great empathy.

What were all of your thoughts? Do we share similar sentiments on any of the above?