Emergenza Festival – Promoting Emerging Bands

The Emergenza Festival is hosted annually, and held its first music festival in 1994 in the city of Rome. It has grown into a festival that spans across approximately one hundred and fifty venues in the United States of America and in Europe. Young and unknown bands get the opportunity to perform in front of live audiences and expose themselves to a wide audience. Each year, the number of bands that sign up to perform at the Emergenza Festival increases and its popularity as a music festival has reached staggering proportions.

To explain how the festival works, it can be seen as a sort of Battle of the Bands. Emergenza Festival provides bands with the best in technology, in regard to the stage set-up, and ensures that the stages are fully equipped. Bands then perform for thirty minutes and have the opportunity to win the crowd over. The audience members are then asked to vote for their favorite band and, therefore, they ultimately decide who goes through to the next round. When bands reach the national and regional levels in the competition, judges are brought in to evaluate the bands. An international final round is held in Germany, where the national finalists perform for the winning position. Bands such as Band Called Pharisee and Fluttr Effect have won the competition and gone on to enjoy great careers in the music world.

This year, the Emergenza Festival starts on 7 November 2007 and ends on 12 July 2008. Venues hosting the event will be in Paris, Berlin, San Francisco, Tokyo, Rotterdam, Boston, Chicago, Madrid, Brussels, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Toronto, Lyon, Houston and London. Bands are required to pay a fee of $70 as entry fee into the festival and usually get a few gifts from the organisers; for example in 2005 bands received a snare skin, a set of bass strings and a set of drum sticks. Many people have criticized the entry fee, saying that it is taking money from musicians, while others view it as an investment to promote their band. Bands are also given tickets to sell, and can make a profit from these sales. If the band sells eighty tickets, any sale after that puts money into their pockets. There have been a few negative comments about this as well, but most bands are prepared to put in the effort, and live by the philosophy of what you put in, is what you get out.

But over and above the fees, screaming fans and the excitement of performing live, bands are able to meet other musicians, hopefully be noticed by talent scouts and gain experience and knowledge about the music industry. Judging by the number of entries in to the festival and the rising number of audience members, the Emergenza Festival will be hosting its music extravaganza for years to come.