C3 announces ACL Fest economic impact, with $7.2M donated to parks improvements

In a clear sign of the resilience of outdoor music festivals after the Covid-19 pandemic, data released yesterday show the 2022 edition of Austin City Limits Music Festival produced $447.9 million in economic impact.

That number represents a substantial jump from the $369 million impact from the festival’s return in 2021, and the $291 million figure from 2019.

The economic impact study, which was conducted by the AngelouEconomics consulting firm, was released on the same day the festival announced its lineup for this year, with headliners including Kendrick Lamar, Foo Fighters and Mumford & Sons.

Festival promoter C3 Presents also announced its latest annual gift to the Austin Parks Foundation, totaling $7.2 million that will be used to make improvements to parks in all 10 City Council districts. The list of upgrades is evolving, but APF leadership named Rosewood Neighborhood Park, Onion Creek Metropolitan Park, Earl J. Pomerleau Pocket Park, McBeth Recreation Center and the Barton Creek Greenbelt as some of the sites that will get repairs or enhancements.

The economic analysis looked at the effect of direct festival operations as well as the spending activity of the more than 400,000 visitors to Zilker Metropolitan Park for six days, with surveys of 7,300 attendees providing the customer data. Those two weekends of live music, along with the several weeks of setup and teardown, generated the same business impact as 3,578 full-time jobs, according to the report.

Emmett Beliveau, chief operating officer for C3 Presents, said a big driver for the increased economic impact of the festival has been inflation effects that have driven up material prices and wages across the board.

“Generally everything in the economy has been more expensive in the last couple of years. We’ve all seen the inflation, and there’s no question that the ACL Festival was much more expensive to produce in 2021 and 2022 than it was before the pandemic,” he said.

“That means we’re paying vendors more, we’re paying staff more, we’re paying the artists more. And I think you’re certainly seeing that in the economic impact numbers. At the same time, we’ve done our best to hold ticket prices to not match those increases on the expense side that we’re seeing.”

With Tuesday marking the start of the company’s large sales push for festival tickets, Beliveau said he hoped to make a “huge dent” in moving ticket inventory even though the growing impact of ticket resellers makes it rare for an event to truly sell out.

“The secondary resellers have really trained the consumer to believe that there’s always a ticket on sale … so you can go the week before any show and find a ticket. It’s likely not going to be from the primary seller, and it’s likely not going to be from the festival promoter, but it’s there,” he said. “Unless you’re looking to save a few bucks by purchasing directly from the festival, you don’t need to lock up that money earlier in the year.”

Colin Wallis, CEO of the Austin Parks Foundation, said his group works closely with the Austin Parks and Recreation Department to select projects from an extensive list of unfunded improvements that are needed throughout the city.

“When you look at sort of the capital backlog they’re looking at, some are in the magnitude of a billion dollars if I were putting a number on it … and we’ve been working with the Parks Department for a long time, who obviously is the steward and the owner of all those park assets and who knows better than anybody else where the needs are and where they’re the greatest,” he said. “We really work with them throughout the year, around the clock, in identifying where the greatest needs are.”

In the 18 years that C3 and APF have worked together, the company has given more than $55 million to fund parks improvements across Austin, in addition to the money it is required to pay each year for maintenance and restoration of Zilker Park after the festival.

Much attention has been focused on Zilker over the past year, with the release of an ambitious draft vision plan for the park. Wallis said the distaste some groups have shown for parking structures proposed around the outer limits are just one example of how much local residents care about how Zilker is used as the city grows.

“Obviously, it’s a really difficult space to plan. There’s a reason there’s never been a vision plan for it, because Zilker’s contentious,” he said, noting that 15 groups heavily involved in programming at Zilker were involved in identifying the issues and needed improvements.

“The consultants have done an admirable job, given a very difficult task. Is it perfect? Not even close. There are a lot of things in the vision plan that I don’t particularly love, but I’m also not a park planner, and I’m not a traffic engineer. I’m just someone who goes to Zilker a lot.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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