Metropolis Music is one of the UK’s leading concert promotion companies, working on over 500 events a year, promoting acts such as Robbie Williams, Eminem, Oasis, The White Stripes and Coldplay. Metropolis Music promotes a range of concerts from small gigs to large outdoor music festivals.
Production teams, event staff and performers often spend a lot of time on location, before and after the event takes place. In remote locations, email and Internet access for backstage staff is limited or non-existent, much of the communication between suppliers and organisers is carried out via email, which causes a major issue if staff are on location for a number of days.
Director of Metropolis, Bob Angus explains, “With a festival or a long tour, it is essential that we have access to emails and to the company network to ensure the coordination of all event logistics. Unfortunately, if you are working backstage in the middle of a field, the lack of access to this information can be a problem.”
In 2004 Metropolis Music turned to ramsac, an IT solutions company, to provide the answer. ramsac was selected to provide wirelessly enabled Internet and email access at the backstage locations at the outdoor V Festival. The IT solutions company installed a network that allowed the production teams and performers access to the Internet and individual email accounts. In addition, the Metropolis staff were able to access their corporate network back in London, using a Citrix enabled solution.
Technical consultant at ramsac Paul Mew comments, “ramsac provided the four stages at the V Festival with a temporary office environment, with over 80 acts performing at the three day event it was our job to ensure that each of the crews could connect via a stable and secure network. ”
Mew continues, “We provided a dedicated on-site support team throughout the event to ensure that should any problems have occurred, we were able to solve them immediately. Due to large number of supporting acts, each act and each production team had allocated times to use the backstage facilities, it was therefore essential that the network was fully functional at all times and that any potential problems could be quickly resolved.”
Following the successful implementation, management and maintenance of the festivals IT requirements in 2004, Metropolis Music, selected ramsac to provide backstage wireless connectivity for the 2005 and 2006 festivals.
In September 2006 Metropolis Music was asked to promote the Robbie Williams outdoor concerts, at the Milton Keynes Bowl. Metropolis Music once again turned to ramsac.
The five consecutive concerts attracted 65,000 fans each day with support performances from artists including Basement Jaxx and Orson. To ensure that the system would run efficiently throughout the five-day event, ramsac arrived at Milton Keynes Bowl 7 days before the concerts to install wireless internet access using ASDL broadband lines to ten different backstage areas including the main dressing room. With a team of technical consultants Metropolis was assured continual support throughout each of the performance dates.
Angus comments, “As with the V Festival, a project of this proportion and profile must run flawlessly. Access to Internet and email allows us to maintain a level of organisation that is essential to an event of this magnitude.”
“ramsac has successfully provided backstage IT support for some of our largest open air events this year. We are confident that ramsac have the knowledge and expertise in this field to provide IT support in any number of scenarios, and as such we look forward to working with them again in the future.”