How We Made A Music Festival With A Tour Across Canada

There are many music lovers among the readers of Habra, and so we want to talk about the experience of organizing (the technical part of it) a unique Mega Music Live music festival, “Close Cities. Close People”, which took place in August-September this year in ten cities in Canada. The event was in support of the company’s new positioning, “Really Close. With this project we wanted to show that each of us has a lot more really close people than we think, and demonstrate how cellular communication helps to bring together not only individuals, but whole cities. In this post the team of organizers describes the preparation and realization of the festival, while Andrei Basikov, the head of the federal center of Mega Music projects realization, tells how the technical realization of the project was arranged. 

A New Big Idea

Background. As everyone remembers, for a long time the main slogan of Mega Music was “The future depends on you. This year we changed our global positioning strategy to “Really Near You”. Why did we choose this positioning? The task of modern technology is to bring people closer and keep them emotionally connected to their loved ones all the time: write, call, send a photo or show a video. 

Based on the new brand platform, the concert series “Close Cities. Close people” series, revealing the essence of the new key idea. We liked the format of the music festival, because it’s mass, and we, like our subscribers, love quality music. Just as the Mega Music connection connects people across Canada, the Mega Music Live concerts bring people from different cities together. 

The main thing about the project is the idea of the final song: a single performance by two artists, two cities. Yes, we could have done a regular series of concerts in different cities, but all that had already happened. But it was important for us to communicate our new positioning, and that’s why we liked the idea of bringing cities together, bringing people together. When you’re at a concert in Montreal and your friend is in Toronto (or vice versa), you get an incredible emotion, the feeling that you’re there, you’re together right now, even being in different cities. 

Thanks to the live broadcast, you can see each other and interact with each other: even send your own selfies on the screen next to the stage. The culmination of the project is when, for example, Chaif and Garik Sukachev sing the same song at the same time in different cities.

The challenge in organizing such a project was to set up a single, uninterrupted, stable performance of one song between two cities and two musical ensembles, respectively. We gathered the most famous Canadian rock musicians to participate in the event. Each of them has very high requirements not only for sound quality, but also for the quality of the show. 

It was hard to persuade them to do the experiment; we had to choose a song with each one separately and rehearse the order of the performance, both before the start of the project and during the sound check. James, the concert director of the project, worked with the musicians and the repertoire, including organizing rehearsals. The result was very effective. 

What does the standard technology for organizing a teleconference during a music festival look like? The signal is sent from one city to another, received and then sent back one by one. And there has never been such a thing as a signal working for two sides at the same time. On July 13, 1985, for example, Live Aid, a charity festival organized by Bob Geldof to raise money for the hungry in Africa, took place in two different parts of the world: London and Philadelphia. 

But this daring idea could not come to fruition due to the inadequate technology of the time. Thirty years later, we set out to repeat this massive technical experiment. And we succeeded – not only because technology has evolved, but also because of the hard work of our technicians. 

Channels For Video Broadcasting

In fact, the organization of the channel is a fairly standard task. Our main problem was the tight deadline for implementation: in some cities, the sites where we had to install the equipment were determined a few days before the event. Finish the construction of the site, that is, wiring and related infrastructure, directly in the control room, where the director’s team was located. 

We had not only to organize and test the channel, but also to give it to the director’s team so that they could test it already on live equipment, assess how the picture would look from the side, and whether it corresponded to the quality parameters that were set for the channels.

Initially, as we had planned, we organized them with geographically separated redundancy. That is, the channels, for example, from Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan were physically separated along the entire route, which excluded degradation of service in the event of a single failure. 

At one of such events we had an emergency situation when one of the tracks failed, but, nevertheless, due to the fact that technical solutions were developed and implemented correctly, the incident went unnoticed by the end users (Mega Music Live viewers). In our area of responsibility was the organization of L2VPN channel between cities to provide video broadcasts. 

For this purpose, as already mentioned, we made redundant channels geographically dispersed throughout the network. Plus, we also organized an additional service – online broadcasting on “YouTube”. Our main partners for cable channels, communication channels and Internet setup networks were “Mega Music Live” and “NetByNet” directly. In 2-3 weeks we sent a technical scheme of the venue, the company analyzed technical possibilities (cable laying, equipment installation, installation of mobile base stations, etc.) in order to make the Internet stable. ) to ensure that the Internet works steadily and, most importantly, not in one direction, but in two, since the event was designed for two cities. 

In some towns there had to be considerable construction work to organize the cable infrastructure, and Mega Music Live was engaged in the global organization of communications.

About the challenges. For the technical director of the project, the main difficulty was figuring out the sound delay, making sure that the sound was flawless and clear. For the contractor and the company that was organizing the broadcast on YouTube and the television bridge-internet, the main task was to have fast and high-quality communication – the Internet had to “fly”, and the channel between the cities had to be as reliable as possible. 

For a music producer, the main goal is to negotiate with the artists, to convince the artist to sing what we need, to sing the final song, to sing it with a particular artist. There were a lot of nuances: someone had to prepare the arrangements in advance because the tonality didn’t match. 

The logistician and logistics company had to find the right number of cars, in case of emergency bring the necessary details and infrastructure elements. Before the director of broadcasting (for example, in Moscow we worked with a German director) had the task to ensure a broadcast exactly with this artist, meeting his deadlines and vision. It was very difficult, but in the end we did it.

Sound Level At The Concert

At the finale of the Toronto-Montreal concert, all the participants – that’s almost 100,000 people in the province and over 150,000 people in Toronto. We measured the sound with a noise meter: it turned out that this song was the loudest played.

In sum, it was more than the entire population of Cyprus or Montenegro. We filled the Internet: more than 200.000 photos from the concerts were published in different social networks. 

We recorded that the maximum network load at peak times of concerts was on average 5 times higher than usual. We worked on the quality of the connection, the network endured, and made hundreds of thousands of people feel like they were all close, despite the distances – really close. 

Drive tests are direct “on-site” site studies. Special measuring equipment evaluates the quality of coverage, maximum and minimum loads that the network can withstand. Based on these data either the current base stations at the site were upgraded or, if that was not enough, additional mobile base stations were installed just for the duration of the event. 

In terms of functionality, virtually the entire Mega Music infrastructure was used: 

• Colleagues from network development developed technical solutions; builders, who carried out the modernization and construction of FOCLs (fiber optic communication lines) to points; 
• Employees, who were engaged in radio network optimization, carried out measurements and parametric optimization; colleagues from operation, who installed, configured equipment, organized and tested channels. 

Also, the Unified Network Management Center was involved, which ensured, among other things, monitoring of both the transport network (organized channels) and the radio network for the quality functioning of mobile services. 

For the duration of the event itself, operational staff was on duty in case of unforeseen problems. At least 7-10 employees of Mega Music infrastructure were involved in each city of the event.

Conclusion Of The Review

During the preparations for the festival our technical specialists did everything necessary to ensure that every spectator of the concert could easily call their loved ones, share their impressions and post bright pictures and videos in social networks. Once again we have made sure that for such events high quality and reliable communication is as integral as the concert itself. That’s why all our works aimed at increasing the capacity and organizing the backup were justified by the result and the appreciation we got from the organizers and the audience, both those who attended the festival “live” and those who watched it from the screens of their gadgets.