Hello everyone,

We've been reading your comments - positive and negative - on our recent San Francisco Summer Gathering show and discussing them in depth as a team. We take a lot of pride in our TNH events and the Summer Gatherings have always felt like the pinnacle of our show concept, so when things don’t go as intended, we take it very seriously.

It's clear from reading your post-show thoughts that we missed the mark in SF for some of you - and for that we apologize. It's clear, with the benefit of hindsight, that the narrow block party venue was very cramped for the number of attendees wanting a close stage view. We will focus on picking more spacious venues that can comfortably accommodate our crowd in the future. We'll also work more closely with security vendors to ensure that they understand the standards of safety and security that we expect at every show.

With the above said, the team here wanted to provide some further context to some of the most common issues we've heard in your comments.

Crowd levels - We’ve reviewed all the venue and promoter’s event reports, as well as our own. First, we need to make clear that the capacity and venue layout was proposed by our promoter partner Hotbox, and then approved by the Fire Department (with the SF Fire Captain and his inspector on site for the whole event as part of their due diligence). This is typical for outdoor shows, and we rely on our local partners to set capacity limits. We have pulled the security report and there were no reported injuries or major security incidents. All this said, there is no doubt it was a very busy event. And we hear that a lot of you felt the capacity was uncomfortably crowded with some of you feeling unsafe. This is unacceptable, and we will be focusing on ensuring that comfort levels and space to move are in line with previous Summer Gatherings at all our future events.

Ticket check - there was a one hour period when the WiFi signal at our entry point went out, and security was unable to scan tickets. Security opted to do a visual check of tickets to keep the line moving. While this may have temporarily increased the potential for fraudulent ticket holders to be waived through, we had to balance this against the risks of letting a massive crowd accumulate outside the venue, which poses safety risks in itself. No doubt holding the entire line up would have also been very frustrating for many of you, so we elected to keep things moving. Generally speaking, fraudulent tickets are rare and we do not believe the visual ticket check period resulted in any unticketed entry to the event. With all this in mind, we believe the decision to move to a visual ticket check for this hour period was the right one.

Sound - A few words on sound. Getting the sound coverage perfect in all corners of long narrow street blocks with intersections isn’t simple, especially when we have a hard limit on sound levels as part of the event permit. We are also conscious that these events are long daytime gatherings, we always want people to have space to get some respite from the music and talk. This said, for all the challenges of the venue and its location, we accept we didn’t get the sound coverage as good as it should have been for a venue of this size. And we’ll be looking at that and putting extra investment and checks in moving forward. 

Phone usage - many of you noted that there was an above average number of people recording on phones at this show. We decided to use phone stickers in San Francisco instead of phone pouches, in part because the narrow event space would have made it difficult to create a dedicated phone use zone, which we always include at our longer events. Curbing phone recordings becomes more and more difficult as events get bigger, and we will likely be relying more on the phone pouches at these events in the future. In addition, we'll try to increase our efforts to communicate the TNH concept to everyone in attendance to get as many people on the same page as possible.

Venues - Perhaps our biggest takeaway from this experience is in venue choice. The block party, while well-intentioned, wasn't the ideal venue choice for this event. We'll be taking our learnings from this event and using them to try to select venues that better align with the Summer Gatherings concept in the future.

Thank you all so much for all the understanding, and the support on all things TNH over the years - we look forward to many great events with you all in the future!

-Team TNH