In an industry filled with hundreds of music festivals around the globe, a decade in, there’s still nothing else quite like Form.
For one there’s the venue, the tiny experimental eco-city of Arcosanti, smack dab in the middle of the Arizona desert about an hour north of Phoenix. Then there’s the size; whereas major festivals are bringing in tens to hundreds of thousands of fans, Form sells out at just a couple thousand tickets.
And yet, the festival has managed to punch above its weight and book larger artists than such a small event would often garner. In previous years, Form acts have included Solange, Anderson .Paak, Charli XCX, Beach House, and Florence and the Machine.
After a nearly five-year hiatus, that’s set to continue in 2024. Today, Form is announcing its 2024 lineup. Some of Form’s heaviest hitters will include Skrillex — a mainstay whose played Form several times already — along with Jamie XX, James Blake, and Angel Olsen. Other notable artists on the bill include Thundercat, Jessica Pratt, Kim Gordon, Mustafa, and Floating Points. The festival runs from Oct. 4 through Oct. 6, and sold out in one day back in March.
Form began as an antithesis to much of the more commercial festival-industry landscape. It’s removed from “the capitalistic venture that most people start festivals for,” says Zach Tetreault, who founded the festival with his band Hundred Waters in 2014. The band came up with the idea for the festival to serve as an album release show for their LP The Moon Rang Like a Bell.
“I never set out to start that festival as a way to make a bunch of money,” Tetreault says. “I was just completely enthralled by the curatorial possibilities, the intimacy, and all of the partnerships that we could bring into play working with important organizations and nonprofits and things like that.”
Form became a much-beloved event each year, labeled in the press as “the festival of the future,” thanks to its unconventional locale and more community-centered ethos. But after its 2019 iteration, Tetreault decided Form needed a break, and in January 2020 — months before the pandemic would end up halting the rest of the live-music business — he indefinitely shelved the event. “I wanted to reevaluate why we were doing this,” he says. “By the time we finished 2019, I kind of felt like Form had reached its fullest potential, and rather than continue to beat it down, I thought we’d let it live in memory as being something really special before it lost its spark.”
Since the pandemic, Tetreault had worked on larger events like Complexcon, and more recently began booking Life Is Beautiful in Las Vegas. (Note: Rolling Stone purchased a majority stake in Life Is Beautiful in 2022.) Working on the bigger events had him thinking back on Form, and its 10-year anniversary felt like the right time to resurrect it.
Zach Tetreault
Anthony Pham*
“It reminded me of how fucking special Form is, and it feels like now more than ever the world needs something like this to come back, as grandiose a statement as that is,” Tetreault says.
Without putting on a show since 2019 — and without naming a single artist on the bill — Form managed to sell out in one day after announcing its return earlier this year, a notable feat in 2024 as larger festivals have struggled to move all of their tickets as fans have grown pickier as shows have grown increasingly expensive. Form tickets went for about $500, a similar asking price for Coachella’s cheapest tickets this year. “I was expecting it to be solid, enough excitement to get this thing going. I thought it’d be a lot of work, that we’d be selling tickets until the very last minute, that we’d sell half,” Tetreault says. “I think over the course of the last four or five years, people out there have still been talking about it and it’s built up a reputation. I wish I had three or four times more tickets to sell because that would help this make a lot more sense financially. But at the end of the day, I had to call it sold out and that’s that.”
JULIAN BAJSEL*
As Tetreault confirms, Form isn’t a money-making venture. It’s picky about taking on sponsors, a key money-maker for many live-music events, as he wants to ensure the show doesn’t feel corporate. Artists take below their usual asking fees, which makes booking some of the acts possible.
“My goal with Form is for it to be a sustainable, break-even festival,” Tetreault says, adding that he thinks sponsorship could be a means to getting toward that goal. Given how few tickets are sold each year, a raise in ticket price may have to be part of that calculus as well. Tetreault feels there’s a lot of value for what the festival offers but added that “we just weren’t ready to make that jump this year because it had been gone for so long. And we just wanted to make sure that we were coming back with the right foot forward.
“It’s not profitable. I’ll be extremely direct about that, but I don’t do it for that reason, that’s not hyperbole. I get positive responses from artists and their teams because they understand what it is. We don’t have huge funding partners and it’s small. No one’s really making money on this show, period. The people who play this show have to want to play.”
As Tetreault had said, Form has traditionally partnered with goal-driven organizations and nonprofits like Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign. This year, Form partnered with British sustainability consulting firm Hope Solutions and its founder Luke Howell to analyze the festival’s carbon emissions to identify areas for improvement. Hope Solutions also serves as sustainability lead at Glastonbury and consulted with Coldplay on sustainability initiatives for their most recent tour.
The festival has also teamed up with Arizona for Abortion Access to raise awareness for abortion-rights legislation, as well as with HeadCount to encourage voting in the upcoming election. HeadCount launched a contest to win a pair of tickets plus airfare and a $500 spending stipend at the festival, with those interested able to enter the contest by providing their proof of voter registration.
With Form sold out, Tetreault is mum on whether this is a one-off or if he’s thinking toward a longer-term comeback for 2025 and beyond. “I don’t know how to answer that right now, we’ll have to wait and see how this one goes,” he says. “I guess that’s TBD.”
