One Grand Acquisition
After 54 years at the head of Festival Productions, George Wein finally sold his business to an ambitious admirer.
Chris shields was reClining on a blanket with his girlfriend at the Newport Folk Festival when it hit him. It was the early 1990s, and Shields, a local native, had just entered college. The late-summer sun, he remembers, shone down brightly on the festival site, Fort Adams State Park, set on a 4,000-foot-long peninsula jutting out from Rhode Island’s coastline. The masts of hundreds of sailboats in the surrounding Narragansett Bay poked at the sky overhead as 10,000 lawn-chaired folk fans nodded to the music. The wailing guitarist onstage was either Bob Weir or Bruce Cockburn — Shields can’t quite remember which. But he remembers well the epiphany that accompanied the heady mix of sun and song at that moment.
Nodding along with the rest of the throng, Shields sud-denly sat up and turned to his girlfriend. “My god,” he said. “This is someone’s job to put this on. How extraordinary!”
In the 20 years that have passed since that summer, Shields has gained a healthy respect for that someone. “I had no idea who George Wein was at the time,” Shields says of the man who founded the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and many other music festivals in the years since. “But, man, his cocktail of great music and location was powerful.” Since graduating from Columbia University and then studying jazz theory at Berklee School of Music, Shields has forged his own career in the music business, from running the soundboards at the House of Blues Boston to directing the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival to launching his own music-festival business, Shoreline Media, in 2004. 
With Shoreline, Shields succeeded in bringing a variety of far-flung music festivals under the direction of a single entity — in essence, expanding on the model Wein had been building during the past five decades with his company, Festival Productions. That plan culminated in January 2007, when Shields, heading a consortium of partners and investors, purchased Festival Productions from Wein for an undisclosed amount of money. 
Wein’s legacy as a sort of music-festival guru began with his founding of the Newport Jazz Festival, which featured the likes of Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Dizzy Gillespie. For subsequent festivals, Wein continued to book the greatest of jazz icons: Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, and many others. As the CEO of Festival Productions, Wein became one of the first producers to align corporate sponsorships with music festivals — and the panache and popularity of his festivals brought more sponsors to his doorstep. He signed deals with Kool cigarettes, JVC, Playboy, Dunkin’ Donuts, Verizon, and others. ​​​​​​​
“The concept of soliciting sponsors was something that I never did a lot of,” he says. “And yet I was this pioneer in sponsoring because the sponsors came to me. That was the luck of the draw.”
After founding the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals (now the JVC Jazz Festival at Newport, and the Dunkin’ Donuts Folk Festival, re-spectively), Wein established music festivals around the world, all the while expanding his reputation as a major player in the world of jazz.
Wein’s wife of 46 years, Joyce Alexander Wein, died three years ago. Now 82, her husband increasingly considers his own mortality. “Up to a certain point, you’re always thinking about planning for the future,” he says. “And then you start thinking about planning for a future after you’ve gone. That’s the ‘second future,’ so to speak.”
In recent years, Wein has fielded several offers to buy Festival Productions. In 1998, for example, BET, the Washington D.C.-based cable network, made a highly publicized — and  nearly successful — bid for the company. Ultimately that deal fizzled, as did all the others. Then along came Chris Shields.
in the latter halF oF 2006, Shields approached Wein with a proposal to launch The Festival Network, a company that would link Wein’s existing festivals with others across the globe, govern them under one umbrella organization, and launch new festivals in untapped locales. Under Shields’ plan, Festival Productions would become a division of The Festival Network, a division that Wein and some of his top-level employees would head, continuing to do what they’d always loved to do: organize music festivals.
Initially, Wein refused. But, says Shields, “I’m a stubborn bastard. I kept knocking, and George finally took us seriously.”
For a short while during the late ’90s, Shields had worked for Wein at Festival Productions, which didn’t hurt the appeal of his proposal. Nor did it hurt that, while growing up, Shields had regularly attended the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals. And there was one other serendipitous con-nection between Shields and Wein: the maternal side of Shields’ family brewed Narragansett Beer, which just happened to be one of Wein’s early sponsors.
At the very least, Shields was an experi-enced insider who respected Wein’s legacy. But more importantly, Shields was willing to buy Festival Productions for a price that wasn’t simply dictated by a cold, corporate formula. “My business has never been a huge moneymaker by Wall Street stan-dards,” Wein explains. “What impressed me with Chris and his associates is that they appreciated the reputation we had more than the actual bottom-line figures that we had. And they paid me on that basis, which made it easier for me to make the decision.”
In January 2007, the deal was inked, The Festival Network, LLC, became bona fide, and Wein finally allowed the company he’d nurtured for half a century to be run by someone else.​​​​​​​
“Somebody comes along, gives me a nice story like that, puts some money on it, offers to take care of me for the next few years and still give me the right to do what I want to do? Sounds good.”​​​​​​​
In 2008 alone, The Festival Network will supplement Wein’s existing Festival Productions roster with 40 new festivals, including Festival De Musique in Monaco, the Jackson Hole Jazz & Heritage Festival 
(Jackson Hole, Wyoming), the Whistler Arts & Music Festival (Whistler, BC, Canada), and the Festival of the Olympians at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. As for festivals already in existence, Shields says they’ll be maintained and subtly improved upon with features like better sound and lighting, and eco-friendly practices.
Those enhancements, however, will lead to higher production costs. To cover those costs, The Festival Network, like most festival producers, must increasingly rely on corporate sponsorships. Because of this, says Shields, “individual producers are more willing to allow corporate sponsors to physically plaster their corporate names and logos all over the festival.” Shields intends to curb that trend at Festival Network events because, he says, “sophisticated audiences have an absolute backlash against it.”
Specifically, he points to the Newport Folk Festival, which in recent years has become branded top to bottom in pink and brown coffee and donuts signage. “There was big money that came in with Dunkin’ Donuts, and the Newport Folk Festival became the ‘Dunkin’ Donuts Newport Folk Festival,’” Shields says. “But we’re changing that back to the Newport Folk Festival, where it should be and will remain.”
While Shields isn’t necessarily looking to scale back on sponsors, he is committed to pursuing underwriters with products and services that could improve the festival-going experience — companies, for instance, that might provide jumbo television screens, quality lighting, or recording equipment; or that could broadcast recordings and live performances on the Web. And then there’s the matter of beverages. Last year, Shields says, “We brought beer and wine to Newport. It was nice to actually have a glass of wine or a beer while you were watching the Allman Brothers.”
Like Wein, Shields is a music fan first, an entrepreneur second — and he’s us-ing his instincts as a fan to guide The Festival Network. “We don’t want to do the things that we wouldn’t want to see or experience,” he says. “If I’ve done my job correctly, I’m not backstage hobnob-bing; I’m out in the audience with my daughter watching and experiencing.”
As for Wein, he’s nearly as busy now as he was when he owned and operated his own company. He still heads into his Manhattan office at least five days a week, and still attacks his work with “the same sense of urgency” he’s always felt. His main Festival Network duties lie in festival programming, particularly for the JVC Jazz Festivals in Newport and New York City, but his sage-like wisdom is equally valuable.
“They bought me for a reason,” Wein says with a chuckle. “They didn’t buy me to put me on a shelf.”