Skrillex, Jamie XX, James Blake among Form Festival 2024 performers

In an industry filled with hundreds of music festivals around the world, a decade later, there's still nothing else like Form.

For one, there's the venue, the tiny experimental eco-city of Arcosanti, located in the middle of the Arizona desert about an hour north of Phoenix. Then there is the size; while major festivals attract tens to hundreds of thousands of fans, Form sells out just a few thousand tickets.

And yet, the festival has managed to punch above its weight and book bigger artists than such a small event would often gather. In previous years, Form Acts have included Solange, Anderson .Paak, Charli XCX, Beach House and Florence and the Machine.

After a hiatus of nearly five years, this is set to resume in 2024. Today, Forma is announces its 2024 lineup. Some of Form's heaviest players will include Skrillex – a mainstay who has 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 October 4-6 and sold out in one day in March.

The form began as a counterpoint to much of the more commercial festival-industry landscape. It's removed from “the capitalist venture that most people start festivals for,” says Zach Tetreault, who founded the festival with his band Hundred Waters in 2014. The band envisioned the festival as an album release show for the LPs The moon rang like a bell.

“I never set out to start this festival as a way to make a lot of money,” says Tetreault. “I was completely blown away by the curation possibilities and the intimacy and all the partnerships we could bring into play by working with major organizations and nonprofits and things like that.”

The Form became a much-loved event each year, dubbed in the press as festival-2015″ data-type=”link” data-id=”https://www.vice.com/en/article/6e4vg4/form-arcosanti-festival-2015″ target=”_blank”>”The festival of the Future” thanks to that unconventional location and more communal ethos. But after the 2019 repeat, Tetreault decided that Form needed a break, and in January 2020 — months before the pandemic ended up shutting down the rest of live music activity — he suspended the event indefinitely. “I wanted to reevaluate why we were doing this,” he says. “When we finished 2019, I felt that Form had reached its full potential and rather than continue to beat it, I thought we would let it live on as something really special before it lost its spark. ”

Since the pandemic, Tetreault has worked at larger events like Complexcon and most recently began booking Life Is Beautiful in Las Vegas. (Note: Rolling rock bought a majority stake in Life Is Beautiful in 2022.) Working on the bigger events made him rethink Form, and the 10-year anniversary felt like the right time to resurrect it.

“It reminded me of how special Form is, and I feel like now more than ever the world needs something like this to come back, as grand a statement as that is,” says Tetreault.

Having not performed since 2019 — and not naming a single artist on the bill — Form managed to sell out in one day after announcing its return earlier this year, a remarkable feat in 2024 as major festivals struggle to move all the tickets them as fans have become more selective as shows become more and more expensive. Paper tickets cost about $500, a similar price to Coachella's cheapest tickets this year. “I expected it to be solid, enough excitement to get this thing going. I thought it would be a lot of work, that we would sell tickets until the last minute, that we would sell half of them,” says Tetreault. “I think over the last four or five years, people out there are still talking about it and it's built a reputation. I wish I had three or four times as many tickets to sell because that would help make a lot more sense financially. But at the end of the day, I had to call it sold out and that was it.”

As Tetreault confirms, Form is not a money-making business. He is selective about taking on sponsors, a key profit driver for many live music events, as he wants to ensure the show doesn't feel corporate. Artists get below their usual fees, which makes it possible to book some of the events.

“My goal with Form is to be a sustainable, break-even festival,” says Tetreault, adding that he believes sponsorship could be a means to that end. Given how few tickets are sold each year, an increase in ticket price may also have to be part of that calculation. Tetreault believes there is great value in what the festival offers, but added that “we just weren't ready to make that leap this year because it had been gone for so long. And we just wanted to make sure we got back on the right foot.

“It's not profitable. I'm going to be super direct about it, but I'm not doing it for that reason, that's not an exaggeration. 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 is actually making any money on this show, period. The people who play this show have to want to play.”

As Tetreault said, Form has traditionally partnered with cause-driven organizations and nonprofits like Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign. This year, Form worked with UK sustainability consultancy Hope Solutions and its founder Luke Howell to analyze the festival's carbon emissions to identify areas for improvement. Hope Solutions also acts as Head of Sustainability at Glastonbury and advised Coldplay on sustainability initiatives for their most recent tour.

The festival has also collaborated Arizona for access to abortion to raise awareness of abortion rights legislation, as well as HeadCount to encourage voting in the upcoming election. HeadCount started a contest to win a pair of tickets plus airfare and a $500 stipend to the festival, with those interested being able to enter the contest by showing proof of voter registration.

With Form sold out, Tetreault is mum on whether this is a one-off or if he's considering a longer-term return for 2025 and beyond. “I don't know how to answer that right now, we'll have to wait and see how that goes,” he says. “I guess that's TBD.”