Max SteventonManchester-based independent promoter JBM Music has expanded its festival portfolio in recent years, developing new brands while continuing to grow established events including Reggae Land. JBM Music director Jorge Meehan and co-founder Brian Murphy tell Access how it has approached that growth, the factors behind its expansion and its plans for maintaining and growing even further.
How has JBM Music’s festival portfolio evolved over the past few years?
It has changed massively. We’ve gone from operating individual shows and building a small number of event brands to now having a genuine portfolio of festivals across different genres, audiences and locations.
Reggae Land has obviously been a huge part of that journey and demonstrated to us what can happen when you build a strong festival brand over a number of years rather than treating every event as a one-off.
More recently, we’ve taken that experience into new concepts including Electric Paradise, Electric Heart, Diaspora Calling! Festival and Barton Live, while continuing to develop our existing brands. I think JBM today is a very different business to where we were even three or four years ago. We’re no longer just thinking about the next show; we’re thinking about where each brand can be in three or five years.
What have been the biggest factors behind JBM’s growth during that period?
I’d say ambition, reinvestment and being prepared to take risks.
We’ve consistently reinvested back into the events – bigger artists, better production, stronger marketing and improved customer experience. As an independent promoter, that can sometimes be uncomfortable because ultimately it’s our own capital at risk, but it has allowed us to accelerate the growth of certain brands.
Another major factor has been building the team around us. You reach a point where growth can’t just come from working harder; you need really good people taking ownership of different parts of the business.
And ultimately, we’ve learned a lot. Every event we’ve promoted, whether it has massively exceeded expectations or been more challenging, has made us better operators.
How has Reggae Land developed since its launch, and what have been the key milestones in that growth?
Reggae Land has probably been the clearest example of our evolution as a company.
It started as an idea to create a proper home for reggae music and culture in the UK, and every year we’ve tried to move it forward. Growing the audience, expanding the line-up, increasing production and ultimately taking the festival to a venue like the Milton Keynes Bowl have all been major milestones.
But I think the biggest milestone has been seeing Reggae Land become a recognised brand in its own right. People aren’t necessarily buying a ticket because of one particular artist anymore; they’re buying into Reggae Land and trusting us to deliver the experience.
The ticket sales really demonstrate that. For the 2026 festival, we sold 40,000 tickets in the week immediately following the previous event, before announcing a single artist. This year, we’ve taken that another step further, with 53,000 tickets already sold for 2027 in the first week, again without a line-up announcement.
That’s an incredible level of trust from the audience. We now expect 2027 to sell out when we announce the line-up, which puts us in a very different position from where we were when we launched the festival.
For any independent festival promoter, getting to the point where people are buying into the brand and the experience before they even know who is performing is incredibly valuable. That’s what we’ve always wanted Reggae Land to become.
How has the growth of Reggae Land influenced JBM’s decision to expand into new festival concepts?
It gave us confidence in our ability to build brands. Reggae Land showed us that if you identify an audience, understand what they want and consistently invest in the experience, you can build something with genuine long-term value.
That changed our thinking as a company. Instead of asking, “What event can we promote?” we increasingly ask, “What brand can we build?”
That’s a very different mindset and it’s influenced a lot of what we’re doing now.
JBM has launched several new events this year, including Diaspora Calling! and Electric Paradise. What has driven the recent focus on launching new festival brands?
Part of it is opportunity, but it’s also a deliberate strategy to diversify JBM.
We don’t want the future of the company to depend on one event, one genre or one audience. We want to build a portfolio of strong, recognisable festival brands.
At the same time, launching festivals is expensive and difficult, particularly in the current market, so we’re not interested in launching things simply to make the portfolio look bigger.
Each concept needs to have a reason to exist. If we can’t explain clearly who the audience is and why that event should exist, then we probably shouldn’t be doing it.
What goes into deciding whether a new festival concept has the potential to become part of the JBM portfolio?
It starts with the audience and the gap in the market. We’ll look at artist data, streaming, ticketing history, competing events, geography, potential venues and ultimately whether we believe there is an underserved audience.
But data only gets you so far. There has to be a creative idea behind it as well.
The best festivals have an identity people can understand almost immediately. We’re looking for concepts where we believe we can create that identity and then develop it over multiple years.
Increasingly, we’re also asking ourselves whether an idea can scale. A successful first year is great, but we’re much more interested in whether something could become significantly bigger three or five years down the line.
How has the expansion of the festival portfolio changed the way JBM operates as a business?
We’ve had to become much more structured. When you’re promoting a smaller number of events, a relatively small team can be involved in almost every decision. Once the portfolio grows, that becomes impossible.
We’ve invested heavily in people, systems and processes and created much clearer ownership across marketing, operations, production, finance and commercial areas.
At the same time, one thing we’re determined not to lose is the entrepreneurial nature of JBM. The challenge is building the infrastructure of a larger company without creating the bureaucracy of one.
What have been the biggest challenges of managing a growing portfolio of festivals?
Resource allocation is probably one of the biggest. Every festival wants attention, marketing budget, talent, production investment and people’s time. When you’ve got multiple events operating simultaneously, you have to become much more disciplined about where those resources go.
There is also significantly more financial exposure. Festival costs have increased enormously, particularly across artists, infrastructure, production and staffing. When you’re operating multiple large-scale events, managing cash flow and risk becomes just as important as selling tickets.
The other challenge is making sure growth doesn’t dilute quality. I’d rather operate fewer brilliant festivals than have a huge portfolio of average ones.
How important are new festival launches to JBM’s long-term growth strategy?
They’re important, but they’re only one part of it.
There’s enormous growth potential within the brands we already own, and sometimes the best investment is making an existing festival bigger and better rather than launching another one.
New launches allow us to enter different markets and reach new audiences, but we’re becoming increasingly selective.
Long term, I think JBM’s value will come from owning a smaller number of genuinely strong festival brands rather than simply promoting as many events as possible.
Has the growth of the portfolio changed the types of venues or locations JBM is able to work with?
As we’ve grown, we’ve developed the operational experience and relationships required to deliver events at much greater scale.
Working at venues such as the Milton Keynes Bowl changes the level you’re operating at. The infrastructure, licensing, transport, security and stakeholder requirements become significantly more complex.
But successfully delivering events at that level also creates opportunities. It gives venues, local authorities and other partners confidence that JBM has the infrastructure and experience to operate major shows.
Location is also becoming a bigger part of our strategy. We’re increasingly looking at the relationship between the brand, audience and location rather than simply finding a field and putting a festival into it.
What opportunities do you see for JBM to grow beyond its current festival portfolio?
There are quite a few areas we’re interested in. International opportunities are definitely something we’ll explore. If you build a strong enough festival brand in the UK, there’s no reason elements of that brand can’t eventually travel into other territories.
We’re also looking at how our audiences interact with our brands outside the festival weekend. There are opportunities around content, partnerships, experiences and potentially taking certain brands into different formats throughout the year.
Ultimately, festivals give you access to incredibly passionate communities. The opportunity is finding authentic ways to engage those communities beyond two days each summer without over-commercialising the brands.
What are the priorities for JBM’s festival business over the next few years?
The first priority is strengthening what we’ve already built.
With Reggae Land, growth for us isn’t necessarily about increasing capacity anymore. The ambition now is to grow its profile and awareness internationally and establish Reggae Land as the biggest and most recognised reggae festival in the world. We believe the brand has the potential to reach far beyond the UK, and that’s a major focus for us over the next few years.
Alongside that, we want to establish and grow our newer festival brands while continuing to improve the customer experience across the entire portfolio. We also have one more new festival concept launching in 2027. I can’t give too much away at this stage, but it’s an area where we believe there’s a genuine gap in the market and we’re very excited about its potential.
Beyond that, it’s about sustainable growth. That means becoming more sophisticated operationally, continuing to invest in our team and infrastructure, and being disciplined about where we put our time and capital.
We’re still extremely ambitious. We want JBM to become one of the leading independent festival businesses in the UK, but we don’t believe that means owning dozens of festivals. It’s about building a focused portfolio of distinctive, culturally relevant events that have genuine longevity.
If we can create festivals that audiences love, trust and want to return to year after year and build brands that have recognition beyond the events themselves the growth will follow.