Dreams Made Reality as Tucker Gumber Turns “Festivaling” Into a Career

In today’s day and age there is a contagious buzz around the incredible atmosphere and life-changing experience gained from attending a music festival. Imagine being lucky enough to attend festivals as your actual career instead of working a regular 9-5 job. Tucker Gumber, also known as “The Festival Guy”, has been to 84 festivals and counting in the last four years. His mission is to be the voice of the festival subculture and find solutions to festival problems, maintaining the goal of maximizing the ultimate festival experience for all music lovers. “The lineup basically sorts the world’s population, brings all of the people that you would want to be friends with, and puts you on a vacation with them for three days,” Gumber expresses. “It’s like, ‘Oh, these artists are going to be there? Well, these people are going to be there, and that’s excellent news.’” He added, “This is where new relationships are formed and people spend their quality time together. For me, it’s all I could ever want to do, and I’m pretty excited that I’ve found a way to do it.”

After attending Snowball Festival‘s inaugural year in 2011, Gumber began embarking on a personal musical journey of a lifetime by attending 10 different fests in 5 months around the country, and hasn’t stopped since. This year alone, he’s hit a stunning 14 fests in 15 weeks, including majors like South by Southwest and Coachella, as well as lesser-known events like Treefort Music Fest in Boise, Idaho, and Orange County’s hippie-fied Boogaloo Mountain Jam. Gumber is impossible to miss with his trademark Burner-esque holsters and fedora and his infectiously positive, almost superhuman, high-energy attitude.

The Festival Guy Sings At Electric Forest

Music festivals aren’t always cheap, and it took Tucker two years of maxing out credit cards, volunteering, meeting people and publishing reviews, all in the name of “festivaling”, to begin gaining media credentials, guest passes, and even the coveted all-access artist passes. He never intended on starting a festival of his own, but instead to make it his mission to improve and inspire the festival experience as a whole.

Gumber has become the go-to-guy for artists, fans, and everyone in between to shape ways of elevating the festival experience as much as possible. He’s successfully created a career for himself in improving festivals through his website, TheFestivalGuy.com, where he publishes reviews, tip sheets, and festival critiques, as well as his recently launched social media app, FestEvo, which keeps track of upcoming festivals, lets users RSVP and find rides, listen to and rank artists on lineups, discover new music, and even helps organize lineup schedules.

Gumber is also working on his very own TV travel show that will launch on Uphoric.TV in September, and has begun initiating his personal green philosophy called “leave no trace +1,” which entails being responsible for picking up your trash and the trash of one other festival attendee. He reasoned, “If half of the crowd participates in LeaveNoTrace+1, it doesn’t matter what the other half does. The venue would be spotless.”

This guy has blown up a project that many would dream of taking on and sent it to the big leagues. His passion and drive to improve the overall festival experience is inspiring as a whole and gives hope for the future of such a beloved culture. I look forward to the possible future army of professional festival-goers.

Connect With The Festival Guy:

Website: thefestivalguy.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FestivalGuy
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thefestivalguy