User:Annabeach/Bicycle Music Festival

The Bicycle Music Festival is the largest 100% bicycle-powered music festival in the world. The free, day-long event takes place annually in San Francisco, California on the Saturday closest to the summer solstice. The mission of the Bicycle Music Festival is to promote sustainable culture and transport in general, and bicycle culture in particular, by physically engaging and immersing communities in an environmentally responsible event celebrating local music and bicycle advocacy. The festival cultivates a local network of sustainable musicians through the staging of free, community participatory, bicycle-based music events.

For more info, visit www.bicyclemusicfestival.com

History
The Bicycle Music Festival in San Francisco was founded in 2007 by Bay Area bike activists and musicians Gabe Dominguez and Paul Freedman. The Festival has since become a fiscally-sponsored Park Partner project of the 501(c)3 non-profit San Francisco Parks Trust www.sfpt.org. In 2010, San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi awarded a Certificate of Honor to the San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival on behalf of the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco.

Festival Features
The festival is run by a team of over 20 volunteers and is supported financially both by donations from the public, grants and partnerships with local and national businesses such as Xtracycle and bicycle-advocacy organizations such as the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. Like Critical Mass (another bike event which began in SF), the concept of the Bicycle Music Festival has begun to be emulated around the world.

The festival is focused on promoting environmental sustainability through pedal-power bicycle advocacy, as well as encouraging community participation and responsibility. Audience members, volunteers and musicians work together to generate zero trash in the parks and streets that the festival passes through.

With its completely bike-haulable stage, the event is packed up and deployed numerous times over the course of the day: staged sequentially at different public parks and also on a moving “Live On Bike” stage pulled by bicyclists down city streets.

The only festival in the world literally hauling its own weight, the BMF possesses 4 distinctive qualities:

Human-powered P/A system
The Bicycle Music Festival features a 2000 watt pedal-powered PA system. The Pedal-Powered Stage generates power via a multi-person "Biker Bar," a pedal-powered generator that uses normal bikes mounted and hooked into the amplification system to power the festival's sound. The biker bar is designed to double as a cargo trailer and LiveOnBike stage as well while the festival is in transit.

Full-scale mobile festival
The festival features Critical Mass-style bicycle party caravans between festival stops with zero use of cars or trucks. The audience, bands, and crew completely pack up all stage and musical equipment onto bicycles, and travel as a large group to each next festival stop.

Sequential venue schedule
The festival features as many as 15 bands, split between multiple venues throughout the event. All festival participants (audience members, musicians, and festival crew) travel from one venue to the next over the course of the day. Audience members offer tips and donations for the bands they hear and love.

Live-On-Bike mobile stage
Artists and bands perform while mounted on the backs of cargo bikes and bike trailers outfitted with microphones and amplifiers. The sound is wirelessly routed to “soulcycle” bikes interspersed throughout the crowd, allowing the sound to travel throughout the crowd, which sometimes stretches for more than a mile while in transit.

BMF Music
Since 2007 The Bicycle Music Festival has featured many of San Francisco's most promising musicians and bands. All musicians are required to travel to and in the festival by bicycle and ideally carry all of their equipment by bicycle, assisted by the festival's "roadie" volunteers. Notable groups that have been featured in the festival: Sean Hayes, Thao with the Get Down Stay Down,  Manicato,  Shake Your Peace,  Fossil Fool, and others.

BMFs Around the World
Since the inception of the San Francisco Bicycle Music Festival in 2007, similar festivals have begun to happen in cities around the world. All BMFs worldwide operate autonomously and independently from the SF Bicycle Music Festival. A partial list of cities that have hosted festivals in the past:
 * Seattle, WA
 * Brooklyn, NY
 * Chico, CA
 * Los Angeles, CA
 * Toronto, ON Canada
 * NorthWest US Tour: Ashland, Eugene, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Yosemite
 * European Tour: UK, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, France, Spain, Portugal
 * Mexico

Touring
A group of Bicycle Music enthusiasts have undertaken several national and international tours over the past several years. Called the Pleasant Revolution, this group has successfully taken Bicycle Music Festival on the road on tours throughout the NorthWest United States (festivals took place in Ashland, Eugene, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Yosemite), down the West coast through Mexico, and most recently, across Europe (festivals took place in UK, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, France, Spain, and Portugal).

For more info, visit www.PleasantRevolution.net