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PLUS63 Festival is an annual music and arts festival held in Cebu City, produced by Insignia Presents. The festival, which is named after the Philippines’ country code +63, has been running since 2016.

The festival calls itself a dynamic event experience [1], bringing together both local and international music acts to create a lively, intercultural event.

PLUS63 hopes to become the Philippines’ premier music festival destination, where fans can catch their favorite international and local

History
PLUS63 Founder Peter Delantar first put up Vinyl Entertainment in 2015, which was mainly focused on promoting nightclub shows in Cebu. Vinyl Entertainment brought in international DJs like Helena, Danny Avila, Otto Knows, and Dirty South to local clubs in Cebu. Around that time, Delantar and his team also produced their own music festival for Sinulog Saturday.

Eventually, the idea for PLUS63 was conceptualized by Delantar, his wife Sarah Delantar, and their friend from high school, Lloyd Sun. PLUS63 was first envisioned to be an event that would draw both local and international tourists to Cebu City and a space where festival-goers could discover new artists and genres of music they might not usually listen to. After a successful run of nightclub shows in Cebu, the friends began to gather investors for the festival endeavor, all of which were also their friends from high school. PLUS63 was officially founded in 2016.

In 2020, PLUS63 was acquired by Insignia Presents, a full-service concert and events company based in the Philippines.

Location
PLUS63 takes place in Cebu City, and has taken place at Cebu International Convention Center and Cebu Business Park. In 2023, it will take place at the SM Seaside Complex.

Cebu City is the capital of Cebu, a province comprised of a main island and 167 surrounding islands and islets. Its location proves conducive to a festival atmosphere, given its many beaches and surrounding islands. The city also boasts a vibrant food scene and nightlife, and is fairly easy to navigate.

Cebu City’s location is strategic, given it has an international airport that services direct flights to major cities in Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The city also holds sentimental value to the founders, who were all born and raised in the city.

Challenges
In its earlier years, PLUS63 was mostly executed by a team of five people. A festival of this scale usually takes multiple teams, so the people behind PLUS63 had to take on many roles in the process.

According to founder Peter Delantar, the PLUS63 team also faced difficulties when it came to being taken seriously by talent agents and managers. Booking artists for the festival took months of pitching over email and international calls.

Another challenge the team faced was that much of the production outfit had to be flown in from Metro Manila. Also, given that the festival's tickets were priced higher than the Visayas and Mindanao markets were used to, the PLUS63 team had to work hard to get them to warm up to the ticket prices.

Moving out of Sinulog
PLUS63’s first festivals coincided with Cebu City’s popular Sinulog Festival, but the team soon realized that Sinulog-goers had a limited spending appetite and were less willing to spend for a paid event. Production rentals, hotels, flights, and staffing costs would also be at a premium, due to the busy nature of the Sinulog weekend.

In 2018, the PLUS63 team produced two external events (PLUS63 SUMMER: Cash Cash at Movenpick and PLUS63 HALLOWEEN: Wellman at Mandani Bay) to test the market and see if a large international event outside of the popular Sinulog festival would be saleable in Cebu.

Critical Reception
During its first year, PLUS63 coincided with the widely attended Sinulog weekend. It was well received, with Sunstar declaring that the festival successfully “proved itself to be no small contender in Cebu’s festival scene.”[2]

In 2020, PLUS63 stirred up the Philippine festival scene when they brought in popular pop-rock band LANY. “LANY” became a trending topic on Twitter on the night of the group’s performance in Cebu.[3]

The Philippine STAR called PLUS63 “everything that a Filipino festival should be: great music and dancing, inspiring art, and delicious good food.”[4]