How to Throw a Concert for 60,000 People in Central Park

This weekend, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Demi Lovato, Major Laser, and Metallica are headlining the 2016 Global Citizen Festival in New York City's Central Park. If you can't make it in person, find out how to you can watch and follow along with all the action here.

Hosting a 60,000 person festival each year is no joke.

This year, Global Citizen will be hosting its fifth festival in Central Park. 2016 is also the first year we’ve hosted festivals in Canada and India, which we announced last week. As you can imagine, our office in Soho is a madhouse right now, with GC staff flying every which way to pull together this Saturday’s festival together.

We spoke to a couple of our concert-organizing maestros, event manager Phoebe Baldwin, and talent relations associate Daniel D’Amico to get the inside scoop.

Getting ready for the Global Citizen festival involves communicating with talent, ensuring proper safety measures are put into place, and always being ready with a backup plan — or three.

With roughly 100 people working around the world, and dozens of volunteers, preparations for the festival last all year, according to Baldwin. Things heat up about six months in advance of the event itself.

First, you need people to perform at the festival. The Global Citizen talent team works endlessly to bring the best to the Global Citizen stage.

D’Amico, who is responsible for liaising with talent, highlighted the need to balance bringing in top-quality talent and ensuring that Global Citizen’s message is not lost in the fray.

“We want it to be a lineup that is both a good show and accurately reflects the message of Global Citizen,” he says. “We look at who has a passion for the issues and who would make sense, not just in terms of a giant concert in Central Park but ending extreme poverty and solving the world’s biggest problems.”

We also recruit Hollywood’s best talent and the world’s top dignitaries to discuss the issues we’re trying to change.

As with any major event involving large crowds of humans, all this planning and preparation is liable to go to the wind at the very last moment.

“With the festival, you’re going to have a plan and then the plan is just going to be thrown into the wood chipper five minutes into the show,” D’Amico says. The smallest incidents, such as in 2014 when the Queen of Sweden accidentally came in through the media entrance, can cause major mayhem.

This year, the team has already had to handle a major lineup change with the late addition of Demi Lovato.

Second, we need fans to come see all the amazing talent. Global Citizen’s festival is unique in that the majority of tickets aren’t for sale. People have to earn them. And they do this by taking action around our core issues — women and girls, education, health, water and sanitation, and food and hunger.

While 60,000 people may seem like an enormous event, that number pales in comparison to the number of actions taken by Global Citizens that relate directly to the festival. This year, 113,000 Global Citizens took 1.18 million actions. Once someone takes enough actions, they get put into a drawing for tickets.

“Each year we have thousands of people that enter and take lots of actions that don’t get tickets,” as Baldwin points out.

With great talent comes great responsibility, and the Global Citizen team has worked with the NYPD to ensure that the festival prioritizes safety. As Baldwin says, “safety is our number one concern.”

The safety apparatus includes metal detectors at the entrance, a full sweep of the lawn the morning of the concert, and fire safety lanes between the pens in case of emergency.

Of course, there’s always a certain amount of spillover to be expected with a concert on the Great Lawn. Global Citizens can always catch some tunes from outside the park. For those unable to attend in person, you’re in luck. The show streams on MSNBC and YouTube, and will be on Global Citizen’s homepage on the day of the big event. Get more details here.

“It’s always really exciting and satisfying to see it all come together,” says Baldwin, who assures us it’s “worth all the stress and sleepless nights.”