Over the past couple of years, there’s been plenty of proof that not anyone can successfully run a festival. The recent crop of failed festivals, including Bam!, Blueprint, Ultra Beats 3000, Mission to Launch, Lost Weekend and most recently, Heatwave have proven that starting up a new festival is something of a risky business. Between the many festivals that never were and poor ticket sales in the well-established national tours, it seems as though the festival business might not actually be a fail-safe cash-grab. With that in mind, we’ve trawled through the less-than-stellar festivals of recent years to dissect just why they fell flat, and come up with inthemix’s guide to festival promotion for dummies.

1. Book acts that have been relevant in the past five years

First and foremost, to stage a successful festival it’s vital to ensure that your line-up features acts whom the general population actually gives two shits about. Seem obvious? Perhaps, but it’s a memo many have missed in the past. Heatwave, for example, booked early noughties vestige Crazy Town, whose only real hit, Butterfly, dropped all the way back in 2001. Even commercial FM radio stations don’t play it anymore.

Heatwave also offered audiences about three members of D12, who also enjoyed a brief success with their track Purple Pills back in 2001. But without main-man Eminem or any subsequent hits over the past decade, D12 proved unable to pull the crowds – we’ll get to the fact that they didn’t actually turn up for most of the tour later. Last year’s New Beginnings festival, cancelled not long after it was announced, had 90s Euro-trash act The Vengaboys as their headliner. In short: when your line-up resembles the track-listing of an early-2000s So Fresh CD, it’s time to re-think the strategy.

We were also left scratching our heads at the apparent ambition of Ultra Session Beats 300 putting its bets last year on a respected-but-random line-up that included Kosheen, Tall Paul and Seb Fontaine.

2. Hip-hop can be hard work

It’s also worth remembering that attempting to pull off a drama-free tour with an American hip-hop star on the bill is no mean feat. To generalise wildly, between the inflated egos, penchant for carrying drugs and weapons and rocky relationships with the law, getting a hip-hop heavyweight to our shores has never really been easy. For instance, 2011 would-be festival Ultra Beats 3000 got the hip-hop kiss of death when the festival was cancelled just a day after adding the likes of Lil Wayne and Kid Cudi to the bill.

Then there’s Newcastle’s Fat as Butter festival, which saw headliner Flo Rida chuck a “hissy fit” and bail on his performance before being arrested for possession of cannibas and an “Uzi taser”, whatever the hell that is. Perhaps, then, having a hip-hop bill is the reason Heatwave stacked it so badly: D12 missed their flight (and thus most of their performances) due to visa issues, Chamillionaire bailed altogether, Kid Cudi trashed the stage and Obie Trice dry-humped potentially-underage girls from behind on stage. Though as brow-furrowing as that all is, it would be selling Heatwave’s failures short to suggest just one factor lead to its downfall.