Whether it’s the 50,000 people who will pack Piedmont Park for Atlanta’s Shaky Knees Festival this weekend, or the 100,000 who pack into Chicago’s Lollapalooza every summer, someone has to be in charge of making sure everyone has a place to: 1, get water and; 2, go to the bathroom.
For many of the largest music festivals around the world, that someone is Emmett Beliveau, chief operating officer for C3 Presents — an international events company that produces 30 music festivals a year, along with events such as the NFL Draft and past presidential inaugurations.
That means leading a team to set up the equivalent of a small city from scratch dozens of times a year, Beliveau told a crowd of students gathered at a UGA Music Business Program Talk on Sept. 4.
“I feel like I’m in the festival business much more than in the music business because much of what C3 does is to bring this incredible infrastructure into a space and put people on those stages,” Beliveau said. “We come into spaces across the country and around the world — some are city parks, some are F1 tracks, some are horse racing tracks — and we’re basically building cities from scratch.”
While Beliveau loves the music and the experiences he brings to people at C3 festivals, he wasn’t looking for a music career when he started. He was always an organizational guy.
He spent the first 10 years of his career working on presidential campaigns, finally running logistics for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008.
He first met the team at C3 while organizing the campaign’s election night watch party in Chicago’s Grant Park. The campaign hired C3 because the company worked with the city to produce Lollapalooza in the park and could help them host the 70,000 revelers who packed the park.
After eight years working in the White House, Beliveau called his contacts at C3 to see whether they needed someone who shared his passion for logistics and organizing people.
“You never know when you’re securing your next job,” he told the students. “In this case, the job that I didn’t start until 2015, I earned in 2008. I could have been a jerk back in Grant Park in 2008, but instead it was this awesome, collaborative, civic, hopeful, kind, hard, but ultimately successful, endeavor that we did together. And that impression they had of me bore fruit in 2015.”
That’s his biggest piece of advice for students who want to work in the live music and festival space — try lots of different roles and become known as someone who gets things done and is easy to work with.
“My advice is just to say yes to everything,” he said. “Start now, pick up contract gigs, part-time gigs, hourly stuff, try different parts of the business … I like to see that people have put their toe in the water — that you’ve taken tickets at a festival, that you’ve worked security or you worked hospitality at a golf event. It helps you winnow down what you’re interested in, or more importantly, what you’re not interested in.”
Over the decade Beliveau has been at C3, the company has grown from organizing two major festivals a year and a handful of corporate events to organizing 30 festivals a year.
They’ve grown their team to 250 employees doing everything, including procurement to risk management.
“It’s forced us to grow our depth,” he said. “A lot of the growth of the company is in the guts that are required in the back office to support that type of scale … They’re doing the same thing they might be doing if they were working at a law firm or an HVAC company or a car company. But our product isn’t making cars; it’s putting these festivals together.”
The difference is that few people have life-changing memories about their air conditioner or take a whole week off work to hang out with their car. Music festivals are unique in how fans relate to them, and there’s a responsibility to maintain that relationship, he said.
“We are constantly trying new things, but what we keep coming back to is we’re really good at big music festivals,” Beliveau said. “It’s OK to just be good at that and build that scale out. The biggest challenge over the last 10 years is finding how can we scale without losing some of that magic.”
Beliveau was the inaugural speaker in the 2026-2027 MBUS Talks series hosted by the UGA Music Business Program.