June Joy : Deciding to throw Priceless!
willowbl00 2025-06-27
When one of my dearest friends found out I was planning to move from the Boston Area to the Bay Area, he put me in touch with the planners behind Priceless to give me some extra social safety net and ways to plug in.
Priceless is an anticapitalist campout with about 1150 attendees on the Feather River in Northern California. It’s historically happened July 4th weekend, and has been running for.. 18 years? There was one year it got cancelled due to fires, and a Half Price during Covid, and some other anomalies. It has 3-4 stages with different sorts of music (here’s the sampler set that got me hooked), lots of art, and was (until this year) entirely volunteer run. Our food vendor (paid for in advance) is the only thing that involves money on site for the festival. It’s wonderful. And until this year, it had sold out every year, within a very short period of time.
When I got plugged in 2016, it was still run by a tight knit group of friends called False Profit. They had been so insular that who ran the event was now a weird mishmash of folks in FP and friends who cared about Priceless but weren’t in FP. I jumped straight into the deep end (is anyone surprised?), taking on one of three spots in the “Air Traffic Control” group that makes sure the overall distributed group of friends are coordinating with each other and that things like Run of Show get figured out. The next year I took on the same role again, but also helped transfer running the event away from FP (although they were still welcome!) and into the hands of the Priceless Planners. I then burned out pretty hard after 2 years of that and took a smaller role in 2018, and then bounced entirely for a couple years. Two years ago I came back on as setup and strike lead, and last year I took on door to see what it was like.
This year I’m back as ATC. The event has changed a lot — we have a lot of legacy knowledge documented and shared, and a lot of old hands in the mix, but the social cohesion of a party thrown by friends for friends has slowly dissolved into a group of people who enjoy throwing a party together but otherwise aren’t particularly attached. It’s an interesting exercise in distributed organizing and volunteer management when all the volunteers are friendly with each other. I may write more about that later.
This year, ticket sales were behind for our first round, but they were still close enough to sold out to be noise in the system. We didn’t fret too much. But when the second round went live, we experienced the same thing that festivals all over are experiencing — severely slumped sales. We ran the numbers, and we were on track to lose something like $110k. Through good financial shepherding over the years, we would be able to cover our costs, but we might not be able to throw parties in the future. More importantly, we would have empty dance floors.
We then had, I shit you not, six hours worth of meetings over 10 days to just talk about what the threshold was for how many more tickets we would need to sell in order to throw the event. A crack marketing team formed (we’ve never really marketed before, it’s always just been friends and word of mouth), constrained by not wanting to lose the great, high-trust vibe of the event. And then I led the charge on prepping everything so we could shut things down gracefully if we needed to, with staged updates to A/V vendors, attendees, etc.
And then we realized two things, in all that talking. 1/ the event used to be smaller than the number of bodies on site we were already booked for, and 2/ we’re anticapitalist. We don’t care about saving money, we care about having a hell of a party as the world burns around us. So on June 10th, 1 month before the event, we decided to YOLO and go all in on throwing the event.
While some folks have gotten a bit crispy because of the extra effort (and we had been doing SO WELL at preventing burn out this year), we are all SO STOKED to be seeing each other, floating in the river while listening to sick beats, and looking at amazing art from the community. And I love doing hard things that bring joy. So here we go!
(And hey, if you want to join us, there are still some tickets available 