Festival Republic, them what was the Mean Fiddler Music Group until this week, have revealed plans to branch out into the US live music market.
As previously reported, earlier this week Mean Fiddler announced it was selling both its brand name and most of its London venues to another UK based live music firm, the MAMA Group. Rebranded as Festival Republic, the old Mean Fiddler now plans to concentrate primarily on festival promotion.
As a company it already produces the Reading and Leeds festivals and the Latitude Festival, as well as having a stake in the Glastonbury Festival, but the company now plans to expand its roster of live music events, and have told Billboard that expansion into the US market is high up on their agenda.
Billboard quote Festival Republic MD Melvin Benn as saying: "The principle desire is to move into North America. I'd like to create a festival in North America. Probably not a boutique festival, but something more closely aligned with Reading and Leeds Festivals".
Although MAMA now own the Mean Fiddler brand, Benn's company maintained the rights to use the Mean Fiddler name alongside its festivals, although he says he is unlikely to do so, being keen to really push his new brand name. He continued: "If we wanted to, we could still operate Reading and Leeds, plus Glastonbury and Latitude under the Mean Fiddler banners. The reality is that we are not going to use it. Festival Republic is the new company that I'm running and I want it to move away from the legacy of what was the Mean Fiddler, and to build something that was about the team of people that have created the best festivals in the world".