ROSTR is linking with International Festival Forum for IFF LA, the conference’s first North American edition, taking place September 14 through 16, 2026 at The London in West Hollywood. The deal makes ROSTR the official technology and media partner for the event, with the partnership centered on festival data, attendee tools, and editorial coverage through New Industry Focus.
The short version is that IFF LA is built to help agents, festival programmers, promoters, and talent buyers get real booking business done in a compressed window.
ROSTR is now adding a data and software layer around that process, which makes a lot of sense for a room full of people trying to decide what artists make sense for the next festival cycle.
The main output will be an annual North American festival report, co-authored by ROSTR and IFF and published in the official IFF LA conference guide. ROSTR’s Mark Williamson will also present highlights from the report during the event, walking attendees through the data, trends, and what the numbers could mean for festival buyers and agents heading into the next round of bookings.
A Festival Report Built For Buyers And Agents
The report is probably the most useful part of the partnership because festival booking decisions are getting harder to make from instinct alone. Agents, managers, and buyers already know what is happening in their own corner of the business, but a wider look at North American booking patterns can help put those conversations in a clearer context.
ROSTR brings booking data and market intelligence, while IFF brings the direct festival and agency view from years of running one of the most focused booking events in live music. The goal is to make the report a recurring benchmark for people working across the North American festival market.
That is a smart fit for IFF LA because the event is not built around general conference chatter. It is built around meetings, agency pop-up offices, networking, programming, and artist showcases, with the goal of helping attendees get months of booking work done in 2.5 days.
IFF LA also comes in with strong agency support. Founding agency partners include CAA, Ground Control Touring, High Road Touring, IAG, outer/most, Paladin Artists, ROAM, TBA, The Team, UTA, and WME, which gives the first LA edition immediate weight across the booking side of the business.
ROSTR Adds Tools Around The Deal-Making Process
The software side of the partnership is where this gets more practical. ROSTR is building custom features for IFF LA attendees, including dedicated lists and list-sharing tools that let agents, programmers, managers, and promoters organize and exchange booking targets inside the platform.
That might sound like a small workflow detail, but anyone who has worked around booking, promo, or artist campaigns knows how quickly conversations can get scattered across emails, spreadsheets, notes, and half-remembered meetings. If the event is built around making the right conversations happen quickly, then better prep and follow-up tools can help turn those meetings into actual bookings.
NIF, ROSTR’s editorial newsletter, will also cover the event before and during IFF LA, with content focused on the agents, managers, talent, and business stories around the North American festival circuit. That gives the partnership a media side as well as a data and software side.
For IFF LA, ROSTR brings a clearer information layer to an event that already has the industry relationships. For ROSTR, the partnership puts its data and tools directly in front of the people who make festival booking decisions. That is a practical match, and it should give the first North American edition of IFF a stronger sense of structure before the doors open in September.
Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
