Scoremore’s Jmblya taps into youth movement
A triple wick candle flickers on a crescent-shaped desk in the entryway to the office of Scoremore Shows. Behind the desk hangs a large picture of ocean waves. Presumably, for most of the year, it helps create a peaceful vibe, but it’s less than two weeks before Jmblya, the company’s flagship festival, and cardboard boxes loaded with merchandise and swag from sponsors crowd in from every wall.
Scoremore co-founder Sascha Stone Guttfreund walks through the office, his phone buzzing every few minutes. Guys connected to laptops, casually clad in shorts and T-shirts, pop up with questions. Here, in this unassuming office condo in Far South Austin, the 28-year-old University of Texas grad is quietly expanding the company he and Claire Bogle started when he was a hot-shot sophomore into one of the most important and influential boutique event production and music promotion businesses in the country.
With a stacked lineup featuring Chance the Rapper, Gucci Mane and Migos alongside D J Steve Aoki, Lil Uzi Vert, Snow tha Product and more, Jmblya 2017 is one of the hottest Texas hip-hop bills of the year. It’s set to be a massive affair at the Circuit of the Americas on Saturday, May 6.
Jmblya, now in its fifth year, handily doubled attendance in 2016 when organizers moved the Central Texas date (there is also a Dallas show) from the 5,000-capacity Whitewater Amphitheater in New Braunfels to the Austin American-Statesman parking lot, where they hosted over 10,000 fans. This year, Guttfreund says they hoped to hit 15,000 — they bypassed the 14,000-capacity Austin360 Amphitheater to build their own venue in one of the parking lots on the racetrack grounds — but a little over a week out, they’ve already topped that comfortably. He suspects they will hit 25,000 and sell out.
“There’s so much chatter, not just in Texas, in Austin, in Dallas, but in L.A., New York, everybody knows what Jmblya is,” says Ryan Jansen, who recently left a job at William Morris Endeavor, a high-power L.A.-based talent agency, whose roster includes artists such as Drake, Frank Ocean and Pearl Jam, to work for Scoremore.
“From the perspective of an outsider looking in, Jmblya was always a wellcurated event and a festival that artists wanted to play, but now it’s become a lot more,” he says.
Jmblya has built a passionate base of fans who feel personally invested. “Our social media is full of people who are just like, ‘I met my best friend at Jmblya,’ or ‘I met these people at Jmblya and we’re going again this year,’” says Edward Castillo, who was the first full-time employee Guttfreund and Bogle hired.
“I’ve been all over the country and seen kids in Jmblya merch. And, like, they know what it is. If I’m in (a Jmblya T-shirt) people will stop me and say ‘Have you been to that?’ It’s been really crazy to watch almost a cult following being built.”
It wasn’t always this way. The first Jmblya was an under-attended disaster that almost sank the fledgling promotion company when it launched in 2013 as a string of club shows in Dallas, Houston and Austin.
“We lost $186,000 and I was done. Finished. Sayonara. No more money,” Guttfreund said by phone from California in mid-April. He was enjoying Passover with his family in Los Angeles in between weekends of the Coachella Music Festival, where rapper and singer Tory Lanez, an artist he manages, was performing. He can laugh about it now, but at the time he was devastated. “I remember being so miserable and so full of doubt like, ‘Oh my god, it’s over. It’s over.’”
As it turned out, what seemed like the finale was the beginning of a youth culture movement.
‘We’re pretty persuasive people’
Guttfreund grew up in L.A. and his first forays into party promotion sound like a racy plot line from a next-generation “90201.” He rented out grown folk nightclubs and charged a cover to his high school peers just to get in.