Weekender Encore: Blood, Sweat, Tears and Passion – Creating the BottleRock Lineup

By David Kerns

Jan 24, 2025

Editor Note: We are excited to welcome David Kerns to Napa Valley Features. Kerns is a retired Stanford professor of pediatrics, a novelist and a music journalist whose work has appeared extensively in Northern California newspapers. His novel “Fortnight on Maxwell Street” won the Eric Hoffer Award for best general fiction in 2018. A life-long musician and Napa resident of 17 years, Kerns has been a semi-pro rock drummer and bluegrass banjo player and now enjoys playing Hawaiian-style slack-key guitar.

In his debut article "Blood, Sweat, Tears and Passion – Creating the BottleRock Lineup," Kerns provides a look at the complexities of curating BottleRock Napa Valley’s 2025 lineup. Through an interview with Tom Hoppa, Latitude 38 Entertainment’s talent buyer, he reveals the challenges of booking headliners, balancing budgets and designing a festival experience that reflects the diverse tastes of BottleRock’s audience.

Kerns’ combination of expertise and interests makes him a valuable addition to our team. We look forward to his continued exploration of Napa Valley’s music culture. Now, let’s dive into his look at what it takes to create one of the region’s most celebrated music festivals.

Blood, Sweat, Tears and Passion – Creating the BottleRock Lineup

By David Kerns

NAPA VALLEY, Calif. — Early last week, Latitude 38 Entertainment, the producer of BottleRock Napa Valley, released its overall lineup for the 2025 festival to be held Friday to Sunday, May 23-25. A few days later they announced the daily lineups. Green Day will headline on Friday, Justin Timberlake on Saturday and Noah Kahan on Sunday.

On the phone a few days ago, Latitude 38’s Talent Buyer and Director of Artist Experience Tom Hoppa spoke at length about the challenging process of creating the BottleRock lineup. He began by talking about when and how the process begins.

“I started working on the 2026 lineup over the last six months,” Hoppa said, “because as you're booking ’25, you're learning about artists that are not available for ’25, but will be available for ’26. So you keep tabs on them. That's really how it begins.

“Then you sit down and consider potential headliners. Those three spots are truly the most important part of the lineup, no matter what. And at BottleRock we really want to get the biggest artists possible. Then it really boils down to who's going to make themselves available and then obviously negotiations and cost.

Green Day and Justin Timberlake lead the 2025 BottleRock lineup, promising a dynamic mix of rock and pop for this year’s festival — Submitted Photos

“There are certain artists that are always difficult to get — the Taylor Swifts, the Zach Bryans, the Bruce Springsteens and Paul McCartneys, those larger-than-life megastars. But that said, we had Ed Sheeran last year, who is technically a megastar, and he decided he wanted to play BottleRock because he heard such great things about it.

“When we got the call for Ed, it was an easier than usual conversation. Whereas when we want to go book a band like Pearl Jam, for example, it's how does it fit into their touring schedule, how does it work for them and their album release cycle and more. You’ve got five grown men with families and lives and careers of their own, and they’ve got to figure out a way to come together and work as one unit with the other hundred and some people that are employed by them. It gets challenging when you really dig into all the variables. No booking is the same. No band works the same way. No agent operates the same way. It's case by case most of the time.”

Asked about working with artists’ agents, Hoppa said he has had invaluable experience on both sides of the process.

“We talk to agencies and agents all the time,” he said. “I used to work at some of the major agencies, for example William Morris and CAA. Relationships with agents run deep, not only because of my history working there but obviously because of our history of buying talent for BottleRock with those agencies over the last 12 years. So our spending a lot of money bringing artists in, agents coming to visit the festival and seeing what the experience is like and having a great time and their artists having a great time, they all say, ‘We want to come back.’ That's when you know you have a great festival.”

Without going into specific numbers, Hoppa alluded to the essential role of budget as the festival lineup is developed.

“Every business has a financial model,” he said, “and we certainly do. We have a talent budget that we operate within, and it's very important that we maintain that for the integrity of the business. The Latitude 38 partners, Dave (Graham) and Jason (Scoggins) and Justin (Dragoo), determine that piece of the puzzle, and I take their lead and operate within that constraint. Dave, Bethany (Artist Relations Manager Bethany LaPlant) and I work together on the lineup. It's a team. I make a lot of the phone calls and send 99% of the offers and do a lot of the day-to-day work on building the lineup, but it really is something that we do together, and we've found a way to work well with one another.”

Asked about their understanding of the BottleRock audience, Hoppa said, “the demographics of our audience matter a thousand percent. We know who the demographic is that enjoys coming to BottleRock, and we really operate with them in mind. We book for what's best for the festival and for the personality of our audience over the years. It's a mix of genres, and we try to offer a wide variety so people of all ages and genders can come and enjoy themselves. We want people to enjoy the path that they choose at BottleRock, and we design that path for them ahead of time, making assumptions about what type of music certain music-listeners like and the trends that they follow.”

Once the overall lineup is booked, or nearly so, the next step is the creation of the daily lineups, a complex task of its own.

“You have the headliners on each day,” Hoppa said, “and they’re the pillar, the top of the totem. You want to create a day that has a little bit of that personality throughout. You can look at this year’s lineup for each of the three days, and you can kind of see a trickle-down effect. There are bands throughout the day on Friday that are in line with headliner Green Day, whether it's E-40, who is also from Oakland, or Northern Californian Remi Wolf or Ultra Q, whose lead singer is Jakob Armstrong, the son of Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong. There's a lot of those connections within that day’s lineup.

“On Saturday you see pop star Justin Timberlake with Benson Boone, who is on a trajectory to be as big as Timberlake one day. On Sunday with Noah Kahan, it's a little bit more of a rootsy, folky audience. So we put artists in there like Khruangbin, who share a very similar demographic, and Goose, who are getting really big in the jam community.

“As time goes by, I move bands around on the schedule a lot. I don't want to say it's like I'm sitting there every day changing the lineup, but I kind of do. It's not every day. It's every other day, for months, trying to figure out how it flows and where the right fit is. Of course there’s negotiating with the agents to make sure that their band is OK with their positioning. Every band wants to play as late in the day as possible because that’s when there are more people there.”

Asked about obstacles to booking the BottleRock lineup, Hoppa did not hold back.

“Everything has been on the table when it comes to obstacles to booking,” he said. “It’s tour schedules, it’s financial, it's competition within the marketplace. It's whether or not an artist has any new material coming out. It's a complicated business to be in a band and to be an artist, a touring artist. Not only do we need to know what their Bay Area schedule is like but what are they considering nationally and possibly internationally. On top of that, some of these people have families. Maybe a band member is expecting a baby and they didn't know about that when they booked the festival, or maybe they did. Personal things happen. All these things are variables that we can't control but we have to navigate.

“People just have no idea how difficult and challenging it is to put these things together. When it's time to unveil the lineup and put your festival out there, it is nerve-racking. It's like a painter unveiling a painting or a musician unveiling a song or an album. It's like, ‘Here it is. I hope you like it.’ So far the proof's been in the pudding. People buy the tickets, they come to the festival, they have a great time, they evangelize it, and that's all we can ask for. We're very lucky.”

Hoppa spoke about the motivation to year after year do this challenging, complicated and at times frustrating job.

“Music is something that's been a part of me since I was a kid listening to the radio when I was 7 years old,” he said. “That's when I remember first listening to and loving music. Then I wanted to be a radio DJ and became one. I got to go to a lot of shows because of that. My commitment is something that has happened after years and years of loving and being passionate about music, understanding music, understanding artists and going to concerts nonstop. I've been to thousands of concerts in my life.

“I would be ashamed to put a band on the BottleRock stage that doesn't deliver a high-quality show. We really try to make sure that that level of quality is there. We do the diligence, we do our homework, and we know what we're doing when it comes to booking and programming bands. Sometimes it's hard to navigate that, but we do our best, and that comes from a very deep, passionate love of music.”