Artist manager Aidan McLaren said there were 4000 tickets sold for the inaugural event, but that could be increased to 5000 in 2020.
The stellar line-up included Australian artist Tones and I who still sits at number one on the ARIA singles chart for the 14th week for her song Dance Monkey.
Mr McLaren said she had no trouble getting people to dance despite the rain, drawing the biggest crowd of all the performers at the Shepparton Showgrounds.
“The crowd favourite was without a doubt Tones and I,” he said.
“She had the most people braving the rain to come down to the front of the stage and received some pretty amazing cheers.”
Mr McLaren said the crowd was one of the “friendliest” crowds he had entertained.
“The atmosphere had this cool feel and the people were fun, friendly and polite,” he said.
“There were little kids there, adults and people of all different backgrounds.
“Everyone was there to get along and sometimes the rain can make things not as good as they could be, but it was almost like everyone thought we’re not going to let the rain stop us from having a great time.
“They were all respectful.
“Once we heard from police there were no major incidents and they were happy, it was great because that’s what you really dream of.”
Mr McLaren said this event was the first festival he held in a one-day format but he believed it was “much-needed” for the region.
His team applied through an expression of interest process about 18 months ago by Greater Shepparton City Council and Shepparton Show Me who were interested in bringing a large-scale music event to the area.
“We saw it and we put an application together and we’ve been working with them once we got selected,” Mr McLaren said.
“It was driven from the local area, which was great.”
While delivering outstanding acts including Shepparton’s Briggs, Illy, Alex the Astronaut and Ocean Alley, Mr McLaren said it hoped to be as environmentally friendly as possible.
“We have an amazing team called Be Alternative who we work on all our events now and they are all about waste reduction and resource recovery,” he said.
“We run different initiatives at all our events to minimise the amount of landfill the events generate.”
This year patrons could return empty cans for $1 and next year there's likely to be more initiatives introduced.
“At one of our events all the soft plastic is collected and melted down to make furniture for next year’s event,” Mr McLaren said.
“The cash for can is one we wanted to start here. We always start them small – another one we had this year was different bin-streams so we really try to make these events as sustainable as possible.
“We start small, train the audience and build on it each year if we keep going ahead.”
Mr McLaren said clearing the site would take a few days before he and the other organisers debriefed with other stakeholders.
“Then we will send out a survey to everyone who attended sometime in the next week or so to get their feedback before we bring it altogether and start planning for next year hopefully,” he said.
“Based on yesterday’s response and the number of people who have been hitting us up with positive feedback and asking us to bring it back, we would definitely love to come back next year.
“I think we will open it up a bit bigger (next year), just to be able to make budgets work and to secure the acts we need to secure. But that will all come out of the debrief and depends on what the other stakeholders think.”
Mr McLaren thanked Shepparton for its support.
“Without people taking a chance and buying tickets and being a part of it, it definitely wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
“It was wonderful.”
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