CHEEKY LIFE HACK: How to attend festivals, concerts and exhibitions FOR FREE.

Attend festivals, concerts, exhibitions and many other cultural events for free.

How? Get a Press Pass pretending you work for a real magazine

Set-up cost: $10 - $50

Do this at your own risk

Details:

Most cultural events offer free passes to Journalists. However, they usually double check their identity via phone call or email. So what can you do?

Choose a real magazine. Try to find one that is relatively known but not extremely popular. It has to be relevant to the type of events you want to attend. To illustrate my method I’ll name the magazine “Shoegaze Rage” (let’s just pretend it’s a real music magazine).

TIP: I would rather choose a magazine that has a weak presence online and relies on printed content mostly.
Buy a domain that contains the name of the actual magazine+something else. Obviously, you can’t register the original domain (e.g. www.shoegazerage.com), so add something like HR, PR, media… Anything that sounds corporate (e.g. www.shoegazeragemedia.com). You can probably find available domains for $10 -$20 per year.

Note: you may want to make the domain anonymous, since a simple whois would give away your real identity. (It may cost you $10 per year.)

Redirect the domain you bought to the magazine you are trying to supplant. In this case, when you type shoegazeragehr.com (your domain), shoegazerage.com (the real one) opens.

Create a few email accounts under your domain (such as [email protected] / [email protected] …).

Add a professional footer to your emails with logo and contact details.
You may also want to have a landline phone number there too. You can buy a Skype number and list it or buy a virtual phone line that redirects to your phone in case they call.

Several months before the event, send an email to the Press contact of the festival telling them you want to confirm the line-up of the event.

You can follow-up a couple of weeks later and request a Press Pass for one of your Journalists. Do this through the corporate acccount ([email protected]) and add yourself as CC ([email protected]).
They may ask the details of the Journalist and some news pieces you have wrote. Find a 5 or 6 months old printed issue of the real magazine. Find a concert/event coverage piece, scan it and photoshop it. Change the name of the Journalist and write your name instead. Save the file as PDF and send it to them.

On the concert day, pick up your Press Pass and enjoy the event.

After the event, they probably will contact you to ask a copy of your coverage of the event. It’s time to disappear. Create a “Mail delivery failed” type of message and set it as an automatic response for any email received by your contacts from the Festival.
Next festival: repeat the same procedure.