M3F Fest 2025 Preview: Q&A with Festival Manager Rachel Blanchard
On March 7 and 8, M3F Fest will return to Phoenix’s Steele Indian School Park for its highly anticipated 2025 presentation.
For its 22nd year, the cherished Arizona benefit festival has assembled a top-shelf lineup of 32 big names in alternative, electronica, dance-punk, house, indie rock and more, led by electroclash pathbreakers LCD Soundsystem and French touch duo Justice, who just recently secured Best Dance/Electronic Recording at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards. Beyond the titanic headliners, M3F will host beloved innovators like Sylvan Esso, Alvvays, BadBadNotGood, Braxe + Falcon, Eggy, LP Giobbi, Confidence Man, Girl Talk, Monster Rally, Slow Pulp and more.
As always, the unmissable event is for a good cause: 100% of the proceeds will fund educational, arts and environmental charities, adding to the over $6 million raised and donated to date. Since its creation in 2004 by Phoenix general contractors Wespac Construction, M3F (abbreviated from its original title of McDowell Mountain Music Festival) has always centered giving back to the community. From those roots, the homegrown event has shot up to become a regional institution, welcoming tens of thousands of music lovers every year and constantly expanding on its creative and charitable ambitions.
In 2025, M3F is gearing up for one of its most memorable presentations yet as settles into a new space, furthers charitable ties to the community and embraces an eclectic mix of artistic perspectives representative of Phoenix’s vibrant and diverse culture. As the show approaches, Festival Manager Rachel Blanchard reflects on M3F’s mission, development and legacy.
As festival manager, what’s your part in bringing together the charitable and event production sides of M3F?
So right when the festival wraps up, it’s wrapping up accounting and things like that for March. Then in April, we’ll jump into a plan for next year’s festival—working with the city already, and then really diving into the charity side of things.
We have a lot of great charity partners. We work with over 40 different charities. A lot of them we’ve worked with for over 20 years now, but the majority of them we’ve started with over the last couple of years. So it’s still about building those relationships—helping the charities with different programs and events and new things that pop up for them—and then also vetting new charities. We have the M3F Fund, which charities can use to submit for a grant. So connecting with new charities, going through financials, taking meetings with them and seeing how we can help them out and how we can partner with them—that’s a good chunk of the year.
Then we’re just constantly planning for the festival. It’s an all year endeavor working with the team, doing marketing for our charity partners, starting art concepts and getting the lineup together, that’s over the summer. Then we just dive deep into planning and working with Wespac Construction. The founder of Wespac Construction also started M3F, so they provide team leads for each department of the festival. We’ll work together on site plan things, band things and more.
The M3F Fund came around in 2023. How has that factored into the festival’s mission?
When we first started as a smaller independent music festival, we were able to help around four different charities. Then once we hit some exponential growth, we were able to raise more funds and with that, became able to give more to the community.
Through the M3F fund, charities can submit for grants, then we go through and meet with them. It gives us an opportunity to work with a lot of smaller charities, too. You definitely have your big names, but with the small ones, we don’t have too many limitations based on their budget or anything like that. As long as you’re a good, sound charity and we know where the money is going, we can help. It’s a mutual partnership, and we have mutual values, and we’ll do everything that we can to help support you.
With the M3F Fund, we’ve really been able to focus on the smaller charities. For example, there’s this charity called Let’s Go Compost. They submitted for a grant back in 2023 and they provide educational supplies for composting in elementary schools. When she reached out in 2023, she was in one school. We gave her a small grant—maybe like $2,000, compared to donating like $100,000 to Phoenix Children’s—and now she’s in over 100 different schools. So we’ve seen this charity start so small, and then in a year be up to 100, just because we provided her with a small grant to get a website and a PO box and things like that.
You really see the impact with the smaller charities. The bigger charities do a lot of great work, and with Children’s, the music therapy program is amazing and we love working with them—but with some of the smaller charities, you can see your money goes a little bit further, too.
Are there any other charities that you’ve worked with that you feel a personal connection to or have since found yourself reflecting on?
Well one is Cowtown Skateboards. They provide skateboards for youth around the valley, and they do different programs, but one is these exchanges and pop-up events where they set up ramps and things like that for people to come and ride their skateboards.
There’s one that we did on a reservation up in Northern Arizona last summer, and we were able to provide over 100 skateboards; if somebody came with a used skateboard, they could trade it and get a new skateboard. Or, if you didn’t have a skateboard, you could get a used skateboard—you could get shoes, clothes and different things like that. Then we also got these different ramps and stuff set up permanently.
To see this really small community on the reservation, like… I don’t know, it’s kind of overwhelming. It’s something that could be really simple to us, you know, like a new pair of shoes or something, and to see a kid get his new skateboard and a pair of shoes and just hit the ramps with a big smile on their face—it’s just incredible.
What are the founding principles that guide the charity organizations you partner with?
Environment, arts, community and education are the four pillars we were founded upon and have grown from. We started with youth-based charities, and then with the growth of M3F we’ve come to form those four pillars. It’s pretty broad, and we have such a broad audience too, so we love to work with charities that are all-encompassing—like really giving back not just for education or just the unhoused community, but also charities that are a little different or that encompass the valley of Phoenix, too.
The live music and music festival landscapes have transformed so rapidly in the past few years, and M3F has seen it all. How have you seen M3F adapt and respond to changing contexts?
We started with attention to the jambands scene 21 years ago. As music interests and genres have changed, we became more focused on electronic music; the competition on top of us is also more rock and alternative, so we had to steer a bit more into EDM. But this year, we’re on different weekends, so we were able to have a more eclectic mix of EDM and alternative.
With headliners, it was a very difficult year to really grab those headliners. We’re also in a funky place as not one of the really big festivals, but not a really small festival either. Finding that sweet spot with a headliner can be pretty difficult. Then you do have a lot of competition in the market, especially being in Phoenix, from other music festivals in our own city or in neighboring states. But I think that was kind of like the biggest thing: finding the sweet spot of the right bands that are going to fit into our budget.
I’m very grateful that I’m not the one making all of those decisions [Laughs]. We have a really great team that puts a lot of research and thought into it. Because you never know, especially when you’re booking your lineup six months or so in advance. It’s an ever-changing environment, between people’s music tastes and what they want to spend money on as well. There’s definitely been a lot of changes with inflation and things like that, so it’s about making budgets work on our side, but then also for our attendees’ side too.
As a 100% non-profit music festival, could you speak to how M3F balances prices and overhead to meet its charitable goals?
Being a community music festival at our core, we want to give back as much to the community as we can, whether that’s our charitable arm, or whether that’s being reasonable for people to come and enjoy a music festival as well. We strive to create the best experience that we can within our budget, while also keeping our budget as low as we can so that we can give back that much more to our charity partners as well. It definitely takes a lot of thought, a lot of shopping the market on everything that goes into the festival and making sure that we are truly getting the best price.
2025 will bring titanic names like LCD Soundsystem, Justice, Sylvan Esso, Alvvays and many more. Beyond the biggest names on the lineup, what’s happening around the festival grounds?
We highlight a lot of local artists through our Battle of the Bands and our Valley Stage. We had three Battle of the Bands over the last couple of weeks, which were really fun. The winners will be playing at M3F. So we have three stages that are kind of like our main stages, and then we also have a Valley Stage, too, which is focusing a lot of local talent, whether they’re our charity partners or just local artists and some diverse acts as well. It’s going to be really fun. It’s tucked away sound-wise—we have a lake on our new site and everything. So that’s bound to be really cool.
We focus on local artists for our activations, and so we have a lot of cool art activations that will be throughout the festival. We highlight local food trucks and local merchants for our vendor village, and some of our charity partners will be out there too. So we’re really honing in on that Phoenix experience.
What’s new at this year’s festival versus years before? What are you most excited about?
I’ll talk about what I know is announced. We’ll have a silent disco. There’s a couple of other really fun different activities for our audience to do, and really exciting new art activations and things like that to highlight the local talent.
I’m just most excited just to go out and help with all the volunteers. It takes over 500 volunteers to help make M3F happen. So seeing all the returning volunteers back for their favorite weekend, and it’s something that me and my team work towards for the entire year—all that coming together and everything falling into its right place is just a crazy trip. Having our community together, with family and friends coming out, it’s always a really, really great time.
Do you have any key M3F memories of your own to share?
Definitely when ODESZA played. That was in 2019, and that was such a big moment from M3F because we’d always had amazing artists, but to have ODESZA play your festival is just incredible. To be a part of it, and see in the audience just how much they loved it, and just to see their performance—it’s was such an incredible show.
Some other moments were having Rüfüs Du Sol play in 2020, and even just happening in 2020 because we were in early March. Then having everyone come back in 2022 to see the festival come back, just seeing everyone’s excitement and readiness to have a great time. We were kind of like the last thing to happen in 2020, but then the first thing to happen in 2022. Having everyone back together has been a blessing.
Then we moved parks for 2024, so that was really fun and just brought a whole new vibe to M3F. Having the lake there on site, and having things like lasers in our activations on the lake is awesome. This year is gonna be fantastic.
Tickets for M3F Festival 2025 are available now. Secure yours and find more information at m3ffest.com.
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