The LA County Fair is one of Southern California’s longest-running and most widely attended public events. Drawing approximately 800,000 visitors across its monthly run, the fair represents a rare convergence of mass public attendance, live entertainment, and cultural accessibility, a platform that most emerging artists would have little realistic pathway to access. 

For the Los Angeles Academy for Artists & Music Production, known as LAAMP, and founded by Stargate, the Grammy-winning production duo behind recordings with Beyoncé, Rihanna, Sam Smith, and Coldplay, breaking into a platform of that scale required more than musical talent. It required strategic infrastructure: the right partnership, the right production framework, and the communications capacity to transform a single live activation into a lasting institutional milestone. 

Andrea Gylthe in the studio with producer-duo and LAAMP founders Stargate. 

That opportunity came through NextFest LA. LAAMP’s first-ever collaboration with the organization resulted in the institution’s artists performing at the LA County Fair before one of the largest live audiences in the academies history. The activation marked a significant shift in how LAAMP positioned itself publicly, moving from an institution with an impressive roster of mentors and industry connections to one capable of placing its artists on major public stages in front of real, mass audiences. 

The significance of that transition should not be understated. For artist development institutions, public-facing performance opportunities at scale carry a different weight than internal showcases or industry-facing events. They signal external legitimacy. They create visible proof of what the institution’s training is capable of producing. And when managed effectively, they generate the kind of documentation and storytelling that extends well beyond the event itself. 

Delivering an activation of that scale required full-scale event production management from concept through to execution. The work encompassed partnership outreach and development, contract negotiation, budgeting, production logistics, artist coordination, band management, creative direction, scheduling, technical planning, and communications across artists, musicians, vendors, festival organizers, and internal leadership teams. 

At the center of that production effort was Andrea Gylthe, LAAMP’s communications and digital strategy lead, who originated and secured the NextFest LA partnership before managing every dimension of the activation from concept through to execution. Her scope was deliberately broad. On the production side, she oversaw budgeting and financial planning, negotiated and managed contracts with vendors and festival organizers, and handled the full technical and logistical requirements of the event. She managed scheduling, rehearsal planning, and band coordination across all performing artists and their musicians, serving as the central point of contact for talent preparation throughout. Alongside that, she led the partnership development and brand outreach that made the collaboration possible, managing external-facing communications across every stakeholder involved, from artists and musicians to vendors, festival organizers, and LAAMP’s internal leadership. She also created the visuals displayed on the LA County Fair stage during the LAAMP showcase, extending her role from behind-the-scenes production into the live creative presentation seen by the audience on the day. 

Crucially, her work did not end when the event did. Gylthe developed and executed the post-event content strategy designed to translate what happened on the LA County Fair stage into lasting institutional visibility, ensuring that a live audience of hundreds of thousands became the foundation for an ongoing digital and editorial narrative extending well beyond the activation itself. 

The LA County Fair activation stands as one example of what that infrastructure can produce when it functions at its best: a strategic opportunity, executed with precision, that placed emerging artists in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and created a story worth telling long after the event concluded.