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Choose a festival where the town can hold the group: food, shade, and a place to sleep within walking distance. Arriving at the same base matters more than the name on the stage. If the stay is an hour away, the night becomes a transfer problem and you see the festival in pieces.
Book as soon as the date is out. Large groups lose the beds first. A confirmed base organizes the rest: what time you head out, where you eat, how you get back.
Agree on a place and a time to meet again. The crew will scatter, and that is fine, as long as everyone knows where to gather at night. “See you around” is not enough when there is music and the phone has no signal.
That place has to be easy to say when you are tired: the entrance, a tree, the corner of the stay. Not a food stall that moves. Write it down before you go in.
Bring water and a way to pay that does not depend on a single phone. At a festival the group gets separated from its bag, its battery, and its patience. What is settled beforehand does not get argued in the line.
Have a clear way out: the last ride, the walk back, the person who is not drinking and is driving. Deciding it at three in the morning is the fastest way to fight. Deciding it in the afternoon is a detail.
The one you can walk, the one with shade in the daytime, and the one that does not require all ten of you to see the same show. A town festival, with more than one stage and food nearby, beats a huge ground where getting lost is literal.
Go for the crew, not the lineup. The memory that stays is having been together somewhere that could hold you. The name on the stage gets forgotten. The base, the meeting point, and getting back together do not.