Pranav Trewn finds peace in his vinyl record collection.
The music festival industry is, above all else, an arms race. The biggest players compete to book away from one another the hottest names for their marquee, which is why youâll only see Olivia Rodrigo at Live Nation events this year. Beyond talent, they fight for territory (who can forget the Randallâs Island wars of 2016?) and for weekends (Memorial Day, mainly). And most noticeably in January, they rush to drop their lineups first â capturing your excitement and pushing you to commit to a ticket before you can fully compare options.
Announcements have been dropping earlier and earlier over the years, but usually most arrive in the first month of the New Year. In part, this is because Coachella contractually restricts their artists from announcing other festival appearances in North America until after their own lineup comes out. Except this year the organizers broke precedent by revealing their lineup in November, almost certainly to give them more lead time and access to holiday spending to reverse course from their slowing selling year in a decade. I anticipate they will keep to this new schedule, and competitors will soon shift their own lineup releases accordingly. Regardless, however, the move serves as a big signal for the precarious state of the industry this year.
As we approach the end of announcement season, festival goers have now seen a majority of the lineups for the events taking place between now and mid-summer. For those interested in following trends within live music, each poster provides an abundance of tea leaves to sift through. After digging through them all, I came away with a shortlist of insights that will surely shape the stories this column covers in the months ahead. Here are eight thoughts on what the current festival slate forecasts about live music in 2025.
Not long ago, we used to see several new festivals debut a year. But long before the current economic downturn that squeezed concert goersâ purse strings, demand had already hit a cap that could not sustain so many multi-genre, three day extravaganzas across the nation. We said goodbye to beloved institutions like Pemberton, Sasquatch, and most recently Firefly. Promoters pivoted strategies accordingly, which gave rise to the congested one-day genre-specific fests we saw take over last year. Except now even those no longer seem to be sure bets. Sick New World, Live Nationâs Vegas-based nu-metal party, announced itâs cancellation a little after a month from when it was announced. Pitchfork Festival, one of the brightest spots of intentional curation in the game, announced an indefinite hiatus as well. Even the shamelessly pandering pop-punk behemoth When We Were Young hasnât yet been able to justify adding its usual second day, let alone the third they were able to run in 2022. A lot of challenges in putting on festivals are structural â rising production costs, conflicts with local government â such that even if audience demand one day bounces back, the supply of festivals the industry can sustain from here will probably stay limited.
Another prominent reason for this contraction is the increased difficulty of nailing down compelling talent. Post âBeychellaâ and the lucrative accompanying Netflix special and live album, I expected to continue seeing the biggest names in music eager to capitalize on the countryâs often-livestreamed cross-genre stages to showcase massive cultural moments â the kinds we have fewer of these days with the erosion of interest in the old guard of monocultural institutions like the Grammys or VMAs. Festival lore used to be integral to artistâs marketing campaigns â Coachella alone was central to Kendrick DAMN rollout, the debut of Daft Punkâs pyramid stage and RAM, and even Kanyeâs post-VMA redemption. Even if an artist could net more from their own concert, the associated media attention for a wider audience with a festival often proved worth the effort.
Those days seem to be gone, with all of the biggest names in culture explicitly passing up on festival offers. All the money and muscle behind Coachella that in the past landed Prince, Beyonce, and the reunion of Outkast, reportedly failed to achieve their attempts this year at Kendrick, Rihanna, and Taylor Swift. Stars that might have made sense heading any number of lineups have decided to tour on their own, from Bad Bunny to My Chemical Romance. Given the prices these artists have proven able to charge and the size of the venues they can sell out, the economic analysis easily justifies that choice. But of course missing out on A-List talent deflates the value proposition festivals can offer. Whereas once everyone you could see over three days at a festival was worth far more than their individual tickets would cost in aggregate, the calculation is now far shakier. Promoters have to settle for B-Tier headliners while also raising the prices of their passes to cover other increases in production costs. Beyonce tickets alone run you as much as going to say, Boston Calling, but more people would probably take seeing Bey over Fall Out Boy, Dave Matthews Band, and Vampire Weekend combined.
Of course, you might be lucky if your local festival can afford even B-Tier names. Benson Boone has one album and sole hit song to his name, yet there he is sharing headliner duties with Tyler, the Creator at Governorâs Ball and Justin Timberlake at Bottlerock and sitting above Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and T-Pain. By this time next year, he is as likely to have another hit as he is to completely fade from public memory (his first single post-breakthrough was a non-starter). His agent deserves both a raise for punching him above his weight and to be fired for setting him up to disappoint his billing.
Heâs not alone in his egregious placement against names who have taken a substantial hit to their font sizes of the past. Noah Kahan was already spuriously erected a headliner last year, but at least that was at the peak of his moment. He has yet to follow-up âStick Season,â and so his name up top Bottlerock feels primed to age as lazy if he doesnât drop anything new, and foolish if whatever he does drop fails to build on his past momentum. With a limited pool of big name talent to draw from, promoters have seemingly decided to elevate to their mainstages prematurely trendy new artists. With a rare cultural force like Chappell Roan, that is probably a good call. For much of everyone else who has taken over the top lines this year, it reads as desperate.
Anyway, if we are going to elevate green artists to headliner spots, we could do much better than Boone, Kahan, and their ilk. 2024 was a breakthrough year for women in pop, from Roan to Sabrina Carpenter to Clairo to Charli XCX, and all of them would put on better shows and likely move more tickets. Gender diversity was a big talking point pre-Covid, but it seems like the challenges since have made most festivals return to homogeneous, MOR bookings that try to play it safe but will probably come across to audiences as stale.
Racial diversity on these lineups has also dropped substantially. Props to Governorâs Ball for following Coachellaâs post-Covid emphasis on elevating non-English music, which continues to grow in popularity in the US, by giving Columbian vocalist Feid a headliner spot. But where are the Latin stars on the rest of these lineups? Karol G or Peso Pluma would have been slam-dunks, and meet this American momentâs appetite far more effectively than Weezer touring the Blue Album three decades later. And what about crossover K-Pop groups like Twice and aespa that tour arenas nationwide? You canât tell me that a culturally irrelevant Justin Timberlake was a more compelling booking.
The puzzling choices made above ties into a broader dearth of curiosity in our listening. Given the widespread increase in the number of anniversary tours for ten and twenty year old albums, it was inevitable that festivals would buy-in on the action. This is why Avril Lavigne is sitting on top of Boston Calling and Bonnaroo, not because her new music has suddenly taken over the radio again, but because she has fully embraced her mallpop past. Green Day is headlining Bottlerock and Coachella, not because their 2024 album Saviors resonated with audiences, but because they had their most successful tour in years playing American Idiot and Dookie in full. When We Were Young already unretired Panic! At The Disco just a few years after the bandâs end to perform their 2004 smash A Fever You Canât Sweat Out. Coachella, once focused on landing all the big things in music happening today, has made sure in the last few years to cop a few acts who havenât made a new fan in decades. With seemingly random billings for Jimmy Eat World and Miike Snow this year, they have correctly recognized that familiarity with at least one banger you used to hear on the radio is enough to get attendees out to a stage. 2024âs major trend was a big boon in bookings of â90s stars like Sublime and No Doubt. Meanwhile, many of the lineups in 2025 feel straight out of 2005.
Rap and pop long ago took over rockâs place as the staple genre of music festivals, which has made for yearly comment sections left asking âWhere are the guitars?â These days, rock headliners are either those that have long ago went pop (Fall Out Boy) or were already pop to begin with (Olivia Rodrigo). Like rap music a decade ago, country is quickly becoming the inescapable genre of streaming, leading to a similar germination of crossover attempts by non-country artists. As a result, most mainstream festivals have brought country into the fold for the first time in a prominent way. The biggest shift in this direction is the embrace of Luke Combs, a traditional radio country rocker who in the past wouldnât have been seen outside of Stagecoach, and is now taking top billing at Bonnaroo and Boston Calling. His âFast Carâ cover was a big chart hit, but not enough so that I imagine many general audiences being familiar with anything else in his 90 minute sets.
Post Malone will have better luck connecting through his vast well of rap-pop hits, but rest assured he is being booked for this year for his canny country pivot F-1 Trillion. Elsewhere you have the young country star Megan Moroney, Shaboozey, and The Red Clay Strays all taking up prominent lineup space. If you were already tired of seeing cowboy hats as festival-wear, 2025 is going to be your toughest year yet.
My thoughts on reunion tours are documented as skeptical at best, and there has been such an endless sweep of newly revived bands every month that few surprise returns have broken through that cynicism. However, Rilo Kiley coming back to tackle Just Like Heaven and Kilby Block Party is a welcome development, and TV on the Radio being a sub headliner on those same lineups feels like a positive nod to a perpetually underrated band. Coachella used to be the place for critically beloved outfits to reunite â from the Pixies to LCD Soundsystem to Outkast â but it appears that center of gravity has shifted. Future returning bands will proceed to do their own tours where they can get a higher payday and keep the focus on themselves (a la Oasis), but others will simply focus in on the smaller, more curated fests where their appearance will mean more to the audience attending (a la Capân Jazz and The Dismemberment Plan at Best Friends Forever last year). I do expect that if a revived group forgoes festivals during their initial reunion run, they will probably hit them the next year to broaden their payday. Once the fervor dies down and everyone remembers they didnât even like Britpop in the first place, expect Oasisâ next cash-in to be sitting alongside everyone else at the festivals.
I am as liable as anyone to play armchair promoter, wondering how these promoters could fail to book such obviously better names than what they ended up with. If youâre looking for fresh rock headliners, how have we turned to Hozier before finally getting Gen-Z favorites the Arctic Monkeys back to the stage? Khruangbin are extremely talented, and yet are the most boring top font name I can imagine watching at 8 p.m. on a Saturday. Travis Scott should stay the fuck away from designing anything!
Yet even though I make it to one to two festivals a year at most, I still get excited keeping up with them all. Chappell Roanâs record breaking crowds growing every few weeks was a thrillingly joyous spectacle, and I raved last month about watching Justice and Tyler, the Creator creatively squeeze every ounce of juice from their production budgets. I see plenty in these lineups that I expect will captivate both attendees and virtual onlookers, from GloRilla running victory laps around the stage to the continued rise of Mannequin Pussy to FKA Twigs finally returning to performing (I fully expect her to cancel, but a little hope doesnât hurt). Much as with music blogs in 2025, I still believe in the dream festivals pointed to in the early aughts, no matter how much harder modern developments have made them to love.
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