Summerfest Makes a Statement

On Wednesday morning, Summerfest added Outkast to their headlining bill. This is their eighth headlining announcement with three more spots to fill in the coming weeks. All eight of the headline performances are seemingly big deals to Summerfest and Milwaukee. This is as good as a headliner lineup than I have seen in the last couple of years.It is likely hyperbole, but I cannot remember a headliner lineup that was more geared towards the 18-35 demo withholding Motley Crue. What does this mean?  Summerfest is tired of being second fiddle of other festivals, and they have a little money to spend this year plus what does this mean for the free stages?

Summerfest's slogan is being the 'World's Biggest Music Festival.', but in reality, there are many other music festivals that reign supreme over them. Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Coachella are always going to be the three cornerstones of the festival game, but that second tier is wide open with so many festivals going on during the summer months. Many three-day festivals would not be able to pull off this diverse of a group of eight performers as of now even if most of them would not seen the light of day on the festival circuit. They are at least throwing some haymakers at the second tier, and they have a chance to finish damn strong creating the ultimate mic drop.

Piet Levy does a great job with music in Milwaukee and they speculated eight artists whom might make it to Marcus. They already nailed two with Fall Out Boy and Outkast plus Levy gets they likely will add one more 'classic' artist and one more country artist leaving the door open for that eleventh spot. The days they have to fill are the first Saturday of Summerfest, Tuesday and final day of the festival. Two of those spots can be marquee performances so let's see what happens in the coming weeks. It will be interesting to see where they go for country and classic because Summerfest swung big already so why stop now?

What sparked this change of pace to what Summerfest was last year? I mean the festival kicked off with The Avett Brothers (Love them but besides the point) to Bruno Mars. That's a big step-up. There are two things I believe fueling this new plan of attack. The first one is the cash flow is better than its been in quite some time. Remember Summerfest saw record crowds last year meaning there is more money to spend on high quality heaedliners. The second one is a little obtuse but they saw what happens with Harley Fest where they had mostly older,advanced guys taking the headline bill with a great deal of young talent on the free stage making people my age to drop 75 dollars for three days. If the talent is there, people will likely show up in droves. The festival scene has proven that fact countless times over.

The question now is what will Summerfest do with their free stages? With all the big names on the headlining bill, will they scale back the free stages or add different genres versus popular artists? That's the most fascinating thing about this whole festival at this point. To me, a good free stage day is one where you have at least two or three popular names where people would be forced to make a choice at what concert they are seeing on that day versus one popular artist with a bunch of past their prime artists scattered through the festival grounds.

In the end, this makes me fired up for summer. There are big acts worth seeing at the Amphitheater ensuring I will probably drop a little coin (Or working them) and hopefully, more on the way from the Big Gig in the coming weeks.

Charlie.