Festival Alert: Outside Lands 2021 Happens Halloween Weekend
Now that we’ve gotten over the first few hurdles of reopening, with most indoor and outdoor events running at capacity, it’s time to look ahead at what’s coming next in terms of scale. On Friday, October 29, music industry eyes will be on San Francisco, where the three days of Outside Lands will begin at Golden Gate Park, lasting through Halloween night on Sunday. Festivals like Outside Lands are responsible for a considerable percentage of the overall gross revenue from live music, and they’ve almost all been out of commission for two years or more. While Coachella remains the leader by a factor that could be as large as three times that of the others (they stopped reporting attendance and revenue figures after the 2017 fest, which earned $114. 6 million), Outside Lands is #2, with $29.63 million in revenue reported in 2019. Over the entire weekend in 2019, OSL independent promoters Superfly and Starr Hill counted 200,000 attendees, with a one-day high of 90,000 people on Saturday. This 2021 edition, which is taking place approximately two months later in the annual calendar than usual, sold out in two hours when tickets went on sale in June. It will be interesting to see how those pre-Delta sales translate into actual attendance.
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