A cursory glance at the current slate of summer music festival lineups–namely Governor’s Ball, cialis Sasquatch, drug Bonnaroo, and even Delaware’s Firefly (yes, Delaware!)–already displays quite a bit of overlap. Mumford & Sons, Bjork, The Lumineers, The XX, Kendrick Lamar, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, Of Monsters and Men, and an array of other artists will be sharing top and mid-tier shelf space at multiple festivals come this May/June/July. An apparently leaked screenshot of the Lollapalooza lineup largely furthers this pattern (though keep bags of salty grains nearby before checking it out), and Pitchfork’s will most likely continue it as well (they already share two of its headliners, R. Kelly and Bjork, with Bonnaroo). Aside from a few legitimate regional differences (“I’ll trade you one Paul McCartney for The Postal Service and Sigur Rós!”), the American music festival industry is fast approaching its point of bland saturation, and that’s a problem.
At a certain point, these big festivals start to look the same. Festivals risk losing any considerable uniqueness with more and more lineups beginning to showcase carbon-copied names. This isn’t meant in a literal sense; there are always going to be variations among a given year’s crop of sonic carnivals. But think of it this way: the largest festivals now represent New York, Illinois, Tennessee, Washington, and California. If Bonnaroo’s big draws are largely mirrored by those of a weekend in NYC, what’s the point of making Bonnaroo a destination? The original Woodstock was the type of event that couldn’t have been replicated anywhere else, and this is the ideal the various festival organizers should be striving toward every year. Individual festivals may retain a particular identity given their location and environment, but they risk losing their overall identities by engaging in a race to copy each other.
On a fundamental level, difference makes experiences special. Bands may be touring more than ever before, but planners behind the most prominent American summer music festivals should be wary of replicating each other’s moves. Just like Walmart and McDonald’s before them, it isn’t inconceivable that future music festivals will slowly become striped of any unique features in favor of predictably reliable packages of experience. There’s still something to be said about these weekends propagating thousands of annual cross-country journeys because they possess a particular character that can’t be replicated. Where’s the drive to set out for new territory when every place looks the same?