Bonnaroo's Moved, Coachella May Have. What About New Orleans' Spring Festivals?
The Who were scheduled to play Jazz Fest 2020. Will they play in 2021? By Rick Guest
With a COVID-19 vaccine future uncertain, the prospects for New Orleans’ spring music festivals seems up in the air. Again.
On Friday, October 16, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla wrote that the company’s efforts to find a vaccine for COVID-19 were moving ahead so quickly that, “assuming positive data, Pfizer will apply for Emergency Authorization Use in the U.S. soon after the safety milestone is achieved in the third week of November.” That is the earliest projected date for a vaccine being available, and “assuming positive data” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
According to BBC News, “most experts think a vaccine is likely to become widely available by mid-2021.” The president has muddied the information waters and tied his reelection hope to a vaccine to such a degree that even if one becomes available, many would be reluctant to take it because they fear the process “will move too fast, without fully establishing safety and effectiveness.”
That doesn’t bode well for New Orleans events scheduled for spring 2021, including Buku Music + Art Project, French Quarter Fest, and The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell. Without a vaccine, it’s hard to see these events going as planned.
Vaccine aside, there is guarded optimism for live music in 2021. A survey conducted by Pollstar in late August and early September of people who work in the live music industry found that 54.7 percent expected the business to rebound in 2021, but 30 percent didn’t expect it to happen until 2022. Of those who believe it will return in 2021, only 16 percent think it will happen in the second quarter, when the festivals in question will take place. The smart money—to the extent that there is any—is on the third quarter at 25 percent, but it may be a tell that the respondents were answering hopefully when slightly more than 60 percent say they’re ready to go back to work now—18 percent “unconditionally” and 43 percent if attention is paid to health guidelines.
The Who, Bon Iver, Fall Out Boy, Celine Dion, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, Rage Against the Machine, Foo Fighters, Harry Styles, Bikini Kill and many, many more plan to start their postponed tours in 2021, and Live Nation has scheduled the Electric Daisy Carnival electronic dance music festival in Las Vegas for May 21-24. Tickets to the festival sold out before announcing a single act—a sign that fans, like professionals, want to return to concerts and festivals as soon as possible. But Live Nation’s optimism isn’t universal. Earlier this month, RollingStone.com reported that Coachella will for the second year in a row forego its April dates and is looking at October, and Bonnaroo has announced that the June festival will move to September 2-5 in 2021.
Buku is currently scheduled to take place March 19-20, 2021, followed by French Quarter Fest April 8-11, then Jazz Fest April 22-May 2. It is optimistic to believe festivals will take place in the spring, in part because of the vaccine question, and because the festivals may have a hard time booking touring talent in the spring and will certainly not be able to book the legacy, older artists that often headline Jazz Fest’s Acura Stage since they’re the demographic hardest hit by the virus.
Rolling Stone‘s Samantha Hissong and Ethan Millman wrote, “Postponing [Coachella] until October is a huge endeavor involving hundreds of artists and their representatives, as well as hundreds of contractors and vendors and tens of thousands of employees. Artists are frequently touring during the fall months and while organizers aren’t likely to get all the performers to agree to move, sources say that if enough of the big headline acts—this year’s Coachella headliners include Frank Ocean, Rage Against the Machine, and Travis Scott—then the festival can be moved.” Jazz Fest likely has as many moving parts and complications as Coachella, and all three festivals would be hard to move.
Still, what’s worse? Asking fans to buy into those dates, buy tickets, and make plane and hotel reservations, only to disappoint them when the festival has to move? Or to give them fair advance notice so that they can make plans that seem more probable? And will people be willing to travel to New Orleans for these events? French Quarter Fest and Jazz Fest were created with the idea of drawing tourists, and expectations for travel are mixed for 2021.
A recent story in Forbes predicts that 2021 could become “The Year of Travel” with much the same logic as Pollstar’s survey the the EDC sell-out—people have been cooped up and want to go. But even with that pent-up demand, signs suggest that travel won’t simply snap back either. According to Business Travel News, there was an average 66.1 percent capacity level for hotels in the United States in 2019; the forecast for 2021 is 52.1 percent. Fewer tourists are inclined to visit and support outside-state events, even in a city as beloved as New Orleans. According to an Associated Press report, “hotel demand [is] not expected to fully recover until 2023.”
A trusted vaccine will unquestionably help the live music industry, but the odds are that COVID-19 will force changes on New Orleans’ spring festivals again in 2021. The question is what those changes are.
