Essence Fest Needs to Move Next Door

The Mothership will land again during this year’s Essence Festival. Would it have more impact in the arena?

The yearly celebration of Black culture has been unsteady since COVID, and a move to the Smoothie King Center might be the change it needs.

Earlier this week, the producers of the Essence Festival of Culture approached New Orleans looking for $10 million to $12 million from the city, state, and other entities since its contract with the city ends after July’s event. Online, the negative responses fell into two buckets. One wondered why New Orleans would pay money someone to come in, sell tickets to a show and make a profit. The other was skeptical of Essence’s plans after last year’s trainwreck.

The answer to the first set of doubters is that this is how big events work. Host cities pay to host the Super Bowl, the NCAA Final Four and other similar big events. New Orleans will pay the WWE “a site fee” to host Money in the Bank in September. The individual entities will make money, but the argument is that the cities that host these events will profit too. They pay so that tourists bring their money to their cities instead of taking it somewhere else.

Economic impact studies show that these events are good for the city’s economy, but since there is no standard for how these impacts are calculated, there are legitimate doubts about how beneficial these agreements really are. Since 2022, Essence claims the festival has been responsible for the ballpark of $325 million in economic activity, and last year they say the average visitor spent $912 a day.

So that’s the theory. The money spent would be buying that economic activity for New Orleans, and whether you think it’s a good investment or not, it doesn’t represent Sundial Media, Essence’s parent company, trying to pull a fast one.

The second set of doubters raise a question that Essence needs to address. The current production team needs to show a core level of competence to give New Orleanians a reason to believe that it can deliver on its proposals. Making mistakes in one area doesn’t mean a company will make mistakes in all areas, but screw up in a big, public way and that affects people’s confidence.

Last year Essence made national news by sending Ms. Lauryn Hill onstage at 2:30 a.m., more than two hours late to play a set that Essence didn’t announce until days before she played. That means producers added payroll without adding draw since she wasn’t publicized, and she didn’t add to the experience for most of the audience since it largely bailed before she went on.

It didn’t help that the night was never more than half-full, and attendance was down for the Caesars Superdome shows in general last year. It also didn’t help that as of February 2026, Essence still owed the Morial Convention Center $456,000 and one local contractor more $1 million.

If the issues were a one-time thing, they could be written off as a bad year but Essence has been trying to solidify its footing since COVID. Right now, the festival website features photos of Cardi B., Patti LaBelle, Brandy & Monica, and George Clinton with links to the same TicketMaster landing page that lists all the nights, not the ones that they specifically are playing. Nothing on the site says which nights they’re playing or who will perform with them. Fans have to Google for that.

Those substantial shortcomings make Essence’s promise to expand its reach into New Orleans and South Louisiana easy to doubt.

I have had a lot of great times and seen a lot of great music at the festival , so I’m personally pro-Essence. While it’s easy to focus on the stars in the Superdome, it’s also important to remember that a lot of the Essence action takes place at the Convention Center. I don’t know the economics of that part of the festival, but as an event it remains reliable and feels really important.

With that in mind, one remedy that sidesteps the whole multimillion dollar question is moving the concert from the Superdome to the Smoothie King Center.

Okayplayer’s Peter A. Berry wrote, “The Essence Fest is always an event event,” and I can’t argue with that. I can understand the argument that moving into a smaller space diminishes Essence, but lots of empty seats do the same damage. The move solves a problem that all large festivals including Essence face: headliners. The Superdome holds in the ballpark of 50,000 for Essence, which means they need three headliners who can sell somewhere near that many tickets. The math doesn’t work cumulatively with X number of fans for the opening act, Y number of fans for the middle acts, and Z number of fans for the headliner. There will certainly be some fans of the undercard acts who will buy on the strength of their fandom, but the headliner usually sells most of the tickets. Really, the rest of the bill is a value-add.

Jazz Fest faces the same issue, and so did Voodoo. Who can be counted on to sell 25,000 tickets or more to headline the big stages? This year Jazz Fest solved it by revisiting the ‘70s with The Eagles, Stevie Nicks and Rod Stewart, but since the fragmentation of the monoculture, artists can be huge in niches but only known in their niches.

If Essence moves into the Smoothie King Center, producers only need 17,000 or so to sell out, and I think all three of this year’s headliners—Cardi B., Brandy & Monica, and George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic—would sell out and generate the kind of excitement and energy that Essence wants. Clinton plans to land the actual Mothership again, something he did for the first time 50 years ago in the Memorial Auditorium, and that spectacle would be more impressive in a smaller space. In the dome next month, I worry that the size of the building will make the Mothership look like a toy.

More importantly, a lower capacity would allow the festival to be more responsive to artists that it or its audience want. In 2024, fans loved Victoria Monet in front of Janet Jackson. With another album and another tour, she might be a headliner, and while Olivia Dean, Lola Young, and Raye may not be headliners yet, they speak to Black women and are contemporary enough to make the festival feel more urgent.

The move would also solve a couple of basic problems. The sound in the Superdome is usually awful, whereas the Smoothie King Center was built with idea of attracting touring concerts. The sound isn’t great, but it’s a lot better than next door. Essence also has to deal with VIPs who only show up for the headliner, which means that most artists perform with the dispiriting sight of the best seats in the house empty right in front of them. Changing buildings won’t change that behavior, but more fans will be visible from the stage and give the artists an audience to play to.

In the past, the Superdome was needed to house the Superlounges—awkward spaces tucked away in the corners of the dome that provided four stages for more cutting edge programming. They were closed when the Superdome started renovations and weren’t reopened last year. Without those secondary stages, Essence doesn’t need to put up with the issues created by the Superdome’s size.

I imagine producers and some fans will resist moving into a smaller space and fear it will make Essence Fest look diminished, but they need to get real about the festival. 2017’s Girls Trip breathed some life into a festival that has struggled to deal with some of the generational change that Jazz Fest has faced as well, but it can only give the festival mouth-to-mouth for so long. If they treated the move as a rebranding exercise, producers could present the Essence Festival night concert as a boutique event, something that fans have to buy tickets to because they’ll likely sell out. One or two good years of energetic crowds in full or almost full houses will help turn around the perception that the festival is struggling.

A move into a smaller space that Essence could fill might also help the economics of the festival because artists who have a chance at selling 35,000 tickets or more are expensive on a different level from those who can sell 15,000. That might not represent much of a savings since I’m not sure than anyone Essence booked this year can sell 35,000 tickets, but the bottom line is that the concert business is only getting harder. As the economics of touring get tougher, many artists who might make sense for Essence Fest are opting for Las Vegas residencies and tours where they have more control over the presentation and merchandise sales. The festival needs to adapt to the changing reality and give themselves a chance to succeed. That means running financially solvent shows so that they can continue, and offering fans a quality experience that will make them want to keep coming back with friends.

The actual proposal sounds great but doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. It envisions the creation of Essence 365. “This structure reinforces Essence’s long-term commitment to the people and future of New Orleans—not as a three-day event, but as a year-round cultural and economic platform,” the proposal says. Essence lays out plans to expand its connection with local culture and content creators and aid in entertainment industry workforce development. It also bulletpoints ways to expand Essence’s presence in South Louisiana and ways to improve the festival experience for vendors, the city’s representatives and attendees, the latter by integrating ticketing with New Orleans dining and shopping experiences.

As a list of point-form ideas, they sound fine, and it’s easy to see how it would be in the best interest of a magazine in a struggling business to follow through on many of these.

As a whole, they represent an opportunity for Essence as an entity to put its money and corporate muscle in a hands-on way into the improvement of a city. These proposals would mean a lot more though, if Sundial Media demonstrates it can deliver on plans and not just make them. Essence owed the Convention Center $456,000 in February, but it only paid $50,000 then. In March, Sundial committed to paying off all outstanding debts before this year’s festival, and it set up a payment plan with the Convention Center. I haven’t seen confirmation that anyone has been fully paid off yet.

Sundial Media made the proposal because its contracts with the city, the Convention Center and the Superdome all finish at the end of the year. That makes this an opportunity for change. The daytime events need the Convention Center, and it’s too crucial a part of the Essence Fest experience to change that. Since they’ll save money by renting the smaller Smoothie King Center, the conclusion of that contract is an opportunity to scale down into a space that will make it easier for Essence to carry the buzz and significance it once had into the next generation.