Voodoo Cancels for 2021, Promises a Return in 2022

screen shot from VoodooFestival.com

The New Orleans rock and dance music festival scheduled for the Halloween weekend will take its second year off this October, when it was scheduled to conclude a month of festival weekends.

Today, the Voodoo Music + Arts Experience announced on its website that it will “take a pause in 2021” and return to City Park on the Halloween weekend of 2022. This means the rock and dance music festival will be dark for two years in a row since it missed 2020 due to the pandemic.

As we wrote in February, Voodoo faced a number of challenges this year. It has historically had October to itself, but when French Quarter Festival, Jazz Fest and Buku’s Planet B all moved into October, it suddenly became the final festival with four weekends of festivals before it. It was going to face the possibility of the local market being financially and physically exhausted by that point, and it was going to follow its most direct competition in the market, Buku, which caters to the same target audience.

It can’t help that the top lines of Buku’s talent lineup were artists who would have made sense at Voodoo. Megan Thee Stallion could have headlined Voodoo’s main stage, while Illenium, Machine Gun Kelly, Playboi Carti, Kaytranada, Zeds Dead, Alison Wonderland, and Jamie xx would have all made sense on Voodoo’s Le Plur stage. Since that stage outdraws Voodoo’s main stage, the importance of the dance music artists to the festival’s bottom line can’t be ignored.

Voodoo also faced national competition that it never had in the past as festivals around the country moved into October. San Francisco’s Outside Lands moved to the Halloween weekend, and Atlanta’s Shaky Knees moved to the weekend before. That meant many musicians that would have made sense at Voodoo already had gigs.

Compressing the 2021 festival season into September and October also means that fans who might travel to New Orleans for Voodoo will likely have had a lot of chances to see destination festivals, and since many other festivals already have their tickets on sale, the fans that might travel have already committed their money. Voodoo would likely have had to rely on its local audience at the end of a festival month this year.

The question now is whether Voodoo can reactivate its fan base in 2022 after a two-year hiatus, and what work Voodoo will do between now and then to remain on people’s minds.