by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Putting on a music festival is a giant gamble. Every decision is an educated guess that will either pay off in spades or aid in your demise. 

It starts with the location, and in the Outlandia Music Festival’s case, that choice was the right one. Falconwood Park is a bucolic, pastoral paradise uniquely suited to host a multi-day music fest. You can read about Falconwood and its history right here.

But after that, it’s all a roll of the dice.

Will the lineup attract a large audience? Are the bands too obscure or have they played in the area too often?

Are the tickets correctly priced? How’s the economy? Do fans have available cash to make the buy? Is there a competing event that could lure away their dollars?

How about marketing? Where was the festival marketed and was enough spent to get the word out? 

Every dollar is a gamble, from facility and production costs to personnel and security arrangements. Nothing is cheap. 

And then, after all that, there’s Mother Nature, because scorching heat or soaking rain does not entice participation in an outdoor event. 

If you make all the right decisions and the stars align, the only thing left is to execute the plan, and the Outlandia folks definitely know how to execute. 

One of the biggest wild cards was weather, and Outlandia drew aces.  The sky was partly cloudy and temps were in the 70s Saturday afternoon when I visited Falconwood Park. The main festival site felt like a small village. Concert-goes walked to the stage area with folding chairs while festival personnel zipped around the small paved paths in golf carts escorting guests from the parking area to the VIP section or the sponsor cabins. 

In the back of the compound were the usual food trucks and beer stands as well as merch tents and other vendors scattered around the perimeter. Beyond the long row of port-a-johns, a triangle of dudes played frisbee in the open field. Everywhere tangled in the brown and green grass were scraps of colored paper – the remnants of the previous night’s Flaming Lips’ confetti cannons. 

The festival suffered a bit of a set-back the previous day when J. Mascis announced he couldn’t play Saturday because of the death of close friend Dave Swetapple, bassist for Witch, Eerie and Sweet Apple, a band that includes Mascis. The schedule change pushed Buffalo Tom back to 5:30. 

The trio of guitarist Bill Janovitz, bassist Chris Colbourn and drummer Tom Maginnis may have looked grayer than they did in the mid-‘90s when their best albums were released, but they didn’t sound any different. They ripped into a greatest hits set that included just about every song any Buffalo Tom fan would want to hear, played to tight perfection. The only thing missing were a couple songs the band had hoped to play with Mascis, who helped produce their first two albums.

I can’t comment on the lighting but the sound was pristine. Outlandia’s huge stage gave the band plenty of room to roam, though they rarely strayed from their fixed positions. About 75 or so stood by the stage while a couple hundred sat behind the “No Chair Zone” area 50 yards or so from the stage. Dozens more sat off of stage-right in the Outlandia VIP section.

Execution-wise, Outlandia appeared to be a home run. But what about the numbers?

Tyler Owen, one of festival’s organizers, said he heard they had around 5,000 in the park for the weekend, but doesn’t have the data yet or the plan for 2025. Owen said during our recent interview for Flatwater Free Press that this year’s Outlandia was “make or break.” I talked to another organizer who said that’s the case every year. 

As Owen said, Outlandia has everything it needs to be as successful as Iowa’s Hinterland Music Festival. I searched in vain to find attendance numbers for 2024’s Hinterland, held last weekend, but instead only found article after article that reported complaints about how the enormous crowds put a strain on the festival’s resources, this despite humid temps in the mid-90s throughout the weekend. I’ve heard past festivals drew well over 15,000.

What I do know is that Hinterland quickly sold out their allotment of 3-day General Admission passes on the strength of their line-up, which included major indie artists Chappell Roan, Ethel Cain, The Last Dinner Party, Orville Peck, Blondshell, Vampire Weekend, Hozier, Mt. Joy and more – a line-up that must have cost a gazillion dollars to book. 

If Outlandia had booked just the top three of the above list of artists, they might have doubled their attendance this year. But at what cost?

And at the end of the day, even with that star power, it’s all a gamble.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2024 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.