These releases are making me realize I actually don’t know what’s going on with the youth music of today. A lot of these artists have 20-100M streams on songs that I’ve never heard of.
I really don't understand popularity in music anymore. Because at the same time all these artists have millions of streams and then 70 people show up to there shows. It's hard to tell how popular bands are now.
I saw a band play South by So What in 2022 who are FROM Dallas and had a GIANT song on TikTok and there were maybe 15 people watching their set EDIT: It was this
I feel like i'm in this sweet spot (in a bad way) in between eras. I'm 30 years old. I attended Warped starting in 2007 until the final dates in Atlantic City, and yeah, I haven't even heard of (let alone enjoy the music of) many of the bands on the Long Beach date so far. I'm more of a pop punk / emo band person and I feel like so many of the bands are either punk/ska/hardcore from just before my time or newer bands that i've never heard of. Pretty sure I only really know State Champs, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Saosin, Cobra Starship, Bowling for Soup decently well. Iann Dior is good too but outside that genre I guess. Still 18 more days of announcements so hoping for more of the WWWYF type bands. I don't just mean in terms of popularity - pretty sure I legitimately enjoyed 80+% of the WWWYF lineups including the undercard. But i'll definitely be listening more to some of these ones that I don't know.. Honey Revenge, for ex, sounds legit good after a few listens.
One thing I’ll say and this doesn’t necessarily frame it as a bad thing, just an observation. This lineup just seems like the equivalent of if warped tour was still going on yearly. And I’m sure that’s the point but a lot of folks def saw this as being a reunion of sorts, like a wwwy type event.
Yeah, I think you're right. But that makes it even more shitty that they sold tickets before announcing the lineups. They knew what people assumed the festival would be like. I wouldn't pay $250 for a ticket plus flights and hotel to go to a festival to see a bunch of bands I've never heard of and Pennywise.
Yeah i feel sort of scamed a little so far. While I was never expecting mcr or blink like others. I thought it would be a lot of throw back small acts. They announced this at when we were young. Seeing the billboards all over vegas hyped me up so much that I got a ticket just off that feeling. Marketing it as the 30th anniversary. It kinda was marketed as a big reunion year. So far I don't care if I still go to warped and that feeling sucks.
Yeah that is a pretty good description of what it’s shaping out to be. Although, I thunk the first couple days of announcements kind of lead to people (myself included) thinking the latter
People need to compare it more to Warped Tour 2019 and not WWWY. This is not the same thing for a dozen reasons, price point being the main one.
DC is only about 1/3 of the way filled out so there's still plenty of time for bigger/more exciting bands to be announced, but if I'd bought a ticket to any of these shows, I'd be very underwhelmed so far. I assume they're announcing these lesser known bands first off so people can check them out without them all being overshadowed by the bigger bands. If they announced that Blink is playing all of Dude Ranch with Scott Raynor, you know every complainer would suddenly be blowing their loads. So there's still plenty of time for them to announce someone/something exciting.
Yeah at this point I’m assuming that all “big” bands are being saved for last. And the first set of announcements that had the big-ish bands were just a way to lure people in.
thats ultimately why I didn’t bite, my wife and I did the math and I would be like $1k for us to go and with no lineup I just couldn’t do it. It was too tough a gamble.
AC 2019 Lineup for perspective: Honestly in retrospect this wasn't as jaw droppingly amazing as I think we held it up to be. Just in the pre-WWWY world this was the most stacked festival lineup for our scene behind maybe Riot Fest. But still a fun 2 days, and we could probably expect something very very similar minus Blink 182.