Warped Tour Tour • Page 74

Did people really go to warped tour not knowing any of the bands? I can’t recall ever going without checking out the bands I didn’t know beforehand.

 

Yeah, every year I listened to at least one song by every band. It's how I found out about Bad Rabbits.

 

There were always bands I knew the name of but had never really listened to until seeing them live at Warped. That’ll be Drain and Cliffdiver for me this year.

 

As someone who has always been insanely invested in concerts and music for 30 years, the casual concert crowd always fascinates me. Like someone saying they spent that kind of money and they are just gonna show up and catch some bands is fascinating to me.

 

I think the number of small artists also hurt the perception a bit. Like I had faith that there would be enough bands I was interested in to justify going, but the middle ~10 days of the announcement were largely filled with small bands, which lead to a lot of complaints.

And I think it's to Warpeds credit, WWWY is going for nostalgia/legacy acts, whereas there are a lot of smaller/newer bands on Warped, which is how it always was.

 

Feeling pretty hopeful for LB’s lineup now

 

kevin has been saying this for months. This is not supposed to be a nostalgia fest, this is supposed to be 50% new 50% established artists.

 

I usually knew about 20 bands playing Warped I would like and would look into like 10 others that I had heard about and never dove into or heard a snippet and decided to dig deeper. 2017 was the exception I only liked about 10 bands but I just tried to discover more that year.

 

Yeah and look what's happening with the nostalgia fest WWWY. Three years in and they were already recycling headliners and undercard bands. It's not sustainable where as with Warped, there will always be fresh new bands whether you know them or not

 

Bands on DC Warped that I'd be happy to see:

Avril Lavigne
Comeback Kid
Dance Hall Crashers
Hidden in Plain View
Knuckle Puck
Koyo
Saosin
Sublime
Boys Like Girls
Cartel
Four Year Strong
Hawthorne Heights
Less Than Jake
Motion City Soundtrack
Pennywise
Royal and the Serpent
Senses Fail
Simple Plan
The Aquabats
The Wonder Years


Not bad at all, really. And that's without checking out the bands I've never heard of before.

 

that's why they were the longest running music fest.

 

It’s 75 dollars per day that’s basically the same as what standard concerts are nowadays and less than some of the bigger names on warped tour cost lol

 

REGARDLESS: Lots of accusations and gross people on this thing, along with Kevin Lyman's clear disinterest back in the day of protecting fans. Wouldn't catch me near it

 

nothing wrong with feeling that way but no need to act like its so overpriced or anything can just say that and not get invovled in the discussion otherwise

 

Bummed we won’t get Heart Attack Man in Long Beach since they’re on tour elsewhere on those dates, but they’ll be a lot of fun in DC.

 

That DC line-up shaped up pretty nicely! Not really worth traveling for but if this were within 3 hours of me I'd 100% be going.

I do think one of the other challenges with this roll-out was the fact that the posters don't clearly highlight the "bigger" artists/headliners.

I get trying to be egalitarian about it and the point is to get there early to see all the bands... But I'm not sure it does anybody any favors. Hah. Even the old Warped posters put the bigger artists toward the top.

 

Yeah they did the same thing for those 25th anniversary Warped fests. They just put everyone in alphabetical order. I get it, but I agree. Maybe like, bold the “headliners” or something like that?

 

That's almost worse. Haha. I think putting the like, 6 biggest names toward the top of the poster and then do the rest alphabetically?

But I'm not sure who that would be for DC beyond Avril Lavigne, MGK, and Simple Plan (which wouldn't really help because of how "pop" leaning that is).

 

Even though it is good that they are called out I never understood why Kevin lyman seems to be the only one to be called out for booking problematic bands when majority of rock and metal festivals put on similar bands and also neo nazis like look at danny wimmers festivals, when others post his festivals I don't see the same reactions but maybe I just haven't noticed

 

Its this reason that I think WWWY will start blurring that line of emo nostalgia going forward. No way they stop doing the fest, as its 4 years in with sell outs and second days added; too much of a money maker. But they can't keep recycling acts like they have, like you said its not sustainable.
They're either going to start going 50/50 between new and old acts, or they're going to start incorporating adjacent scenes, like booking more nu metal acts like Deftones & Evanescence or start booking acts of the 2010s like MGK, 21 Pilots and The 1975.

 

I think nowadays a lot of artists/management make negotiations for festival bookings more difficult by incorporating clauses about poster placement in their agreements. Keeping it purely alphabetical alleviates that headache.

I'd imagine the headliners for DC would be MGK, Avril Lavigne, Sublime and All Time Low. But judging by some of the bizarre comments I've seen on Reddit, most fans have absolutely no grasp on that kind of thing.

 

This whole thread is pretty illuminating, but the gist is:

 

Some interesting surprises and some “oh duh why didn’t I think of them?”

Surprised to see Gogol Bordello

I thought Mom Jeans was ruled out, but glad to see I was right about them being on

The Vandals are another “of course they had to do it”

Body Count and and Ice-T solo set absolutely rocks